Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Metaheuristic Algorithms on Feature Selection: A Survey of One Decade of Research (2009-2019)

Feature selection is a critical and prominent task in machine learning.To reduce the dimension of the feature set while maintaining the accuracy of the performance is the main aim of the feature selection problem.Various methods have been developed to classify the datasets.However, metaheuristic algorithms have achieved great attention in solving numerous optimization problem.Therefore, this paper presents an extensive literature review on solving feature selection problem using metaheuristic algorithms which are developed in the ten years (2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019).Further, metaheuristic algorithms have been classified into four categories based on their behaviour.Moreover, a categorical list of more than a hundred metaheuristic algorithms is presented.To solve the feature selection problem, only binary variants of metaheuristic algorithms have been reviewed and corresponding to their categories, a detailed description of them explained.The metaheuristic algorithms in solving feature selection problem are given with their binary classification, name of the classifier used, datasets and the evaluation metrics.After reviewing the papers, challenges and issues are also identified in obtaining the best feature subset using different metaheuristic algorithms.Finally, some research gaps are also highlighted for the researchers who want to pursue their research in developing or modifying metaheuristic algorithms for classification.For an application, a case study is presented in which datasets are adopted from the UCI repository and numerous metaheuristic algorithms are employed to obtain the optimal feature subset.
Understanding the Behaviour of Contrastive Loss

Unsupervised contrastive learning has achieved out-standing success, while the mechanism of contrastive loss has been less studied. In this paper, we concentrate on the understanding of the behaviours of unsupervised contrastive loss. We will show that the contrastive loss is a hardness-aware loss function, and the temperature τ controls the strength of penalties on hard negative samples. The previous study has shown that uniformity is a key property of contrastive learning. We build relations between the uniformity and the temperature τ. We will show that uniformity helps the contrastive learning to learn separable features, however excessive pursuit to the uniformity makes the contrastive loss not tolerant to semantically similar samples, which may break the underlying semantic structure and be harmful to the formation of features useful for downstream tasks. This is caused by the inherent defect of the instance discrimination objective. Specifically, instance discrimination objective tries to push all different instances apart, ignoring the underlying relations between samples. Pushing semantically consistent samples apart has no positive effect for acquiring a prior informative to general downstream tasks. A well-designed contrastive loss should have some extents of tolerance to the closeness of semantically similar samples. Therefore, we find that the contrastive loss meets a uniformity-tolerance dilemma, and a good choice of temperature can compromise these two properties properly to both learn separable features and tolerant to semantically similar samples, improving the feature qualities and the downstream performances.
Effects of virtual reality on theme park visitors' experience and behaviors: A presence perspective

Advances in virtual reality (VR) technology exert increasingly influential impacts on tourism. Drawn upon a presence perspective and a process theory, this research aims to explore how VR technology may help enhance theme park visitors' experience and behaviors. Data was collected from 396 theme park visitors who had experienced VR roller coaster over the past twelve months. Results of stepwise regression analysis suggest that users' sense of presence is predominantly driven by their feeling of control, followed by participation, effectiveness, curiosity, vividness, temporal association, and enjoyment provided by VR system. Results of simple linear regression analyses reveal positive impacts of sense of VR presence on visitors' overall theme park experience and intentions to revisit and recommend. Further sensitivity tests are performed using Hayes’ PROCESS model to accommodate the potential influence of two individual factors (i.e., personal innovativeness and VR familiarity) on the results. Theoretical and managerial implications are presented.
A balanced whale optimization algorithm for constrained engineering design problems

In this study, two novel effective strategies composed of Lévy flight and chaotic local search are synchronously introduced into the whale optimization algorithm (WOA) to guide the swarm and further promote the harmony between the inclusive exploratory and neighborhood-informed capacities of the conventional technique and investigate the core searching capabilities of WOA in dealing with optimization tasks. However, the conventional WOA may simply be stuck at local optima or the global best may not be obtained successfully when tackling more complex optimization landscapes, including the multimodal and high dimensional scenarios. To substantiate the efficacy of the enhanced method, it is compared to a set of well-regarded variants of particle swarm optimization and differential evolution. The used benchmark problems are composed of unimodal, multimodal, and fixed-dimensions multimodal functions. Additionally, the proposed balanced method is applied to realize three practical, well-known mathematical models such as tension/compression spring, welded beam, pressure vessel design, three-bar truss design, and I-beam design problems. The experimental results and analysis reveal that the proposed algorithm can outperform other competitors in terms of the convergence speed and the quality of solutions. Promisingly, the proposed method can be treated as an effective and efficient auxiliary tool for more complex optimization models and scenarios.
Motivational and cognitive benefits of training in immersive virtual reality based on multiple assessments

