Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Class-incremental learning: survey and performance evaluation

For future learning systems incremental learning is desirable, because itallows for: efficient resource usage by eliminating the need to retrain fromscratch at the arrival of new data; reduced memory usage by preventing orlimiting the amount of data required to be stored -- also important whenprivacy limitations are imposed; and learning that more closely resembles humanlearning. The main challenge for incremental learning is catastrophicforgetting, which refers to the precipitous drop in performance on previouslylearned tasks after learning a new one. Incremental learning of deep neuralnetworks has seen explosive growth in recent years. Initial work focused ontask incremental learning, where a task-ID is provided at inference time.Recently we have seen a shift towards class-incremental learning where thelearner must classify at inference time between all classes seen in previoustasks without recourse to a task-ID. In this paper, we provide a completesurvey of existing methods for incremental learning, and in particular weperform an extensive experimental evaluation on twelve class-incrementalmethods. We consider several new experimental scenarios, including a comparisonof class-incremental methods on multiple large-scale datasets, investigationinto small and large domain shifts, and comparison on various networkarchitectures.
Facing COVID-19 Challenges: 1st-Year Students’ Experience with the Romanian Hybrid Higher Educational System

First-year students undergo several transformations like the transition from high school to university schedules, teaching methods, and discipline specificities to social changes that come with meeting new colleagues or moving to other locations far from family and friends. The COVID-19 outbreak brought additional concerns and uncertainties once educational systems implemented distance learning schemes for public health management. Nevertheless, higher educational organizations preferred to implement hybrid approaches for student engagement motivation and high dropout rate avoidance. In Romania, such an educational system has been applied with caution. Since the pandemic needs to be understood as an opportunity for adaptation and education improvements, the purpose of the present paper is to uncover lessons learned and to develop a systematized model based on students' perception regarding face-to-face, online and hybrid systems. For this reason, a grounded theory approach has been preferred. Thus, 149 Romanian students enrolled in the first year in engineering specialities with ages between 18-26 years both male (50.3%) and female (49.7%) have answered the research questions in an online environment due to pandemic restrictions. Based on the online asynchronous student interviews, 220 codes and a further 13 categories have been developed. After a pertinent analysis of the relationships between categories and relevant literature sorting, a theoretical model for the Romanian higher educational current pandemic situation has been proposed. The main face-to-face and online education characteristics are outlined, the hybrid approach becoming a bridge between the two systems. Management implications are outlined together with further research directions.
Taxonomy of centralization in public blockchain systems: A systematic literature review

Bitcoin introduced delegation of control over a monetary system from a select few to all who participate in that system. This delegation is known as the decentralization of controlling power and is a powerful security mechanism for the ecosystem. After the introduction of Bitcoin, the field of cryptocurrency has seen widespread attention from industry and academia, so much so that the original novel contribution of Bitcoin, i.e., decentralization, may be overlooked, due to decentralizations’ assumed fundamental existence for the functioning of such crypto-assets. However, recent studies have observed a trend of increased centralization in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. As this increased centralization has an impact the security of the blockchain, it is crucial that it is measured, towards adequate control. This research derives an initial taxonomy of centralization present in decentralized blockchains through rigorous synthesis using a systematic literature review. This is followed by iterative refinement through expert interviews. We systematically analyzed 89 research papers published between 2009 and 2019. Our study contributes to the existing body of knowledge by highlighting the multiple definitions and measurements of centralization in the literature. We identify different aspects of centralization and propose an encompassing taxonomy of centralization concerns. This taxonomy is based on empirically observable and measurable characteristics. It consists of 13 aspects of centralization, classified over six architectural layers: Governance, Network, Consensus, Incentive, Operational, and Application. We also discuss how the implications of centralization can vary depending on the aspects studied. We believe that this review and taxonomy provides a comprehensive overview of centralization in decentralized blockchains involving various conceptualizations and measures.
Systemic formalisation of Cyber-Physical-Social System (CPSS): A systematic literature review

