Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Validating the operational flexibility dimensions in the medical service sectors

This paper examines the health operations flexibility dimensions in the United Arab Emirate in the healthcare sector by employing Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approaches. The study also attempts to determine the numbers for the operational flexibility dimensions which will help the researchers in future find healthcare operational flexibility dimensions valid and reliable. A model consisting of two constructs of operations flexibility structures: external flexibility and internal robustness is examined to measure health operations flexibility elements in service sectors. Respondents are the health leaders (managers, middle manager, top manager and others) who were working in health service sectors in the United Arab Emirate. The underlying constructs of operations flexibility are empirically verified and validated through Reliability Analysis Procedure, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), First and Second Confirmatory Factor Analysis, and Construct Validity Procedures, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was employed to test the model, drawing on a sample of 250. The findings revealed that the model of the UAE health service sector consists of two latent's operations flexibility dimensions namely external flexibility and internal robustness, each dimension consisting of four items. Further research should be considered to validate these findings in the other firms. The two dimensions of health operations flexibility represent a valid instrument to measure the operations flexibility in the services sector in the United Arab Emirate. This research is important for one to understand the main topics of health operations flexibility in the health services sector.
IoT data analytics in dynamic environments: From an automated machine learning perspective

With the wide spread of sensors and smart devices in recent years, the data generation speed of the Internet of Things (IoT) systems has increased dramatically. In IoT systems, massive volumes of data must be processed, transformed, and analyzed on a frequent basis to enable various IoT services and functionalities. Machine Learning (ML) approaches have shown their capacity for IoT data analytics. However, applying ML models to IoT data analytics tasks still faces many difficulties and challenges, specifically, effective model selection, design/tuning, and updating, which have brought massive demand for experienced data scientists. Additionally, the dynamic nature of IoT data may introduce concept drift issues, causing model performance degradation. To reduce human efforts, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) has become a popular field that aims to automatically select, construct, tune, and update machine learning models to achieve the best performance on specified tasks. In this paper, we conduct a review of existing methods in the model selection, tuning, and updating procedures in the area of AutoML in order to identify and summarize the optimal solutions for every step of applying ML algorithms to IoT data analytics. To justify our findings and help industrial users and researchers better implement AutoML approaches, a case study of applying AutoML to IoT anomaly detection problems is conducted in this work. Lastly, we discuss and classify the challenges and research directions for this domain.
Hybrid Convolutional Neural Network-Multilayer Perceptron Model for Solar Radiation Prediction

Urgent transition from the dependence on fossil fuels towards renewable energies requires more solar photovoltaic power to be connected to the electricity grids, with reliable supply through accurate solar radiation forecasting systems. This study proposes an innovative hybrid method that integrates convolutional neural network (CNN) with multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to generate global solar radiation (GSR) forecasts. The CMLP model first extracts optimal topological and structural features embedded in predictive variables through a CNN-based feature extraction stage followed by an MLP-based predictive model to generate the GSR forecasts. Predictive variables from observed data and global climate models (GCM) are used to predict GSR at six solar farms in Queensland, Australia. A hybrid-wrapper feature selection method using a random forest-recursive feature elimination (RF-RFE) scheme is used to eradicate redundant predictor features to improve the proposed CMLP model efficiency. The CMLP model has been compared and bench-marked against seven artificial intelligence–based and seven temperature-based deterministic models, showing excellent performance at all solar energy study sites tested over daily, monthly, and seasonal scales. The proposed hybrid CMLP model should be explored as a viable modelling tool for solar energy monitoring and forecasting in real-time energy management systems.
Exposure Normalization and Compensation for Multiple-Exposure Correction

Images captured with improper exposures usually bring unsatisfactory visual effects. Previous works mainly focus on either underexposure or overexposure correction, resulting in poor generalization to various exposures. An alternative solution is to mix the multiple exposure data for training a single network. However, the procedures of correcting underexposure and overexposure to normal exposures are much different from each other, leading to large discrepancies for the network in correcting multiple-exposures, thus resulting in poor performance. The key point to address this issue lies in bridging different exposure representations. To achieve this goal, we design a multiple exposure correction framework based on an Exposure Normalization and Compensation (ENC) module. Specifically, the ENC module consists of an exposure normalization part for mapping different exposure features to the exposure-invariant feature space, and a compensation part for integrating the initial features unprocessed by the exposure normalization part to ensure the completeness of information. Besides, to further alleviate the imbalanced performance caused by variations in the optimization process, we introduce a parameter regularization fine-tuning strategy to improve the performance of the worst-performed exposure without degrading other exposures. Our model empowered by ENC outperforms the existing methods by more than 2dB and is robust to multiple image enhancement tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness and generalization capability for real-world applications. Code: https://github.com/KevinJ-Huang/ExposureNorm-Compensation.
G-Rep: Gaussian Representation for Arbitrary-Oriented Object Detection

