Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Does SoC Hardware Development Become Agile by Saying So: A Literature Review and Mapping Study

The success of agile development methods in software development has raised interest in System-on-Chip (SoC) design, which involves high architectural and development process complexity under time and project management pressure. This article discovers the current state of agile hardware development with the questions (1) how well literature covers the SoC development process, (2) what agile methods and practices are applied or (3) what proposals are made to increase the agility, and (4) what is the impact for the SoC community. To answer the questions, a mapping study and literature review were performed. Seven hundred thirty papers were first studied, and eventually, after a rigorous filtering process, 25 papers were thoroughly analyzed. The results show that the popular agile SW development methods are applied in 5 cases, ideas adapted from the agile Hardware manifesto in 9 cases, and 11 cases do not define the Agile HW development method. Most of the papers address shorter development time by better methodologies and tools that indirectly shape the SoC development toward agility. The focus of agile hardware development is mostly on the SoC artifacts and methodological improvements have not been quantified. However, the literature indicates a significant impact on many academic chip prototypes. The challenges are better understood and the interest in agile methods is clearly increasing. The methodological gaps in the prevalent situation encourage further research and more accurate reporting of the development in addition to the SoC artifacts.
An Improved Algorithm for Complete Coverage Path Planning Based on Biologically Inspired Neural Network

Complete coverage path planning (CCPP) requires the mobile robots to traverse every part of the workspace, which is one of the major challenges in cleaning robots and many other robotic systems. The biologically inspired neural network (BINN) algorithm has been extensively applied in path planning, recently. In this article, a new CCPP strategy with BINN is proposed. The planned path of cleaning robot is not only determined by the dynamic neural activities but also by the distribution of obstacles in the environmental map. By distinguishing the connectivity between different areas of the environmental map, and using the proposed path backtracking algorithm, the improved CCPP algorithm can autonomously plan a collision-free path and reduce the path repetition ratio. Besides, an improved dynamic deadlock escape algorithm is presented to select the optimal escape target point. The simulation results show that the proposed CCPP algorithm without any templates or learning procedures is able to generate an orderly path in both known and unknown environment.
A Multiview Stereo Algorithm Based on Image Segmentation Guided Generation of Planar Prior for Textureless Regions of Artificial Scenes

Textureless building surfaces composed of homogenized pixels could lead to failure of photometric consistency. However, textureless regions widely present in artificial scenes usually exhibit strong planarity enabling depth estimation of textureless regions with planar priors. However, existing methods for generating planar priors suffer from over-segmentation of large planes with textureless regions, which indicates that planarity is not fully exploited. In this study, we propose a novel generation method of planar prior by combining mean-shift clustering and superpixel segmentation. The planarity is fully utilized given preferential generation of planar priors for large planes with textureless regions in artificial scenes. Finally, a probabilistic graphical model is used to adopt the planar priors and smoothing constraints into depth estimation process. The image gradient is used as a criterion of the degree of texture to adaptively adjust the weights of different constraints. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset ETH3D, UDD5, and SenseFly demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively recover the depth information of textureless regions in high-resolution images to obtain highly complete three-dimensional (3-D) models of artificial scenes.
Reliable Face Morphing Attack Detection in On-The-Fly Border Control Scenario with Variation in Image Resolution and Capture Distance

Face Recognition Systems (FRS) are vulnerable to various attacks performed directly and indirectly. Among these attacks, face morphing attacks are highly potential in deceiving automatic FRS and human observers and indicate a severe security threat, especially in the border control scenario. This work presents a face morphing attack detection, especially in the On-The-Fly (OTF) Automatic Border Control (ABC) scenario. We present a novel Differential-MAD (D-MAD) algorithm based on the spherical interpolation and hierarchical fusion of deep features computed from six different pre-trained deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Extensive experiments are carried out on the newly generated face morphing dataset (SCFace-Morph) based on the publicly available SCFace dataset by considering the real-life scenario of Automatic Border Control (ABC) gates. Experimental protocols are designed to benchmark the proposed and state-of-the-art (SOTA) D-MAD techniques for different camera resolutions and capture distances. Obtained results have indicated the superior performance of the proposed D-MAD method compared to the existing methods.
Information Maximization for Extreme Pose Face Recognition