The notion of Cyber-Physical-Social System (CPSS) is an emerging concept developed as a result of the need to understand the impact of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) on humans and vice versa. This paradigm shift from CPS to CPSS was mainly attributed to the increasing use of sensor enabled smart devices and the tight link with the users. The concept of CPSS has been around for over a decade and it has gained an increasing attention over the past few years. The evolution to incorporate human aspects in the CPS research has unlocked a number of research challenges. Particularly human dynamics brings additional complexity that is yet to be explored. The exploration to conceptualise the notion of CPSS has been partially addressed in few scientific literatures. Although its conceptualisation has always been use-case dependent. Thus, there is a lack of generic view as most works focus on specific domains. Furthermore the systemic core and design principles linking it with the theory of systems are loose. This work aims at addressing these issues by first exploring and analysing scientific literatures to understand the complete spectrum of CPSS through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). Thereby identifying the state-of-the-art perspectives on CPSS regarding definitions, underlining principles and application areas. Subsequently, based on the findings of the SLR, we propose a domain-independent definition and a meta-model for CPSS, grounded in the Theory of Systems. Finally a discussion on feasible future research directions is presented based on the systemic notion and the proposed meta-models.
DAST: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation Based on Discriminator Attention and Self-Training

Unsupervised domain adaption has recently been used to reduce the domain shift, which would ultimately improve the performance of the semantic segmentation on unlabeled real-world data. In this paper, we follow the trend to propose a novel method to reduce the domain shift using strategies of discriminator attention and self-training. The discriminator attention strategy contains a two-stage adversarial learning process, which explicitly distinguishes the well-aligned (domain-invariant) and poorly-aligned (domain-specific) features, and then guides the model to focus on the latter. The self-training strategy adaptively improves the decision boundary of the model for the target domain, which implicitly facilitates the extraction of domain-invariant features. By combining the two strategies, we find a more effective way to reduce the domain shift. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on numerous benchmark datasets.
E-learning in higher education institutions during COVID-19 pandemic: current and future trends through bibliometric analysis

<h2>Abstract</h2> The purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive review of e-learning in higher education institutions (HEIs) during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study presents current research issues and future progress in HEIs e-learning in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic from 2019 to 2020 through the Web of Science (WOS) database. The analysis comprises citation analysis, co-citation analysis, and co-occurrence of keyword analysis. This bibliometric review provides essential insight for researchers to identify the most influential publications and determine the fundamental structure. Furthermore, this review facilitates future studies on the influential research trends and emerging topics. Findings present several streams of discussion based on the clusters identified from the three analyses. Subsequently, the theoretical and methodological implications on the emergence of new sub-fields and interesting future works in connection with e-learning in HEIs are presented. The outcome would aid scholars and practitioners in advancing the technology and aid towards e-learning in HEIs to ensure students' education can be sustained in the state of emergency.
HiFormer: Hierarchical Multi-scale Representations Using Transformers for Medical Image Segmentation

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been the consensus for medical image segmentation tasks. However, they suffer from the limitation in modeling long-range dependencies and spatial correlations due to the nature of convolution operation. Although transformers were first developed to address this issue, they fail to capture low-level features. In contrast, it is demonstrated that both local and global features are crucial for dense prediction, such as segmenting in challenging contexts. In this paper, we propose HiFormer, a novel method that efficiently bridges a CNN and a transformer for medical image segmentation. Specifically, we design two multi-scale feature representations using the seminal Swin Transformer module and a CNN-based encoder. To secure a fine fusion of global and local features obtained from the two aforementioned representations, we propose a Double-Level Fusion (DLF) module in the skip connection of the encoder-decoder structure. Extensive experiments on various medical image segmentation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of HiFormer over other CNN-based, transformer-based, and hybrid methods in terms of computational complexity, quantitative and qualitative results. Our code is publicly available at GitHub.
Morphological Segmentation Analysis and Texture-based Support Vector Machines Classification on Mice Liver Fibrosis Microscopic Images

Background: To reduce the intensity of the work of doctors, pre-classification work needs to be issued. In this paper, a novel and related liver microscopic image classification analysis method is proposed. Objective: For quantitative analysis, segmentation is carried out to extract the quantitative information of special organisms in the image for further diagnosis, lesion localization, learning and treating anatomical abnormalities and computer-guided surgery. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt; Methods: In the current work, entropy-based features of microscopic fibrosis mice’ liver images were analyzed using fuzzy c-cluster, k-means and watershed algorithms based on distance transformations and gradient. A morphological segmentation based on a local threshold was deployed to determine the fibrosis areas of images. Results: The segmented target region using the proposed method achieved high effective microscopy fibrosis images segmenting of mice liver in terms of the running time, dice ratio and precision. The image classification experiments were conducted using Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM). The best classification model derived from the established characteristics was GLCM which performed the highest accuracy of classification using a developed Support Vector Machine (SVM). The training model using 11 features was found to be accurate when only trained by 8 GLCMs. Conclusion: The research illustrated that the proposed method is a new feasible research approach for microscopy mice liver image segmentation and classification using intelligent image analysis techniques. It is also reported that the average computational time of the proposed approach was only 2.335 seconds, which outperformed other segmentation algorithms with 0.8125 dice ratio and 0.5253 precision.&lt;/P&gt;
Data Association for Multi-Object Tracking via Deep Neural Networks

