Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
VolumeNet: A Lightweight Parallel Network for Super-Resolution of MR and CT Volumetric Data

Deep learning-based super-resolution (SR) techniques have generally achieved excellent performance in the computer vision field. Recently, it has been proven that three-dimensional (3D) SR for medical volumetric data delivers better visual results than conventional two-dimensional (2D) processing. However, deepening and widening 3D networks increases training difficulty significantly due to the large number of parameters and small number of training samples. Thus, we propose a 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) for SR of medical volumetric data called ParallelNet using parallel connections. We construct a parallel connection structure based on the group convolution and feature aggregation to build a 3D CNN that is as wide as possible with few parameters. As a result, the model thoroughly learns more feature maps with larger receptive fields. In addition, to further improve accuracy, we present an efficient version of ParallelNet (called VolumeNet), which reduces the number of parameters and deepens ParallelNet using a proposed lightweight building block module called the Queue module. Unlike most lightweight CNNs based on depthwise convolutions, the Queue module is primarily constructed using separable 2D cross-channel convolutions. As a result, the number of network parameters and computational complexity can be reduced significantly while maintaining accuracy due to full channel fusion. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed VolumeNet significantly reduces the number of model parameters and achieves high precision results compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Design of face detection and recognition system to monitor students during online examinations using Machine Learning algorithms

Today's pandemic situation has transformed the way of educating a student. Education is undertaken remotely through online platforms. In addition to the way the online course contents and online teaching, it has also changed the way of assessments. In online education, monitoring the attendance of the students is very important as the presence of students is part of a good assessment for teaching and learning. Educational institutions have adopting online examination portals for the assessments of the students. These portals make use of face recognition techniques to monitor the activities of the students and identify the malpractice done by them. This is done by capturing the students' activities through a web camera and analyzing their gestures and postures. Image processing algorithms are widely used in the literature to perform face recognition. Despite the progress made to improve the performance of face detection systems, there are issues such as variations in human facial appearance like varying lighting condition, noise in face images, scale, pose etc., that blocks the progress to reach human level accuracy. The aim of this study is to increase the accuracy of the existing face recognition systems by making use of SVM and Eigenface algorithms. In this project, an approach similar to Eigenface is used for extracting facial features through facial vectors and the datasets are trained using Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm to perform face classification and detection. This ensures that the face recognition can be faster and be used for online exam monitoring.
Lightweight Image Super-Resolution via Weighted Multi-Scale Residual Network

The tradeoff between efficiency and model size of the convolutional neural network (CNN) is an essential issue for applications of CNN-based algorithms to diverse real-world tasks. Although deep learning-based methods have achieved significant improvements in image super-resolution (SR), current CNN-based techniques mainly contain massive parameters and a high computational complexity, limiting their practical applications. In this paper, we present a fast and lightweight framework, named weighted multi-scale residual network (WMRN), for a better tradeoff between SR performance and computational efficiency. With the modified residual structure, depthwise separable convolutions (DS Convs) are employed to improve convolutional operations' efficiency. Furthermore, several weighted multi-scale residual blocks (WMRBs) are stacked to enhance the multi-scale representation capability. In the reconstruction subnetwork, a group of Conv layers are introduced to filter feature maps to reconstruct the final high-quality image. Extensive experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed model, and the comparative results with several state-of-the-art algorithms demonstrate the effectiveness of WMRN.
SRGAT: Single Image Super-Resolution With Graph Attention Network

Deep neural networks have demonstrated remarkable reconstruction for single-image super-resolution (SISR). However, most existing CNN-based SISR methods directly learn the relation between low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) images, neglecting to explore the recurrence of internal patches, hence hindering the representational power of CNNs. In this paper, we propose a novel single image Super-Resolution network based on Graph ATtention network (SRGAT) to make full use of the internal patch-recurrence in a natural image. The proposed model employs a feature mapping block with a recurrent structure to refine low-level representations with high-level information. Especifically, the feature mapping block contains a parallel graph similarity branch and a content branch, where the graph similarity branch aims at exploiting the similarity and symmetry across different image patches in low-resolution feature space and provides additional priors for the content branch to enhance texture details. Specifically, we consider the internal patch-recurrence of an image by constructing a graph network on image feature patches. In this way, the information from neighboring patches can be interacted using graph attention network (GAT) to help it recover additional textures, which complements the textures learned from the content branch. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art super-resolution methods.
Ambient Intelligence Based on IoT for Assisting People with Alzheimer’s Disease Through Context Histories