Typical representations for arbitrary-oriented object detection tasks include the oriented bounding box (OBB), the quadrilateral bounding box (QBB), and the point set (PointSet). Each representation encounters problems that correspond to its characteristics, such as boundary discontinuity, square-like problems, representation ambiguity, and isolated points, which lead to inaccurate detection. Although many effective strategies have been proposed for various representations, there is still no unified solution. Current detection methods based on Gaussian modeling have demonstrated the possibility of resolving this dilemma; however, they remain limited to OBB. To go further, in this paper, we propose a unified Gaussian representation called G-Rep to construct Gaussian distributions for OBB, QBB, and PointSet, which achieves a unified solution to various representations and problems. Specifically, PointSet- or QBB-based object representations are converted into Gaussian distributions and their parameters are optimized using the maximum likelihood estimation algorithm. Then, three optional Gaussian metrics are explored to optimize the regression loss of the detector because of their excellent parameter optimization mechanisms. Furthermore, we also use Gaussian metrics for sampling to align label assignment and regression loss. Experimental results obtained on several publicly available datasets, such as DOTA, HRSC2016, UCAS-AOD, and ICDAR2015, show the excellent performance of the proposed method for arbitrary-oriented object detection.
Video anomaly detection based on spatio-temporal relationships among objects

Video anomaly detection is to automatically identify predefined anomalous contents (e.g. abnormal objects, behaviors and scenes) in videos. The performance of video anomaly detection can be effectively improved by making the model focus more on the anomalous objects in videos. However, such existing approaches usually rely on pre-trained models, which not only require additional auxiliary information but also face the challenge of anomaly diversity in the real world. In this paper, we propose a new video anomaly detection method based on spatio-temporal relationships among objects. Concretely, we use a fully convolutional encoder-decoder network with symmetric skip connections as the backbone network, which can effectively extract features from the object regions at different scales. In the encoding stage, an attention mechanism is used to enhance the model's understanding of the spatio-temporal relationships among various types of objects in the video. In the decoding stage, a dynamic pattern generator is designed to memorize the inter-object spatio-temporal relationships, which thus enhances the reconstructions of normal samples while making the reconstructions of abnormal samples more difficult. We conduct extensive experiments on three widely used video anomaly detection datasets CUHK Avenue, ShanghaiTech Campus and UCSD Ped2, and the experimental results show that our proposed method can significantly improve the performance, and achieves state-of-the-art overall performance (considering both effectiveness and efficiency). In particular, our method achieves a state-of-the-art AUC of 98.4% on the UCSD Ped2 dataset that consists of various anomalies in real-world scenarios.
American zebra optimization algorithm for global optimization problems

Abstract A novel bio-inspired meta-heuristic algorithm, namely the American zebra optimization algorithm (AZOA), which mimics the social behaviour of American zebras in the wild, is proposed in this study. American zebras are distinguished from other mammals by their distinct and fascinating social character and leadership exercise, which navies the baby zebras to leave the herd before maturity and join a separate herd with no family ties. This departure of the baby zebra encourages diversification by preventing intra-family mating. Moreover, the convergence is assured by the leadership exercise in American zebras, which directs the speed and direction of the group. This social lifestyle behaviour of American zebras is indigenous in nature and is the main inspiration for proposing the AZOA meta-heuristic algorithm. To examine the efficiency of the AZOA algorithm, the CEC-2005, CEC-2017, and CEC-2019 benchmark functions are considered, and compared with the several state-of-the-art meta-heuristic algorithms. The experimental outcomes and statistical analysis reveal that AZOA is capable of attaining the optimal solutions for maximum benchmark functions while maintaining a good balance between exploration and exploitation. Furthermore, numerous real-world engineering problems have been employed to demonstrate the robustness of AZOA. Finally, it is anticipated that the AZOA will accomplish domineeringly for forthcoming advanced CEC benchmark functions and other complex engineering problems.
DETRs with Hybrid Matching