In this paper, we seek to draw connections between the frontal and profile face images in an abstract embedding space. We exploit this connection using a coupled-encoder network to project frontal/profile face images into a common latent embedding space. The proposed model forces the similarity of representations in the embedding space by maximizing the mutual information between two views of the face. The proposed coupled-encoder benefits from three contributions for matching faces with extreme pose disparities. First, we leverage our pose-aware contrastive learning to maximize the mutual information between frontal and profile representations of identities. Second, a memory buffer, which consists of latent representations accumulated over past iterations, is integrated into the model so it can refer to relatively much more instances than the mini-batch size. Third, a novel pose-aware adversarial domain adaptation method forces the model to learn an asymmetric mapping from profile to frontal representation. In our framework, the coupled-encoder learns to enlarge the margin between the distribution of genuine and imposter faces, which results in high mutual information between different views of the same identity. The effectiveness of the proposed model is investigated through extensive experiments, evaluations, and ablation studies on four benchmark datasets, and comparison with the compelling state-of-the-art algorithms.
Exploiting temporal information to prevent the transferability of adversarial examples against deep fake detectors

The diffusion of AI tools capable of generating realistic DeepFakes (DF) videos raises serious threats to face-based biometric recognition systems. For this reason, several detectors based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been developed to distinguish between real and DF videos. Despite their good performance, these methods suffer from vulnerability to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we argue that it is possible to increase the resilience of DNN-based DF detectors against black-box adversarial attacks by exploiting the temporal information contained in the video. By using such information, in fact, the transferability of adversarial examples from a source to a target model is significantly decreased, making it difficult to launch an attack without accessing the target network. To back this claim, we trained two convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to detect DF videos, and measured their robustness against black-box, transfer-based, attacks. We also trained two detectors by adding to the CNNs a long short-term memory (LSTM) layer to extract temporal information. Then, we measured the transferability of adversarial examples to-wards the LSTM-networks. The results we got suggest that the methods based on temporal information are less prone to black-box attacks.
Facial De-morphing: Extracting Component Faces from a Single Morph

A face morph is created by strategically combining two or more face images corresponding to multiple identities. The intention is for the morphed image to match with multiple identities. Current morph attack detection strategies can detect morphs but cannot recover the images or identities used in creating them. The task of deducing the individual face images from a morphed face image is known as demorphing. Existing work in de-morphing assume the availability of a reference image pertaining to one identity in order to recover the image of the accomplice - i.e., the other identity. In this work, we propose a novel de-morphing method that can recover images of both identities simultaneously from a single morphed face image without needing a reference image or prior information about the morphing process. We propose a generative adversarial network that achieves single image-based de-morphing with a surprisingly high degree of visual realism and biometric similarity with the original face images. We demonstrate the performance of our method on landmark-based morphs and generative model-based morphs with promising results.
Temporal Feature Alignment in Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning for Human Activity Recognition

Automated Human Activity Recognition has long been a problem of great interest in human-centered and ubiquitous computing. In the last years, a plethora of supervised learning algorithms based on deep neural networks has been suggested to address this problem using various modalities. While every modality has its own limitations, there is one common challenge. Namely, supervised learning requires vast amounts of annotated data which is practically hard to collect. In this paper, we benefit from the self-supervised learning paradigm (SSL) that is typically used to learn deep feature representations from unlabeled data. Moreover, we upgrade a contrastive SSL framework, namely SimCLR, widely used in various applications by introducing a temporal feature alignment procedure for Human Activity Recognition. Specifically, we propose integrating a dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm in a latent space to force features to be aligned in a temporal dimension. Extensive experiments have been conducted for the unimodal scenario with inertial modality as well as in multimodal settings using inertial and skeleton data. According to the obtained results, the proposed approach has a great potential in learning robust feature representations compared to the recent SSL baselines, and clearly outperforms supervised models in semi-supervised learning. The code for this paper is available via the following link: https://github.com/bulatkh/csshar_tfa.
JBrowse Jupyter: a Python interface to JBrowse 2

JBrowse Jupyter is a package that aims to close the gap between Python programming and genomic visualization. Web-based genome browsers are routinely used for publishing and inspecting genome annotations. Historically they have been deployed at the end of bioinformatics pipelines, typically decoupled from the analysis itself. However, emerging technologies such as Jupyter notebooks enable a more rapid iterative cycle of development, analysis and visualization.We have developed a package that provides a Python interface to JBrowse 2's suite of embeddable components, including the primary Linear Genome View. The package enables users to quickly set up, launch and customize JBrowse views from Jupyter notebooks. In addition, users can share their data via Google's Colab notebooks, providing reproducible interactive views.JBrowse Jupyter is released under the Apache License and is available for download on PyPI. Source code and demos are available on GitHub at https://github.com/GMOD/jbrowse-jupyter.
DeepVID: deep-learning accelerated variational image decomposition model tailored to fringe pattern filtration

