Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Securing IoTs in distributed blockchain: Analysis, requirements and open issues

IoTs are integrated, interconnected concepts of things or objects in our surroundings, with an essence of virtualization. The interconnectivity of the business world, health environments, smart home devices, and daily use gadgets takes place through the networks based on cloud infrastructure which is not restricted to jurisdictional, geographic, and national boundaries. However, the light-weight IoT devices come with a limited storage and processing capacity. Due to this limitation, the need for separate data storage arises so that data can be utilized in the future. These third-party storage services are provided at the cost of a user’s privacy. Furthermore, the storage relies on a centralized database which is more open to attack due to its single point security breach chances. Furthermore, present IoT data is not trustworthy in the external environment, as data manipulation is lacking when data is shared with other parties. To overcome the above-mentioned limitations of IoT, the emerging secure decentralized storage technology; Blockchain, have begun to abandon the significant impact in the IoT with the enhancement of security and incorporating a large number of devices in the today’s ecosystems. In this paper, we have performed a comprehensive literature review to show how well blockchain has transformed the smart environments connected with IoT sensors and the underlying issues for its adaptation. Further, a well-organized taxonomy is presented by highlighting the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of blockchain based IoT environment. In addition to that, we have clearly presented the verities of blockchain applications such as bitcoin (earlier cryptocurrency used in blockchain) or ethereum (establish smart contracts) based works and pinpoint the necessities and security challenges. Moreover, we have highlighted the essential implementation requirements of blockchain in the IoTs. This paper is also equipped with a state-of-the-art framework of IoT while adopting security features and decentralized storage requirements of the blockchain. In the end, we have presented insightful challenges need to be addressed to obtain efficient, secure, and effective communication goals and to provide private and secure services for users as per their requirements.
Daily streamflow prediction using optimally pruned extreme learning machine

Daily streamflow prediction is important for flood warning, navigation, sediment control, reservoir operations and environmental protection. The current paper examines the prediction and estimation capability of a new heuristic method, optimally pruned extreme learning machine (OP-ELM) model, for daily streamflows of Fujiangqiao and Shehang stations at Fujiang River. Prediction accuracy of OP-ELM method is compared with other soft computing models, i.e. adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system-particle swarm optimization (ANFIS-PSO), multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) and M5 model tree (M5Tree) using cross validation technique. Prediction results of the both stations reported that the OP-ELM and ANFIS-PSO are the best in modeling daily streamflows of upstream and downstream, respectively. For improving prediction accuracy of the OP-ELM method, various kernel types are tried and the linear, linear + sigmoid + Gaussian and linear + sigmoid provide the best results for both stations. The OP-ELM outperforms the other methods during estimation of downstream streamflow using hydro climatic data as input. The OP-ELM reduces the prediction error of ANFIS-PSO by 12% in estimation of daily streamflow. It is also found that including local data considerably improves the prediction accuracy in estimation of downstream streamflows. The overall results indicate that the OP-ELM method could be successfully used in predicting and estimating daily streamflow by using hydro climatic data as inputs.
Mask TextSpotter: An End-to-End Trainable Neural Network for Spotting Text with Arbitrary Shapes

Unifying text detection and text recognition in an end-to-end training fashion has become a new trend for reading text in the wild, as these two tasks are highly relevant and complementary. In this paper, we investigate the problem of scene text spotting, which aims at simultaneous text detection and recognition in natural images. An end-to-end trainable neural network named as Mask TextSpotter is presented. Different from the previous text spotters that follow the pipeline consisting of a proposal generation network and a sequence-to-sequence recognition network, Mask TextSpotter enjoys a simple and smooth end-to-end learning procedure, in which both detection and recognition can be achieved directly from two-dimensional space via semantic segmentation. Further, a spatial attention module is proposed to enhance the performance and universality. Benefiting from the proposed two-dimensional representation on both detection and recognition, it easily handles text instances of irregular shapes, for instance, curved text. We evaluate it on four English datasets and one multi-language dataset, achieving consistently superior performance over state-of-the-art methods in both detection and end-to-end text recognition tasks. Moreover, we further investigate the recognition module of our method separately, which significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both regular and irregular text datasets for scene text recognition.
Computational Segmentation and Classification of Diabetic Glomerulosclerosis

