Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Unsupervised Salient Object Detection with Spectral Cluster Voting

In this paper, we tackle the challenging task of unsupervised salient object detection (SOD) by leveraging spectral clustering on self-supervised features. We make the following contributions: (i) We revisit spectral clustering and demonstrate its potential to group the pixels of salient objects across various self-supervised features, e.g., Mo-Cov2, SwAV, and DINO; (ii) Given mask proposals from multiple applications of spectral clustering on image features computed from different self-supervised models, we propose a simple but effective winner-takes-all voting mechanism for selecting the salient masks, leveraging object priors based on framing and distinctiveness; (iii) Using the selected object segmentation as pseudo groundtruth masks, we train a salient object detector, termed SELF-MASK, which outperforms prior approaches on three un-supervised SOD benchmarks. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/NoelShin/selfmask.
Weakly Supervised Object Localization as Domain Adaption

Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) focuses on localizing objects only with the supervision of image-level classification masks. Most previous WSOL methods follow the classification activation map (CAM) that localizes objects based on the classification structure with the multi-instance learning (MIL) mechanism. However, the MIL mechanism makes CAM only activate discriminative object parts rather than the whole object, weakening its performance for localizing objects. To avoid this problem, this work provides a novel perspective that models WSOL as a domain adaption (DA) task, where the score estimator trained on the source/image domain is tested on the target/pixel domain to locate objects. Under this perspective, a DA-WSOL pipeline is designed to better engage DA approaches into WSOL to enhance localization performance. It utilizes a proposed target sampling strategy to select different types of target samples. Based on these types of target samples, domain adaption localization (DAL) loss is elaborated. It aligns the feature distribution between the two domains by DA and makes the estimator perceive target domain cues by Universum regularization. Experiments show that our pipeline outperforms SOTA methods on multi benchmarks. Code are released at https://github.com/zh460045050/DA-WSOL_CVPR2022.
When BERT Meets Quantum Temporal Convolution Learning for Text Classification in Heterogeneous Computing

The rapid development of quantum computing has demonstrated many unique characteristics of quantum advantages, such as richer feature representation and more secured protection on model parameters. This work proposes a vertical federated learning architecture based on variational quantum circuits to demonstrate the competitive performance of a quantum-enhanced pre-trained BERT model for text classification. In particular, our proposed hybrid classical-quantum model consists of a novel random quantum temporal convolution (QTC) learning framework replacing some layers in the BERT-based decoder. Our experiments on intent classification show that our proposed BERT-QTC model attains competitive experimental results in the Snips and ATIS spoken language datasets. Particularly, the BERT-QTC boosts the performance of the existing quantum circuit-based language model in two text classification datasets by 1.57% and 1.52% relative improvements. Furthermore, BERT-QTC can be feasibly deployed on both existing commercial-accessible quantum computation hardware and CPU-based interface for ensuring data isolation.
Cultivating proactive information security behavior and individual creativity: The role of human relations culture and IT use governance

This study developed the concept of proactive information security behavior and examined its connections with individual creativity and two organizational context factors: human relations culture (values and beliefs that promote participation and autonomy in decision-making) and IT use governance. Reliability and validity of this construct were tested with survey data. Findings of this study support its positive relationship with individual creativity, human relations culture, and IT use governance, and show partial mediation effects of individual creativity on the relationships between human relations culture and IT use governance, and proactive information security behavior. Theoretical and practice implications are discussed.
A survey of active and passive concept drift handling methods

Abstract At present, concept drift in the nonstationary data stream is showing trends with different speeds and different degrees of severity, which has brought great challenges to many fields like data mining and machine learning. In the past two decades, a lot of methods dedicated to handling concept drift in the nonstationary data stream have emerged. A novel perspective is proposed to classify these methods, and the current concept drift handling methods are comprehensively explained from the active handling methods and the passive handling methods. In particular, active handling methods are analyzed from the perspective of handling one specific type of concept drift and handling multiple types of concept drift, and passive handling methods are analyzed from the perspective of single learner and ensemble learning. Many concept drift handling methods in this survey are analyzed and summarized in terms of the comparing algorithms, learning model, applicable drift type, advantages, and disadvantages of the algorithms. Finally, further research directions are given, including the active and passive mixing methods, class imbalance, the existence of novel class in the data stream, and the noise in the data stream.
Genetic-GNN: Evolutionary architecture search for Graph Neural Networks