Abstract The main objective of this study was to examine the effectiveness of immersive virtual reality (VR) as a medium for delivering laboratory safety training. We specifically compare an immersive VR simulation, a desktop VR simulation, and a conventional safety manual. The sample included 105 first year undergraduate engineering students (56 females). We include five types of learning outcomes including post‐test enjoyment ratings; pre‐ to post‐test changes in intrinsic motivation and self‐efficacy; a post‐test multiple choice retention test; and two behavioral transfer tests. Results indicated that the groups did not differ on the immediate retention test, suggesting that all three media were equivalent in conveying the basic knowledge. However, significant differences were observed favoring the immersive VR group compared to the text group on the two transfer tests involving the solving problems in a physical lab setting (d = 0.54, d = 0.57), as well as enjoyment (d = 1.44) and increases in intrinsic motivation (d = 0.69) and self‐efficacy (d = 0.60). The desktop VR group scored significantly higher than the text group on one transfer test (d = 0.63) but not the other (d= 0.11), as well as enjoyment (d =1.11) and intrinsic motivation (d =0.83).
Blockchain technology: A survey on applications and security privacy Challenges

Blockchain Technology has received a lot of attention from both industry and academia due to its decentralized, persistency, anonymity and auditability properties. In this survey, use of Blockchain technology in wide applications area and its implementation challenges have been done. A rigorous search for journal/research article related to Blockchain technology have been reviewed. We have considered five databases to conduct this survey namely Sciencedirect, IEEE Xplore, Web of Science, ACM Digital Library and Inderscience are being used. After initial phase elimination 135 research articles are considered in final databases for the survey. Main focus of the survey is to provide a comprehensive analysis on wide applications of Blockchain technology for the academic research community. In this paper challenges in implementing of Blockchian and its associated security and privacy issues have been discussed. For the first time a survey of this type have been done where Blockchain with application and its associated security and privacy issue have been reviewed.
HarDNet: A Low Memory Traffic Network

State-of-the-art neural network architectures such as ResNet, MobileNet, and DenseNet have achieved outstanding accuracy over low MACs and small model size counterparts. However, these metrics might not be accurate for predicting the inference time. We suggest that memory traffic for accessing intermediate feature maps can be a factor dominating the inference latency, especially in such tasks as real-time object detection and semantic segmentation of high-resolution video. We propose a Harmonic Densely Connected Network to achieve high efficiency in terms of both low MACs and memory traffic. The new network achieves 35%, 36%, 30%, 32%, and 45% inference time reduction compared with FC-DenseNet-103, DenseNet-264, ResNet-50, ResNet-152, and SSD-VGG, respectively. We use tools including Nvidia profiler and ARM Scale-Sim to measure the memory traffic and verify that the inference latency is indeed proportional to the memory traffic consumption and the proposed network consumes low memory traffic. We conclude that one should take memory traffic into consideration when designing neural network architectures for high-resolution applications at the edge.
The Effects of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality as Training Enhancement Methods: A Meta-Analysis

The objective of this meta-analysis is to explore the presently available, empirical findings on transfer of training from virtual (VR), augmented (AR), and mixed reality (MR) and determine whether such extended reality (XR)-based training is as effective as traditional training methods.MR, VR, and AR have already been used as training tools in a variety of domains. However, the question of whether or not these manipulations are effective for training has not been quantitatively and conclusively answered. Evidence shows that, while extended realities can often be time-saving and cost-saving training mechanisms, their efficacy as training tools has been debated.The current body of literature was examined and all qualifying articles pertaining to transfer of training from MR, VR, and AR were included in the meta-analysis. Effect sizes were calculated to determine the effects that XR-based factors, trainee-based factors, and task-based factors had on performance measures after XR-based training.Results showed that training in XR does not express a different outcome than training in a nonsimulated, control environment. It is equally effective at enhancing performance.Across numerous studies in multiple fields, extended realities are as effective of a training mechanism as the commonly accepted methods. The value of XR then lies in providing training in circumstances, which exclude traditional methods, such as situations when danger or cost may make traditional training impossible.
INet: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation

Encoder-decoder networks are state-of-the-art approaches to biomedical image segmentation, but have two problems: i.e., the widely used pooling operations may discard spatial information, and therefore low-level semantics are lost. Feature fusion methods can mitigate these problems but feature maps of different scales cannot be easily fused because downand upsampling change the spatial resolution of feature map. To address these issues, we propose INet, which enlarges receptive fields by increasing the kernel sizes of convolutional layers in steps (e.g., from 3 × 3 to 7 × 7 and then 15 × 15) instead of downsampling. Inspired by an Inception module, INet extracts features by kernels of different sizes through concatenating the output feature maps of all preceding convolutional layers. We also find that the large kernel makes the network feasible for biomedical image segmentation. In addition, INet uses two overlapping max-poolings, i.e., max-poolings with stride 1, to extract the sharpest features. Fixed-size and fixed-channel feature maps enable INet to concatenate feature maps and add multiple shortcuts across layers. In this way, INet can recover low-level semantics by concatenating the feature maps of all preceding layers and expedite the training by adding multiple shortcuts. Because INet has additional residual shortcuts, we compare INet with a UNet system that also has residual shortcuts (ResUNet). To confirm INet as a backbone architecture for biomedical image segmentation, we implement dense connections on INet (called DenseINet) and compare it to a DenseUNet system with residual shortcuts (ResDenseUNet). INet and DenseINet require 16.9% and 37.6% fewer parameters than ResUNet and ResDenseUNet, respectively. In comparison with six encoder- decoder approaches using nine public datasets, INet and DenseINet demonstrate efficient improvements in biomedical image segmentation. INet outperforms DeepLabV3, which implementing atrous convolution instead of downsampling to increase receptive fields. INet also outperforms two recent methods (named HRNet and MS-NAS) that maintain high-resolution representations and repeatedly exchange the information across resolutions.
Learning Continuous Image Representation with Local Implicit Image Function

How to represent an image? While the visual world is presented in a continuous manner, machines store and see the images in a discrete way with 2D arrays of pixels. In this paper, we seek to learn a continuous representation for images. Inspired by the recent progress in 3D reconstruction with implicit neural representation, we propose Local Implicit Image Function (LIIF), which takes an image coordinate and the 2D deep features around the coordinate as inputs, predicts the RGB value at a given coordinate as an output. Since the coordinates are continuous, LIIF can be presented in arbitrary resolution. To generate the continuous representation for images, we train an encoder with LIIF representation via a self-supervised task with superresolution. The learned continuous representation can be presented in arbitrary resolution even extrapolate to ×30 higher resolution, where the training tasks are not provided. We further show that LIIF representation builds a bridge between discrete and continuous representation in 2D, it naturally supports the learning tasks with size-varied image ground-truths and significantly outperforms the method with resizing the ground-truths. Our project page with code is at https://yinboc.github.io/liif/.
Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans

This paper addresses the challenge of novel view synthesis for a human performer from a very sparse set of camera views. Some recent works have shown that learning implicit neural representations of 3D scenes achieves remarkable view synthesis quality given dense input views. However, the representation learning will be ill-posed if the views are highly sparse. To solve this ill-posed problem, our key idea is to integrate observations over video frames. To this end, we propose Neural Body, a new human body representation which assumes that the learned neural representations at different frames share the same set of latent codes anchored to a deformable mesh, so that the observations across frames can be naturally integrated. The deformable mesh also provides geometric guidance for the network to learn 3D representations more efficiently. To evaluate our approach, we create a multi-view dataset named ZJU-MoCap that captures performers with complex motions. Experiments on ZJU-MoCap show that our approach outperforms prior works by a large margin in terms of novel view synthesis quality. We also demonstrate the capability of our approach to reconstruct a moving person from a monocular video on the People-Snapshot dataset.
Blockchain adoption: A value driver perspective

The ongoing discussion regarding blockchain technologies is focused primarily on cryptocurrencies, but blockchain features and functionalities have developed beyond financial instruments. As the technologies provide new functionalities, the associated value proposition changes as well. This study explores the relationship between blockchain technologies and their underlying value drivers. Four identified distinct blockchain stages of increased maturity are analyzed and discussed. This covers the evolutionary technology types focused on transactions, smart contracts, decentralized applications, and the introduction of artificial intelligence supporting decentralized decision making. In addition, we address management issues around appropriate blockchain adoption using a blockchain value driver-focused framework that gives decision makers actionable questions and recommendations. We provide practitioners with a method for assessing suitable blockchain adoption that addresses the specific value creation associated with a given organizational strategy. For academics, we critically identify and assess the characteristics of the blockchain stages and their strategy implications and provide a structured approach conceptualizing blockchain technology evolution.
Artificial intelligence as the next step towards precision pathology