New Internet of Things (IoT) applications are enabling the development of projects that help with monitoring people with different diseases in their daily lives. Alzheimer’s is a disease that affects neurological functions and needs support to maintain maximum independence and security of patients during this stage of life, as the cure and reversal of symptoms have not yet been discovered. The IoT-based monitoring system provides the caregivers’ support in monitoring people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). This paper presents an ontology-based computational model that receives physiological data from external IoT applications, allowing identification of potentially dangerous behaviors for patients with AD. The main scientific contribution of this work is the specification of a model focusing on Alzheimer’s disease using the analysis of context histories and context prediction, which, considering the state of the art, is the only one that uses analysis of context histories to perform predictions. In this research, we also propose a simulator to generate activities of the daily life of patients, allowing the creation of data sets. These data sets were used to evaluate the contributions of the model and were generated according to the standardization of the ontology. The simulator generated 1026 scenarios applied to guide the predictions, which achieved average accurary of 97.44%. The experiments also allowed the learning of 20 relevant lessons on technological, medical, and methodological aspects that are recorded in this article.
Self-supervised Representation Learning for Astronomical Images

Abstract Sky surveys are the largest data generators in astronomy, making automated tools for extracting meaningful scientific information an absolute necessity. We show that, without the need for labels, self-supervised learning recovers representations of sky survey images that are semantically useful for a variety of scientific tasks. These representations can be directly used as features, or fine-tuned, to outperform supervised methods trained only on labeled data. We apply a contrastive learning framework on multiband galaxy photometry from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), to learn image representations. We then use them for galaxy morphology classification and fine-tune them for photometric redshift estimation, using labels from the Galaxy Zoo 2 data set and SDSS spectroscopy. In both downstream tasks, using the same learned representations, we outperform the supervised state-of-the-art results, and we show that our approach can achieve the accuracy of supervised models while using 2–4 times fewer labels for training. The codes, trained models, and data can be found at https://portal.nersc.gov/project/dasrepo/self-supervised-learning-sdss .
A Metaheuristic Framework for Dynamic Virtual Machine Allocation With Optimized Task Scheduling in Cloud Data Centers

Optimal allocation of virtual machines in a cloud computing environment for user-submitted tasks is a challenging task. Finding an optimal task scheduling solution is considered as NP-hard problem specifically for large task sizes in the cloud environment. The best solution involves scheduling the tasks to virtual machines data centre while minimizing the essential, influential and cost effective parameters such as energy usage, makespan and cost. In this direction, this work presents a metaheuristic framework called MDVMA for dynamic virtual machine allocation with optimized task scheduling in a cloud computing environment. The MDVMA focuses on developing a multi-objective scheduling method using non dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA)-II algorithm-based metaheuristic algorithm for optimizing task scheduling with the aim of minimizing energy usage, makespan and cost simultaneously to provide trade-off to the cloud service providers as per their requirements. To evaluate the performance of the MDVMA approach, we compared the performances of two different scenarios of benchmark real-world workload data sets using the existing approaches, namely, Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm, Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that optimizing task scheduling leads to better overall results in terms of minimizing energy usage, makespan and cost of the cloud data center. Finally, the paper concludes metaheuristic algorithms as a promising method for task scheduling in a cloud computing environment.
CCPrune: Collaborative channel pruning for learning compact convolutional networks

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is difficult to deploy on resource-constrained devices due to its huge amount of computation. Channel pruning is an effective method to reduce the amount of computation and accelerate network inference. Most of channels pruning methods use statistics from a single structure (convolutional layer or batch normalization layer) of the sparse network to evaluate the importance of channels. The limitation of these methods is that it may often mistakenly delete the important channels. In view of this, we propose a novel method, namely Collaborative Channel Pruning (CCPrune), to evaluate the importance of channels, which combines the convolution layer weights and the BN layer scaling factors. The proposed method first introduces the regularization on the convolution layer weights and the BN layer scaling factors respectively. Then combine the weight of the convolutional layer and the scaling factor of the BN layer to evaluate the importance of the channel. Finally, it can delete the unimportant channels without reduces the performance of the model. The experimental results well demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. On CIFAR-10, it can reduce the FLOPs of VGG-19 by 85.50% while only slightly reducing the accuracy of the model, and it can reduce the FLOPs of Resnet-50 by 78.31% without reducing the accuracy of the model, respectively.
GlobeChain: An Interoperable Blockchain for Global Sharing of Healthcare Data—A COVID-19 Perspective