With recent advances in object detection, the tracking-by-detection method has become mainstream for multi-object tracking in computer vision. The tracking-by-detection scheme necessarily has to resolve a problem of data association between existing tracks and newly received detections at each frame. In this paper, we propose a new deep neural network (DNN) architecture that can solve the data association problem with a variable number of both tracks and detections including false positives. The proposed network consists of two parts: encoder and decoder. The encoder is the fully connected network with several layers that take bounding boxes of both detection and track-history as inputs. The outputs of the encoder are sequentially fed into the decoder which is composed of the bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks with a projection layer. The final output of the proposed network is an association matrix that reflects matching scores between tracks and detections. To train the network, we generate training samples using the annotation of Stanford Drone Dataset (SDD). The experiment results show that the proposed network achieves considerably high recall and precision rate as the binary classifier for the assignment tasks. We apply our network to track multiple objects on real-world datasets and evaluate the tracking performance. The performance of our tracker outperforms previous works based on DNN and comparable to other state-of-the-art methods.
Dynamic Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling Technique-Based Rotation Forest for the Classification of Imbalanced Hyperspectral Data

Rotation forest (RoF) is a powerful ensemble classifier and has attracted substantial attention due to its performance in hyperspectral data classification. Multi-class imbalance learning is one of the biggest challenges in machine learning and remote sensing. The standard technique for constructing RoF ensemble tends to increase the overall accuracy; RoF has difficulty to sufficiently recognize the minority class. This paper proposes a novel dynamic SMOTE (synthetic minority oversampling technique)-based RoF algorithm for the multi-class imbalance problem. The main idea of the proposed method is to dynamically balance the class distribution before building each rotation decision tree. A resampling rate is set in each iteration (ranging from 10% in the first iteration to 100% in the last) and this ratio defines the number of minority class instances randomly resampled (with replacement) from the original dataset in each iteration. The rest of the minority class instances are generated by the SMOTE method. The reported results on three real hyperspectral datasets show that the proposed method can get better performance than random forest, RoF, and some popular data sampling methods.
Statistical Shape Models: Understanding and Mastering Variation in Anatomy

In our chapter we are describing how to reconstruct three-dimensional anatomy from medical image data and how to build Statistical 3D Shape Models out of many such reconstructions yielding a new kind of anatomy that not only allows quantitative analysis of anatomical variation but also a visual exploration and educational visualization. Future digital anatomy atlases will not only show a static (average) anatomy but also its normal or pathological variation in three or even four dimensions, hence, illustrating growth and/or disease progression. Statistical Shape Models (SSMs) are geometric models that describe a collection of semantically similar objects in a very compact way. SSMs represent an average shape of many three-dimensional objects as well as their variation in shape. The creation of SSMs requires a correspondence mapping, which can be achieved e.g. by parameterization with a respective sampling. If a corresponding parameterization over all shapes can be established, variation between individual shape characteristics can be mathematically investigated. We will explain what Statistical Shape Models are and how they are constructed. Extensions of Statistical Shape Models will be motivated for articulated coupled structures. In addition to shape also the appearance of objects will be integrated into the concept. Appearance is a visual feature independent of shape that depends on observers or imaging techniques. Typical appearances are for instance the color and intensity of a visual surface of an object under particular lighting conditions, or measurements of material properties with computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). A combination of (articulated) Statistical Shape Models with statistical models of appearance lead to articulated Statistical Shape and Appearance Models (a-SSAMs). After giving various examples of SSMs for human organs, skeletal structures, faces, and bodies, we will shortly describe clinical applications where such models have been successfully employed. Statistical Shape Models are the foundation for the analysis of anatomical cohort data, where characteristic shapes are correlated to demographic or epidemiologic data. SSMs consisting of several thousands of objects offer, in combination with statistical methods or machine learning techniques, the possibility to identify characteristic clusters, thus being the foundation for advanced diagnostic disease scoring.
Gate Decorator: Global Filter Pruning Method for Accelerating Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Filter pruning is one of the most effective ways to accelerate and compress convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this work, we propose a global filter pruning algorithm called Gate Decorator, which transforms a vanilla CNN module by multiplying its output by the channel-wise scaling factors (i.e. gate). When the scaling factor is set to zero, it is equivalent to removing the corresponding filter. We use Taylor expansion to estimate the change in the loss function caused by setting the scaling factor to zero and use the estimation for the global filter importance ranking. Then we prune the network by removing those unimportant filters. After pruning, we merge all the scaling factors into its original module, so no special operations or structures are introduced. Moreover, we propose an iterative pruning framework called Tick-Tock to improve pruning accuracy. The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches. For example, we achieve the state-of-the-art pruning ratio on ResNet-56 by reducing 70% FLOPs without noticeable loss in accuracy. For ResNet-50 on ImageNet, our pruned model with 40% FLOPs reduction outperforms the baseline model by 0.31% in top-1 accuracy. Various datasets are used, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, CUB-200, ImageNet ILSVRC-12 and PASCAL VOC 2011.
Liquid based-cytology Pap smear dataset for automated multi-class diagnosis of pre-cancerous and cervical cancer lesions