Abstract Pathology is the cornerstone of cancer care. The need for accuracy in histopathologic diagnosis of cancer is increasing as personalized cancer therapy requires accurate biomarker assessment. The appearance of digital image analysis holds promise to improve both the volume and precision of histomorphological evaluation. Recently, machine learning, and particularly deep learning, has enabled rapid advances in computational pathology. The integration of machine learning into routine care will be a milestone for the healthcare sector in the next decade, and histopathology is right at the centre of this revolution. Examples of potential high‐value machine learning applications include both model‐based assessment of routine diagnostic features in pathology, and the ability to extract and identify novel features that provide insights into a disease. Recent groundbreaking results have demonstrated that applications of machine learning methods in pathology significantly improves metastases detection in lymph nodes, Ki67 scoring in breast cancer, Gleason grading in prostate cancer and tumour‐infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) scoring in melanoma. Furthermore, deep learning models have also been demonstrated to be able to predict status of some molecular markers in lung, prostate, gastric and colorectal cancer based on standard HE slides. Moreover, prognostic (survival outcomes) deep neural network models based on digitized HE slides have been demonstrated in several diseases, including lung cancer, melanoma and glioma. In this review, we aim to present and summarize the latest developments in digital image analysis and in the application of artificial intelligence in diagnostic pathology.
ActBERT: Learning Global-Local Video-Text Representations

In this paper, we introduce ActBERT for self-supervised learning of joint video-text representations from unlabeled data. First, we leverage global action information to catalyze the mutual interactions between linguistic texts and local regional objects. It uncovers global and local visual clues from paired video sequences and text descriptions for detailed visual and text relation modeling. Second, we introduce an ENtangled Transformer block (ENT) to encode three sources of information, i.e., global actions, local regional objects, and linguistic descriptions. Global-local correspondences are discovered via judicious clues extraction from contextual information. It enforces the joint video-text representation to be aware of fine-grained objects as well as global human intention. We validate the generalization capability of ActBERT on downstream video-and language tasks, i.e., text-video clip retrieval, video captioning, video question answering, action segmentation, and action step localization. ActBERT significantly outperform the state-of-the-arts, demonstrating its superiority in video-text representation learning.
Sentiment analysis on product reviews based on weighted word embeddings and deep neural networks

Summary Sentiment analysis is one of the major tasks of natural language processing, in which attitudes, thoughts, opinions, or judgments toward a particular subject has been extracted. Web is an unstructured and rich source of information containing many text documents with opinions and reviews. The recognition of sentiment can be helpful for individual decision makers, business organizations, and governments. In this article, we present a deep learning‐based approach to sentiment analysis on product reviews obtained from Twitter. The presented architecture combines TF‐IDF weighted Glove word embedding with CNN‐LSTM architecture. The CNN‐LSTM architecture consists of five layers, that is, weighted embedding layer, convolution layer (where, 1‐g, 2‐g, and 3‐g convolutions have been employed), max‐pooling layer, followed by LSTM, and dense layer. In the empirical analysis, the predictive performance of different word embedding schemes (ie, word2vec, fastText, GloVe, LDA2vec, and DOC2vec) with several weighting functions (ie, inverse document frequency, TF‐IDF, and smoothed inverse document frequency function) have been evaluated in conjunction with conventional deep neural network architectures. The empirical results indicate that the proposed deep learning architecture outperforms the conventional deep learning methods.
A practical tutorial on bagging and boosting based ensembles for machine learning: Algorithms, software tools, performance study, practical perspectives and opportunities

Ensembles, especially ensembles of decision trees, are one of the most popular and successful techniques in machine learning. Recently, the number of ensemble-based proposals has grown steadily. Therefore, it is necessary to identify which are the appropriate algorithms for a certain problem. In this paper, we aim to help practitioners to choose the best ensemble technique according to their problem characteristics and their workflow. To do so, we revise the most renowned bagging and boosting algorithms and their software tools. These ensembles are described in detail within their variants and improvements available in the literature. Their online-available software tools are reviewed attending to the implemented versions and features. They are categorized according to their supported programming languages and computing paradigms. The performance of 14 different bagging and boosting based ensembles, including XGBoost, LightGBM and Random Forest, is empirically analyzed in terms of predictive capability and efficiency. This comparison is done under the same software environment with 76 different classification tasks. Their predictive capabilities are evaluated with a wide variety of scenarios, such as standard multi-class problems, scenarios with categorical features and big size data. The efficiency of these methods is analyzed with considerably large data-sets. Several practical perspectives and opportunities are also exposed for ensemble learning.