One-to-one set matching is a key design for DETR to establish its end-to-end capability, so that object detection does not require a hand-crafted NMS (non-maximum suppression) to remove duplicate detections. This end-to-end signature is important for the versatility of DETR, and it has been generalized to broader vision tasks. However, we note that there are few queries assigned as positive samples and the one-to-one set matching significantly reduces the training efficacy of positive samples. We propose a simple yet effective method based on a hybrid matching scheme that combines the original one-to-one matching branch with an auxiliary one-to-many matching branch during training. Our hybrid strategy has been shown to significantly improve accuracy. In inference, only the original one-to-one match branch is used, thus maintaining the end-to-end merit and the same inference efficiency of DETR. The method is namedℋ-DETR, and it shows that a wide range of representative DETR methods can be consistently improved across a wide range of visual tasks, including Deformable-DETR, PETRv2, PETR, and TransTrack, among others. Code is available at: https://github.com/HDETR.
Tree-Based Solution Methods for Multiagent POMDPs with Delayed Communication

Multiagent Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (MPOMDPs) provide a powerful framework for optimal decision making under the assumption of instantaneous communication. We focus on a delayed communication setting (MPOMDP-DC), in which broadcasted information is delayed by at most one time step. This model allows agents to act on their most recent (private) observation. Such an assumption is a strict generalization over having agents wait until the global information is available and is more appropriate for applications in which response time is critical. In this setting, however, value function backups are significantly more costly, and naive application of incremental pruning, the core of many state-of-the-art optimal POMDP techniques, is intractable. In this paper, we overcome this problem by demonstrating that computation of the MPOMDP-DC backup can be structured as a tree and introducing two novel tree-based pruning techniques that exploit this structure in an effective way. We experimentally show that these methods have the potential to outperform naive incremental pruning by orders of magnitude, allowing for the solution of larger problems.
Sentiment Prediction Using Collaborative Filtering

Learning sentiment models from short texts such as tweets is a notoriously challenging problem due to very strong noise and data sparsity. This paper presents a novel, collaborative filtering-based approach for sentiment prediction in twitter conversation threads. Given a set of sentiment holders and sentiment targets, we assume we know the true sentiments for a small fraction of holder-target pairs. This information is then used to predict the sentiment of a previously unknown user towards another user or an entity using collaborative filtering algorithms. We validate our model on two Twitter datasets using different collaborative filtering techniques. Our preliminary results demonstrate that the proposed approach can be effectively used in twitter sentiment prediction, thus mitigating the data sparsity problem.
A Rogue Dream: Automatically Generating Meaningful Content For Games

Procedural content generation is often seen simply as a means to generate stuff, elaborating on or rearranging abstract data types that describe levels or modular pieces of gameplay. Generating content which is situated in an understanding of the real-world is a much harder task; it requires access to large amounts of knowledge, and a good technique for parsing and using that knowledge. In this paper we describe A Rogue Dream, a game prototype which can generate new visual content and change its design based on an input word from the player at the start of the game. We describe the game and the tools it makes use of to do this, and use the game to discuss ways in which such techniques might enable unique kinds of gameplay or new directions for intelligent design tools.
Learning SVM Classifiers with Indefinite Kernels

Recently, training support vector machines with indefinite kernels has attracted great attention in the machine learning community. In this paper, we tackle this problem by formulating a joint optimization model over SVM classifications and kernel principal component analysis. We first reformulate the kernel principal component analysis as a general kernel transformation framework, and then incorporate it into the SVM classification to formulate a joint optimization model. The proposed model has the advantage of making consistent kernel transformations over training and test samples. It can be used for both binary classification and multi-class classification problems. Our experimental results on both synthetic data sets and real world data sets show the proposed model can significantly outperform related approaches.
Toward Characters Who Observe, Tell, Misremember, and Lie