Abstract The algorithms defined as variational image decomposition (VID) constitute the state-of-the-art in solving the image prefiltration problem. However, the discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of different VID models in the context of fringe pattern prefiltration is yet to be addressed and this work is the first one leaning into this issue. The unsupervised variational image decomposition (uVID) algorithm allows for automatic, accurate and robust preprocessing of diverse fringe patterns and introduces the parameters and stopping criterion for Chambolle’s iterative projection algorithm to separate the fringes and background. However, determining the stopping criterion in each iteration is a severely time-consuming process, which is particularly important given the fact that in many cases thousands of iterations must be calculated to obtain a satisfactory fringe pattern decomposition result. Therefore, the idea of using convolutional neural network to map the relationship between the fringe pattern spatial intensity distribution and the required number of Chambolle projection iterations has emerged. That way, it is no longer required to determine the value of the stopping criterion in every iteration, but the appropriate number of iterations is known in advance via machine learning process. We showed that the calculation time is reduced on average by 3–4 times by employing the deep learning-based acceleration (convolutional neural network called DeepVID) without jeopardizing the overall accuracy of the prefiltration. This way an important progress in developing uVID algorithm features towards real-time studies of dynamic phenomena is reported in this contribution. For the sake of metrological figure of merit, we employ deep learning based solution, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, to accelerate powerful and well-established VID approach, not to bypass it completely.
A featureless approach for object detection and tracking in dynamic environments

One of the challenging problems in mobile robotics is mapping a dynamic environment for navigating robots. In order to disambiguate multiple moving obstacles, state-of-art techniques often solve some form of dynamic SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) problem. Unfortunately, their higher computational complexity press the need for simpler and more efficient approaches suitable for real-time embedded systems. In this paper, we present a ROS-based efficient algorithm for constructing dynamic maps, which exploits the spatial-temporal locality for detecting and tracking moving objects without relying on prior knowledge of their geometrical features. A two-prong contribution of this work is as follows: first, an efficient scheme for decoding sensory data into an estimated time-varying object boundary that ultimately decides its orientation and trajectory based on the iteratively updated robot Field of View (FoV); second, lower time-complexity of updating the dynamic environment through manipulating spatial-temporal locality available in the object motion profile. Unlike existing approaches, the snapshots of the environment remain constant in the number of moving objects. We validate the efficacy of our algorithm on both V-Rep simulations and real-life experiments with a wide array of dynamic environments. We show that the algorithm accurately detects and tracks objects with a high probability as long as sensor noise is low and the speed of moving objects remains within acceptable limits.
KenSwQuAD—A Question Answering Dataset for Swahili Low-resource Language

The need for question-answering (QA) datasets in low-resource languages is the motivation of this research, leading to the development of the Kencorpus Swahili Question Answering Dataset (KenSwQuAD). This dataset is annotated from raw story texts of Swahili, a low-resource language that is predominantly spoken in eastern Africa and in other parts of the world. Question-answering datasets are important for machine comprehension of natural language for tasks such as internet search and dialog systems. Machine learning systems need training data such as the gold-standard question-answering set developed in this research. The research engaged annotators to formulate QA pairs from Swahili texts collected by the Kencorpus project, a Kenyan languages corpus. The project annotated 1,445 texts from the total 2,585 texts with at least 5 QA pairs each, resulting in a final dataset of 7,526 QA pairs. A quality assurance set of 12.5% of the annotated texts confirmed that the QA pairs were all correctly annotated. A proof of concept on applying the set to the QA task confirmed that the dataset can be usable for such tasks. KenSwQuAD has also contributed to resourcing of the Swahili language.
Identifying COVID-19 english informative tweets using limited labelled data

Identifying COVID-19 informative tweets is very useful in building monitoring systems to track the latest updates. Existing approaches to identify informative tweets rely on a large number of labelled tweets to achieve good performances. As labelling is an expensive and laborious process, there is a need to develop approaches that can identify COVID-19 informative tweets using limited labelled data. In this paper, we propose a simple yet novel labelled data-efficient approach that achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) F1-score of 91.23 on the WNUT COVID-19 dataset using just 1000 tweets (14.3% of the full training set). Our labelled data-efficient approach starts with limited labelled data, augment it using data augmentation methods and then fine-tune the model using augmented data set. It is the first work to approach the task of identifying COVID-19 English informative tweets using limited labelled data yet achieve the new SOTA performance.
iDT: An Integration of Detection and Tracking Toward Low-Observable Multipedestrian for Urban Autonomous Driving