Pathologists use visual classification of glomerular lesions to assess samples from patients with diabetic nephropathy (DN). The results may vary among pathologists. Digital algorithms may reduce this variability and provide more consistent image structure interpretation.We developed a digital pipeline to classify renal biopsies from patients with DN. We combined traditional image analysis with modern machine learning to efficiently capture important structures, minimize manual effort and supervision, and enforce biologic prior information onto our model. To computationally quantify glomerular structure despite its complexity, we simplified it to three components consisting of nuclei, capillary lumina and Bowman spaces; and Periodic Acid-Schiff positive structures. We detected glomerular boundaries and nuclei from whole slide images using convolutional neural networks, and the remaining glomerular structures using an unsupervised technique developed expressly for this purpose. We defined a set of digital features which quantify the structural progression of DN, and a recurrent network architecture which processes these features into a classification.Our digital classification agreed with a senior pathologist whose classifications were used as ground truth with moderate Cohen's kappa κ = 0.55 and 95% confidence interval [0.50, 0.60]. Two other renal pathologists agreed with the digital classification with κ1 = 0.68, 95% interval [0.50, 0.86] and κ2 = 0.48, 95% interval [0.32, 0.64]. Our results suggest computational approaches are comparable to human visual classification methods, and can offer improved precision in clinical decision workflows. We detected glomerular boundaries from whole slide images with 0.93±0.04 balanced accuracy, glomerular nuclei with 0.94 sensitivity and 0.93 specificity, and glomerular structural components with 0.95 sensitivity and 0.99 specificity.Computationally derived, histologic image features hold significant diagnostic information that may augment clinical diagnostics.
zkCrowd: A Hybrid Blockchain-Based Crowdsourcing Platform

Blockchain, a promising decentralized para-digm, can be exploited not only to overcome the shortcomings of the traditional crowdsourcing systems, but also to bring technical innovations, such as decentralization and accountability. Nevertheless, some critical inherent limitations of blockchain have been rarely addressed in the literature when it is incorporated into crowdsourcing, which may yield the performance bottleneck in the crowdsourcing systems. To further leverage the superiority of combining blockchain and crowdsourcing, in this article, we propose an innovative hybrid blockchain crowdsourcing platform, named zkCrowd. Our zkCrowd integrates with a hybrid blockchain structure, smart contract, dual ledgers, and dual consensus protocols to secure communications, verify transactions, and preserve privacy. Both the theoretical analysis and experiments are performed to evaluate the advantages of zkCrowd over the state of the art.
Learning to Remember: A Synaptic Plasticity Driven Framework for Continual Learning

Models trained in the context of continual learning (CL) should be able to learn from a stream of data over an undefined period of time. The main challenges herein are: 1) maintaining old knowledge while simultaneously benefiting from it when learning new tasks, and 2) guaranteeing model scalability with a growing amount of data to learn from. In order to tackle these challenges, we introduce Dynamic Generative Memory (DGM) - synaptic plasticity driven framework for continual learning. DGM relies on conditional generative adversarial networks with learnable connection plasticity realized with neural masking. Specifically, we evaluate two variants of neural masking: applied to (i) layer activations and (ii) to connection weights directly. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic network expansion mechanism that ensures sufficient model capacity to accommodate for continually incoming tasks. The amount of added capacity is determined dynamically from the learned binary mask. We evaluate DGM in the continual class-incremental setup on visual classification tasks.
Scene Text Visual Question Answering

Current visual question answering datasets do not consider the rich semantic information conveyed by text within an image. In this work, we present a new dataset, ST-VQA, that aims to highlight the importance of exploiting high-level semantic information present in images as textual cues in the Visual Question Answering process. We use this dataset to define a series of tasks of increasing difficulty for which reading the scene text in the context provided by the visual information is necessary to reason and generate an appropriate answer. We propose a new evaluation metric for these tasks to account both for reasoning errors as well as shortcomings of the text recognition module. In addition we put forward a series of baseline methods, which provide further insight to the newly released dataset, and set the scene for further research.
BreastNet: A novel convolutional neural network model through histopathological images for the diagnosis of breast cancer