Knowledge and its attendant phenomena are central to human storytelling and to the human experience more generally, but we find very few games that revolve around these concerns. This works to preclude a whole class of narrative experiences in games, and it also damages character believability. In this paper, we present an AI framework that supports gameplay with non-player characters who observe and form knowledge about the world, propagate knowledge to other characters, misremember and forget knowledge, and lie. We outline this framework through the lens of a gameplay experience that is intended to showcase it, called Talk of the Town, which we are currently developing. From a review of earlier projects, we find that our system has a novel combination of features found only independently across other systems, and that it is among the first to support character memory fallibility.
HTN Problem Spaces: Structure, Algorithms, Termination

For HTN planning, we formally characterize and classify four kinds of problem spaces in which each node represents a planning problem or subproblem. Two of the problem spaces are searched by current HTN planning algorithms; the other two problem spaces are new.This enables us to provide:Sufficient (and in one case, necessary) conditions for finiteness of each kind of problem space. The conditions can be evaluated up-front to see if an HTN planning problem is finite.Loop-detection tests that can be used in HTN planners to ensure termination when the problem space is finite.A way to compute the correct value for an upper-bound parameter in an HTN-to-PDDL translation algorithm published in IJCAI-2009.Planning algorithms that utilize the two new problem spaces to guarantee termination on broader classes of planning problems than previous HTN planning algorithms.
A New Approach To Integrate Computer Technology Certifications Into Computer Information System Programs

This paper presents a newly designed curriculum model for the computer information systems.It first reviews the history of profession and certifications.It then addresses the characteristics and categories of information technology certifications recognized by industries.The curriculums recommended by ACM and IEEE are reviewed to define core courses for Computer Information System program.Several technology oriented programs at different levels of educational institutions are also evaluated and discussed.Finally a three-step curriculum model is introduced for a Computer Information System Associate Degree program.This three-step curriculum model first connects the undergraduate general study and computer core courses to build students a foundation in information technology.Other computer related courses are then grouped into several small focus programs.The last step of the three step program is designed to bridge students from this academic program to specialized training programs usually offered by a certified training and test center.Ultimately this three-step curriculum model is designed for students to achieve their academic goals and start their preparations for information technology certifications in a two-year associate degree program.
Text detection in natural scene images using morphological component analysis and Laplacian dictionary

Text in natural scene images usually carries abundant semantic information. However, due to variations of text and complexity of background, detecting text in scene images becomes a critical and challenging task. In this paper, we present a novel method to detect text from scene images. Firstly, we decompose scene images into background and text components using morphological component analysis ( MCA ) , which will reduce the adverse effects of complex backgrounds on the detection results. In order to improve the performance of image decomposition, two discriminative dictionaries of background and text are learned from the training samples. Moreover, Laplacian sparse regularization is introduced into our proposed dictionary learning method which improves discrimination of dictionary. Based on the text dictionary and the sparse-representation coefficients of text, we can construct the text component. After that, the text in the query image can be detected by applying certain heuristic rules. The results of experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
An Approach to Domain Transfer in Procedural Content Generation of Two-Dimensional Videogame Levels

Statistical models, such as Markov Chains, have been recently studied in the context of procedural content generation (PCG). These models can capture statistical regularities of a set of training data and use them to sample new content. However, these techniques assume the existence of sufficient training data with which to train the models. In this paper we study the setting in which we might not have enough training data from the target domain, but we have ample training data from another, similar domain. We propose an algorithm to discover a mapping between domains, so that out-of-domain training data can be used to train the statistical model. Specifically, we apply this to two-dimensional level generation, and experiment with three classic video games: Super Mario Bros., Kid Icarus and Kid Kool.
Quantifying quantum invasiveness

We propose a resource theory of the quantum invasiveness of general quantum operations, i.e., those defined by quantum channels in Leggett-Garg scenarios. We are able to compare the resource-theoretic framework of quantum invasiveness to the resource theory of coherence. We also show that the Fisher information is a quantifier of quantum invasiveness. This result allows us to establish a direct connection between the concept of quantum invasiveness and quantum metrology, by exploring the utility of the definition of quantum invasiveness in the context of metrological protocols.
A Conceptual Blending Approach to the Generation of Cognitive Scripts for Interactive Narrative

This paper presents a computational approach to the generation of cognitive scripts employed in freeform activities such as pretend play. Pretend play activities involve a high degree of improvisational narrative construction using cognitive scripts acquired from everyday experience, cultural experiences, and previous play experiences. Our computational model of cognitive script generation, based upon conceptual integration theory, applies operations to familiar scripts to generate new blended scripts.