Robust pedestrian trajectory-tracking is an essential prerequisite to traffic accident prevention. However, it is a challenging task in urban autonomous driving, since the weak backscattered signals from pedestrians with small radar cross-section may be submerged in strong background clutters, especially under adverse weather conditions. On this account, this article presents an integration of detection and tracking (iDT) toward multipedestrian with a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In particular, in contrast to conventional methods, in which the detection and tracking are treated as two separate processes, we address them jointly to ensure the accuracy of continuous detection and tracking in low SNR conditions. Another distinguishing element is that to accommodate the time-varying number of targets, the Bayesian framework is tailored by augmenting the state vector with a multipedestrian evolutional indicator. The advantage is that all targets can be tracked simultaneously by searching the global likelihood ratio of a spectrum once, rather than assigning an individual tracker to each target in conventional methods. Furthermore, through the proposed integrated framework, the data association problem is circumvented because there is no explicit measurement-target assignment process in our approach. In addition, a commercial automotive multiple-input-multiple-output millimeter-wave radar sensor is employed to validate the proposed method. Consequently, numerous simulation and experiment results turn out that iDT shows unique advantages in low-observable multipedestrian tracking compared with traditional methods.
Towards Saving Blockchain Fees via Secure and Cost-Effective Batching of Smart-Contract Invocations

This paper presents <small>iBatch</small> , a middleware system running on top of an operational Ethereum network to enable secure batching of smart-contract invocations against an untrusted relay server off-chain. <small>iBatch</small> does so at a low overhead by validating the server's batched invocations in smart contracts without additional states of user nonces. The <small>iBatch</small> mechanism supports a variety of policies, ranging from conservative to aggressive batching, and can be configured adaptively to the current workloads. <small>iBatch</small> automatically rewrites smart contracts to integrate with legacy applications and support large-scale deployment. We built an evaluation platform for fast and cost-accurate transaction replaying and constructed real transaction benchmarks on popular Ethereum applications. With a functional prototype of <small>iBatch</small> , we conduct extensive cost evaluations, which shows <small>iBatch</small> saves <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$14.6\%\sim {}59.1\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> Gas cost per invocation with a moderate 2-minute delay and <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$19.06\%\sim {}31.52\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> Ether cost per invocation with a delay of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.26\sim {}1.66$</tex-math></inline-formula> blocks.
Two-party interactive secure deduplication with efficient data ownership management in cloud storage

Deduplication, which stores only one copy of duplicate data, is used extensively in cloud storage to reduce the overhead associated with storage. Unfortunately, client-side encryption prevents cloud storage from performing deduplication due to the randomness of traditional encryption. Some existing schemes can balance encryption and deduplication, but their interaction with third-party servers or online users adds additional overhead to the system. Also, the ownership of outsourced data will change frequently due to users’ requests to upload/delete/modify the data. But many existing schemes that can achieve dynamic ownership management have security flaws or require users to manage multiple keys. By focusing on these troubles, we have developed a secure deduplication scheme that does not rely on any third-party entities and supports data ownership management. More specifically, we take advantage of elliptic curve cryptography to design a key-sharing method so that different owners of the same data can share a random key only by interacting with the cloud service provider. And the broadcast encryption is used to manage the ownership of data, and this allows the cloud service provider to control users’ access to outsourced data by updating the broadcast key. In addition, the security analysis shows that the proposed scheme can meet the required security and that it outperforms other related schemes. The detailed simulation comparisons with other related schemes demonstrate that the proposed scheme has good performance.
Blockchain based Sensor System Design For Embedded IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of interconnected computing devices with unique IDs and the potential to exchange data over the network. Most current IoT solutions have highly centralized designs vulnerable to cyber-attacks and have a single point of failure. A new solution path is required to improve data access by enhancing privacy and security standards. In this research, the Block Chain-based sensor system was designed for an embedded IoT platform to improve the integrity of sensor data with their open issues and challenges. The main objective of this research is to enhance sensor data security, resolve single points of failures and improve the trust between users to make the framework more scalable for devices. In this review paper, BC-based IoT network-based techniques are analyzed based on the security and privacy-preservation aspects. Also, discuss current research obstacles and suggest some study possibilities for future work.