Breast cancer is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancer types in the woman and automatically classifying breast cancer histopathological images is an important task in computer-assisted pathology analysis. Statistics indicate that the breast cancer rate is about 12% in all cancer cases in the world. Also, approximately 25% of women have breast cancer. Therefore, rapid and accurate analysis of breast cancer images is extremely important for diagnosis. Recently, deep learning models have been used in preference for this purpose. In short, the most important reason why we use a deep learning model for the diagnosis of breast cancer is can give faster and more accurate results than existing machine learning based methods. In this study, we come up with a novel deep learning model developed based on a convolutional neural network. The success of the classification was increased by using the proposed model named as BreastNet. The general structure of the BreastNet model is a residual architecture built on attention modules. Each image data is processed by the augmentation techniques before applying it as input to the model. With augmentation techniques, each image is processed one by one and transferred to BreastNet. There is no increase in the number of data. The features of each image are changed using some augmentation techniques, such as flip, shift, brightness change and rotation. Then, each image that comes to the model performs the selection and processing of important key regions of the image via through attention modules. Also, a more stable and accurate classification of the data is performed by using the hypercolumn technique in the model. Other parts of the BreastNet model consist of convolutional, pooling, residual and dense blocks. As a result, 98.80% classification success was achieved with the proposed model. The success rate of the proposed model was better than the success rates of AlexNet, VGG-16 and VGG-19 models performed on the same data set. In addition, the results obtained in this study yielded better results than the other studies that use the current BreakHis dataset.
Residual learning based CNN for breast cancer histopathological image classification

Abstract Biopsy is one of the most commonly used modality to identify breast cancer in women, where tissue is removed and studied by the pathologist under the microscope to look for abnormalities in tissue. This technique can be time‐consuming, error‐prone, and provides variable results depending on the expertise level of the pathologist. An automated and efficient approach not only aids in the diagnosis of breast cancer but also reduces human effort. In this paper, we develop an automated approach for the diagnosis of breast cancer tumors using histopathological images. In the proposed approach, we design a residual learning‐based 152‐layered convolutional neural network, named as ResHist for breast cancer histopathological image classification. ResHist model learns rich and discriminative features from the histopathological images and classifies histopathological images into benign and malignant classes. In addition, to enhance the performance of the developed model, we design a data augmentation technique, which is based on stain normalization, image patches generation, and affine transformation. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated on publicly available BreaKHis dataset. The proposed ResHist model achieves an accuracy of 84.34% and an F1‐score of 90.49% for the classification of histopathological images. Also, this approach achieves an accuracy of 92.52% and F1‐score of 93.45% when data augmentation is employed. The proposed approach outperforms the existing methodologies in the classification of benign and malignant histopathological images. Furthermore, our experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the pre‐trained networks, namely AlexNet, VGG16, VGG19, GoogleNet, Inception‐v3, ResNet50, and ResNet152 for the classification of histopathological images.
Cross-Dataset Person Re-Identification via Unsupervised Pose Disentanglement and Adaptation

Person re-identification (re-ID) aims at recognizing the same person from images taken across different cameras. To address this challenging task, existing re-ID models typically rely on a large amount of labeled training data, which is not practical for real-world applications. To alleviate this limitation, researchers now targets at cross-dataset re-ID which focuses on generalizing the discriminative ability to the unlabeled target domain when given a labeled source domain dataset. To achieve this goal, our proposed Pose Disentanglement and Adaptation Network (PDA-Net) aims at learning deep image representation with pose and domain information properly disentangled. With the learned cross-domain pose invariant feature space, our proposed PDA-Net is able to perform pose disentanglement across domains without supervision in identities, and the resulting features can be applied to cross-dataset re-ID. Both of our qualitative and quantitative results on two benchmark datasets confirm the effectiveness of our approach and its superiority over the state-of-the-art cross-dataset Re-ID approaches.
An efficient henry gas solubility optimization for feature selection

In classification, regression, and other data mining applications, feature selection (FS) is an important pre-process step which helps avoid advert effect of noisy, misleading, and inconsistent features on the model performance. Formulating it into a global combinatorial optimization problem, researchers have employed metaheuristic algorithms for selecting the prominent features to simplify and enhance the quality of the high-dimensional datasets, in order to devise efficient knowledge extraction systems. However, when employed on datasets with extensively large feature-size, these methods often suffer from local optimality problem due to considerably large solution space. In this study, we propose a novel approach to dimensionality reduction by using Henry gas solubility optimization (HGSO) algorithm for selecting significant features, to enhance the classification accuracy. By employing several datasets with wide range of feature size, from small to massive, the proposed method is evaluated against well-known metaheuristic algorithms including grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA), whale optimization algorithm (WOA), dragonfly algorithm (DA), grey wolf optimizer (GWO), salp swarm algorithm (SSA), and others from recent relevant literature. We used k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) and support vector machine (SVM) as expert systems to evaluate the selected feature-set. Wilcoxon’s ranksum non-parametric statistical test was carried out at 5% significance level to judge whether the results of the proposed algorithms differ from those of the other compared algorithms in a statistically significant way. Overall, the empirical analysis suggests that the proposed approach is significantly effective on low, as well as, considerably high dimensional datasets, by producing 100% accuracy on classification problems with more than 11,000 features.
Integrated project delivery with blockchain: An automated financial system