Contagious diseases are prevalent even in the current era of advanced technology.A uniformed initiative is required to build a reliable interactive information exchange service targeting vaccination data management and other medical services.The conventional data exchange mechanism is centralized, creating many vulnerable issues such as a single point failure, data leakage, access control, etc.This article introduces a Blockchain-based medical data-sharing framework (called GlobeChain) to overcome the technical challenges to handle the outbreak records.The challenges that might arise due to the proposed Blockchain-based framework are also presented as a future direction that grabs the proposal's effectiveness.& THE WHOLE WORLD is now battling against the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).The COVID-19 pandemic is spreading globally with different mutations. 1The information about the virus shedding patterns, compartmentalization, the quantity of viral shedding, mutated form, etc., are required for real-time sharing globally for optimal specimen collection and advanced
MOOD: Multi-level Out-of-distribution Detection

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential to prevent anomalous inputs from causing a model to fail during deployment. While improved OOD detection methods have emerged, they often rely on the final layer outputs and require a full feedforward pass for any given input. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, multi-level out-of-distribution detection (MOOD), which exploits intermediate classifier outputs for dynamic and efficient OOD inference. We explore and establish a direct relationship between the OOD data complexity and optimal exit level, and show that easy OOD examples can be effectively detected early without propagating to deeper layers. At each exit, the OOD examples can be distinguished through our proposed adjusted energy score, which is both empirically and theoretically suitable for networks with multiple classifiers. We extensively evaluate MOOD across 10 OOD datasets spanning a wide range of complexities. Experiments demonstrate that MOOD achieves up to 71.05% computational reduction in inference, while maintaining competitive OOD detection performance.
Imitation Learning With Stability and Safety Guarantees

A method is presented to learn neural network (NN) controllers with stability and safety guarantees through imitation learning (IL). Convex stability and safety conditions are derived for linear time-invariant systems with NN controllers by merging Lyapunov theory with local quadratic constraints to bound the activation functions in the NN. These conditions are incorporated in the IL process, which minimizes the IL loss, and maximizes the volume of the region of attraction associated with the NN controller simultaneously. An alternating direction method of multipliers based algorithm is proposed to solve the IL problem. The method is illustrated on a vehicle lateral control example.
Blockchain Technology and Sustainable Business Models: A Case Study of Devoleum

The lack of transparency along global supply chains poses challenges in the areas of fraud, pollution, human rights abuses, and inefficiencies. In this context, the blockchain has the potential to offer an unprecedented level of transparency, with a shared and decentralized database in which immutable and encrypted copies of information are stored on every node of the network. Using a single case study methodology, this paper investigates how blockchain technology can improve and facilitate sustainable business models. The aim of this paper is to understand how blockchain technology can drive the development of sustainable business models. Recent studies show the importance of sustainability perspectives for business models. The study was conducted by applying the CAOS (“Characteristic, Ambience, Organization, Start-up”) model to a start-up operating in the agri-food sector, not yet institutionalized, called Devoleum. The results indicate that blockchain technology can increase sustainability through realizing the traceability, security, and non-manipulability of information, which are particularly useful in the agri-food sector. Furthermore, the absence of intermediaries in blockchain technology contributes to reducing transaction costs and the time required to consolidate relations between the company and the environment. The limitations of this study must be identified in that the company is operational but not yet incorporated.
Understanding Data Accessibility for People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Using visualization requires people to read abstract visual imagery, estimate statistics, and retain information. However, people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) often process information differently, which may complicate connecting abstract visual information to real-world quantities. This population has traditionally been excluded from visualization design, and often has limited access to data related to their well being. We explore how visualizations may better serve this population. We identify three visualization design elements that may improve data accessibility: chart type, chart embellishment, and data continuity. We evaluate these elements with populations both with and without IDD, measuring accuracy and efficiency in a web-based online experiment with time series and proportion data. Our study identifies performance patterns and subjective preferences for people with IDD when reading common visualizations. These findings suggest possible solutions that may break the cognitive barriers caused by conventional design guidelines.
Comparison of metrics for the evaluation of medical segmentations using prostate MRI dataset