While a publicly available benchmark dataset provides a base for the development of new algorithms and comparison of results, hospital-based data collected from the real-world clinical setup is also very important in AI-based medical research for automated disease diagnosis, prediction or classifications as per standard protocol. Primary data must be constantly updated so that the developed algorithms achieve as much accuracy as possible in the regional context. This dataset would support research work related to image segmentation and final classification for a complete decision support system (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tice.2020.101347) [1]. Liquid-based cytology (LBC) is one of the cervical screening tests. The repository consists of a total of 963 LBC images sub-divided into four sets representing the four classes: NILM, LSIL, HSIL, and SCC. It comprises pre-cancerous and cancerous lesions related to cervical cancer as per standards under The Bethesda System (TBS). The images were captured in 40x magnification using Leica ICC50 HD microscope collected with due consent from 460 patients visiting the O&G department of the public hospital with various gynaecological problems. The images were then viewed and categorized by experts of the pathology department.
Automatic ischemic stroke lesion segmentation from computed tomography perfusion images by image synthesis and attention-based deep neural networks

Ischemic stroke lesion segmentation from Computed Tomography Perfusion (CTP) images is important for accurate diagnosis of stroke in acute care units. However, it is challenged by low image contrast and resolution of the perfusion parameter maps, in addition to the complex appearance of the lesion. To deal with this problem, we propose a novel framework based on synthesized pseudo Diffusion-Weighted Imaging (DWI) from perfusion parameter maps to obtain better image quality for more accurate segmentation. Our framework consists of three components based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and is trained end-to-end. First, a feature extractor is used to obtain both a low-level and high-level compact representation of the raw spatiotemporal Computed Tomography Angiography (CTA) images. Second, a pseudo DWI generator takes as input the concatenation of CTP perfusion parameter maps and our extracted features to obtain the synthesized pseudo DWI. To achieve better synthesis quality, we propose a hybrid loss function that pays more attention to lesion regions and encourages high-level contextual consistency. Finally, we segment the lesion region from the synthesized pseudo DWI, where the segmentation network is based on switchable normalization and channel calibration for better performance. Experimental results showed that our framework achieved the top performance on ISLES 2018 challenge and: 1) our method using synthesized pseudo DWI outperformed methods segmenting the lesion from perfusion parameter maps directly; 2) the feature extractor exploiting additional spatiotemporal CTA images led to better synthesized pseudo DWI quality and higher segmentation accuracy; and 3) the proposed loss functions and network structure improved the pseudo DWI synthesis and lesion segmentation performance.
Effect of Variability on Cronbach Alpha Reliability in Research Practice

This study aims to describe the effects of variability through data simulation to determine which aspect of variability that maximizes coefficient of Cronbach Alpha reliability. Cronbach Alpha is widely used for estimation of reliability, in recent still. This study served a conceptual and practical simulation for estimating the profound aspect of Cronbach Alpha coefficient relating to the variability of the data. This study carried out with data simulated using the rand between method by Microsoft Excel then simulate different categorical data responses to different range of items by manipulating sample size, range, number of items, variance and standard deviation. The results show that number of variance and standard deviation of data had the most profound aspect of Cronbach Alpha's reliability other than range. The increasing number on some aspect shows that standard deviation and variance has the stability to shows the positive correlation with the coefficient of Cronbach Alpha reliability other than range.