Integrated project delivery (IPD) in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry relies on risk/reward sharing and deferral of parties' profit payments until all project activities are completed. A decentralised, automated and secured financial platform is needed to enable all parties to control and track financial transactions, with no unauthorised changes allowed. The new technology, blockchain, enables data to be recorded, has no network participant with dominant power and manages data using specific functions, in line with smart contracts. The present study is the first to develop a framework proposing blockchain technology utilisation in IPD projects. The framework would enable core project team members to automatically execute all financial transactions, through coding the three main transactions of IPD projects: reimbursed costs, profit and cost saving, as functions of the IPD smart contract. To demonstrate the proposed framework's applicability, a “proof of concept” is developed and validated through an IPD case project. The practicality of the built-up hyperledger network (IBM® Blockchain Cloud Beta 2) and the advantages of the proposed smart contract functions are examined. The user-friendliness of the proposed financial system and its efficiency in automating all transactions are demonstrated. No deficiency is found in the blockchain network components. The study's findings, applied in a favourable external context, would facilitate IPD adoption and use across the AEC industry by providing a workable solution to existing financial barriers. The findings extend the horizon for further research on exploring blockchain's capabilities to solve comparable deficiencies to those affecting the AEC industry.
Class-incremental Learning via Deep Model Consolidation

Deep neural networks (DNNs) often suffer from "catastrophic forgetting" during incremental learning (IL) — an abrupt degradation of performance on the original set of classes when the training objective is adapted to a newly added set of classes. Existing IL approaches tend to produce a model that is biased towards either the old classes or new classes, unless with the help of exemplars of the old data. To address this issue, we propose a class-incremental learning paradigm called Deep Model Consolidation (DMC), which works well even when the original training data is not available. The idea is to first train a separate model only for the new classes, and then combine the two individual models trained on data of two distinct set of classes (old classes and new classes) via a novel double distillation training objective. The two existing models are consolidated by exploiting publicly available unlabeled auxiliary data. This overcomes the potential difficulties due to unavailability of original training data. Compared to the state-of-the-art techniques, DMC demonstrates significantly better performance in image classification (CIFAR-100 and CUB-200) and object detection (PASCAL VOC 2007) in the single-headed IL setting.
UAVid: A semantic segmentation dataset for UAV imagery

Semantic segmentation has been one of the leading research interests in computer vision recently. It serves as a perception foundation for many fields, such as robotics and autonomous driving. The fast development of semantic segmentation attributes enormously to the large scale datasets, especially for the deep learning related methods. There already exist several semantic segmentation datasets for comparison among semantic segmentation methods in complex urban scenes, such as the Cityscapes and CamVid datasets, where the side views of the objects are captured with a camera mounted on the driving car. There also exist semantic labeling datasets for the airborne images and the satellite images, where the nadir views of the objects are captured. However, only a few datasets capture urban scenes from an oblique Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) perspective, where both of the top view and the side view of the objects can be observed, providing more information for object recognition. In this paper, we introduce our UAVid dataset, a new high-resolution UAV semantic segmentation dataset as a complement, which brings new challenges, including large scale variation, moving object recognition and temporal consistency preservation. Our UAV dataset consists of 30 video sequences capturing high-resolution images in oblique views. In total, 300 images have been densely labeled with 8 classes for the semantic labeling task. We have provided several deep learning baseline methods with pre-training, among which the proposed Multi-Scale-Dilation net performs the best via multi-scale feature extraction, reaching a mean intersection-over-union (IoU) score around 50%. We have also explored the influence of spatial-temporal regularization for sequence data by leveraging on feature space optimization (FSO) and 3D conditional random field (CRF). Our UAVid website and the labeling tool have been published online (https://uavid.nl/).
Self-challenging Improves Cross-Domain Generalization

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) conduct image classification by activating dominant features that correlated with labels. When the training and testing data are under similar distributions, their dominant features are similar, leading to decent test performance. The performance is nonetheless unmet when tested with different distributions, leading to the challenges in cross-domain image classification. We introduce a simple training heuristic, Representation Self-Challenging (RSC), that significantly improves the generalization of CNN to the out-of-domain data. RSC iteratively challenges (discards) the dominant features activated on the training data, and forces the network to activate remaining features that correlate with labels. This process appears to activate feature representations applicable to out-of-domain data without prior knowledge of the new domain and without learning extra network parameters. We present the theoretical properties and conditions of RSC for improving cross-domain generalization. The experiments endorse the simple, effective, and architecture-agnostic nature of our RSC method.