Nine previously proposed segmentation evaluation metrics, targeting medical relevance, accounting for holes, and added regions or differentiating over- and under-segmentation, were compared with 24 traditional metrics to identify those which better capture the requirements for clinical segmentation evaluation. Evaluation was first performed using 2D synthetic shapes to highlight features and pitfalls of the metrics with known ground truths (GTs) and machine segmentations (MSs). Clinical evaluation was then performed using publicly-available prostate images of 20 subjects with MSs generated by 3 different deep learning networks (DenseVNet, HighRes3DNet, and ScaleNet) and GTs drawn by 2 readers. The same readers also performed the 2D visual assessment of the MSs using a dual negative-positive grading of −5 to 5 to reflect over- and under-estimation. Nine metrics that correlated well with visual assessment were selected for further evaluation using 3 different network ranking methods - based on a single metric, normalizing the metric using 2 GTs, and ranking the network based on a metric then averaging, including leave-one-out evaluation. These metrics yielded consistent ranking with HighRes3DNet ranked first then DenseVNet and ScaleNet using all ranking methods. Relative volume difference yielded the best positivity-agreement and correlation with dual visual assessment, and thus is better for providing over- and under-estimation. Interclass Correlation yielded the strongest correlation with the absolute visual assessment (0–5). Symmetric-boundary dice consistently yielded good discrimination of the networks for all three ranking methods with relatively small variations within network. Good rank discrimination may be an additional metric feature required for better network performance evaluation.
Vinci: An Intelligent Graphic Design System for Generating Advertising Posters

Advertising posters are a commonly used form of information presentation to promote a product. Producing advertising posters often takes much time and effort of designers when confronted with abundant choices of design elements and layouts. This paper presents Vinci, an intelligent system that supports the automatic generation of advertising posters. Given the user-specified product image and taglines, Vinci uses a deep generative model to match the product image with a set of design elements and layouts for generating an aesthetic poster. The system also integrates online editing-feedback that supports users in editing the posters and updating the generated results with their design preference. Through a series of user studies and a Turing test, we found that Vinci can generate posters as good as human designers and that the online editing-feedback improves the efficiency in poster modification.
Program Comprehension and Code Complexity Metrics: An fMRI Study

Background: Researchers and practitioners have been using code complexity metrics for decades to predict how developers comprehend a program. While it is plausible and tempting to use code metrics for this purpose, their validity is debated, since they rely on simple code properties and rarely consider particularities of human cognition. Aims: We investigate whether and how code complexity metrics reflect difficulty of program comprehension. Method: We have conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study with 19 participants observing program comprehension of short code snippets at varying complexity levels. We dissected four classes of code complexity metrics and their relationship to neuronal, behavioral, and subjective correlates of program comprehension, overall analyzing more than 41 metrics. Results: While our data corroborate that complexity metrics can-to a limited degree-explain programmers' cognition in program comprehension, fMRI allowed us to gain insights into why some code properties are difficult to process. In particular, a code's textual size drives programmers' attention, and vocabulary size burdens programmers' working memory. Conclusion: Our results provide neuro-scientific evidence supporting warnings of prior research questioning the validity of code complexity metrics and pin down factors relevant to program comprehension. Future Work: We outline several follow-up experiments investigating fine-grained effects of code complexity and describe possible refinements to code complexity metrics.
Fragmentvc: Any-To-Any Voice Conversion by End-To-End Extracting and Fusing Fine-Grained Voice Fragments with Attention

Any-to-any voice conversion aims to convert the voice from and to any speakers even unseen during training, which is much more challenging compared to one-to-one or many-to-many tasks, but much more attractive in real-world scenarios. In this paper we proposed FragmentVC, in which the latent phonetic structure of the utterance from the source speaker is obtained from Wav2Vec 2.0, while the spectral features of the utterance(s) from the target speaker are obtained from log mel-spectrograms. By aligning the hidden structures of the two different feature spaces with a two-stage training process, FragmentVC is able to extract fine-grained voice fragments from the target speaker utterance(s) and fuse them into the desired utterance, all based on the attention mechanism of Transformer as verified with analysis on attention maps, and is accomplished end-to-end. This approach is trained with reconstruction loss only without any disentanglement considerations between content and speaker information and doesn't require parallel data. Objective evaluation based on speaker verification and subjective evaluation with MOS both showed that this approach outperformed SOTA approaches, such as AdaIN-VC and AutoVC.