Neural architecture search (NAS) has seen significant attention throughout the computational intelligence research community and has pushed forward the state-of-the-art of many neural models to address grid-like data such as texts and images. However, little work has been done on Graph Neural Network (GNN) models dedicated to unstructured network data. Given the huge number of choices and combinations of components such as aggregators and activation functions, determining the suitable GNN model for a specific problem normally necessitates tremendous expert knowledge and laborious trials. In addition, the moderate change of hyperparameters such as the learning rate and dropout rate would dramatically impact the learning capacity of a GNN model. In this paper, we propose a novel framework through the evolution of individual models in a large GNN architecture searching space. Instead of simply optimizing the model structures, an alternating evolution process is performed between GNN model structures and hyperparameters to dynamically approach the optimal fit of each other. Experiments and validations demonstrate that evolutionary NAS is capable of matching existing state-of-the-art reinforcement learning methods for both transductive and inductive graph representation learning and node classification.
A motion blur QR code identification algorithm based on feature extracting and improved adaptive thresholding

Motion blur can easily affect the quality of images. For example, Quick Response (QR) code is hard to be identified with severe motion blur caused by camera shaking or object moving. In this paper, a motion blur QR code identification algorithm based on feature extraction and improved adaptive thresholding is proposed. First, this work designs a feature extraction framework using a deep convolutional network for motion deblurring. The framework consists of a basic end-to-end network for feature extraction, an encoder-decoder structure for increasing training feasibility and several ResBlocks for producing large receptive fields. Then an improved adaptive thresholding method is used to avoid influence caused by uneven illumination. Finally, the proposed algorithm is compared with several recent methods on a dataset including QR code images influenced by both motion blur and uneven illumination. Experimental results demonstrate that the processing time and identification accuracy of the proposed algorithm are improved in executing motion blur QR code identification missions compared with other competing methods.
Dual-channel cascade pose estimation network trained on infrared thermal image and groundtruth annotation for real-time gait measurement

Real-time spatiotemporal parameter measurement for gait analysis is challenging. Previous techniques for 3D motion analysis, such as inertial measurement units, marker based motion analysis or the use of depth cameras, require expensive equipment, highly skilled staff and limits feasibility for sustainable applications. In this paper a dual-channel cascaded network to perform contactless real-time 3D human pose estimation using a single infrared thermal video as an input is proposed. An algorithm to calculate gait spatiotemporal parameters is presented by tracking estimated joint locations. Additionally, a training dataset composed of infrared thermal images and groundtruth annotations has been developed. The annotation represents a set of 3D joint locations from infrared optical trackers, which is considered to be the gold standard in clinical applications. On the proposed dataset, our pose estimation framework achieved a 3D human pose mean error of below 21 mm and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The results reveal that the proposed system achieves competitive skeleton tracking performance on par with the other motion capture devices and exhibited good agreement with a marker-based three-dimensional motion analysis system (3DMA) over a range of spatiotemporal parameters. Moreover, the process is shown to distinguish differences in over-ground gait parameters of older adults with and without Hemiplegia's disease. We believe that the proposed approaches can measure selected spatiotemporal gait parameters and could be effectively used in clinical or home settings.
COVID-19 personal health mention detection from tweets using dual convolutional neural network

Twitter offers extensive and valuable information on the spread of COVID-19 and the current state of public health. Mining tweets could be an important supplement for public health departments in monitoring the status of COVID-19 in a timely manner and taking the appropriate actions to minimize its impact. Identifying personal health mentions (PHM) is the first step of social media public health surveillance. It aims to identify whether a person's health condition is mentioned in a tweet, and it serves as a crucial method in tracking pandemic conditions in real time. However, social media texts contain noise, many creative and novel phrases, sarcastic emoji expressions, and misspellings. In addition, the class imbalance issue is usually very serious. To address these challenges, we built a COVID-19 PHM dataset containing more than 11,000 annotated tweets, and we proposed a dual convolutional neural network (CNN) framework using this dataset. An auxiliary CNN in the dual CNN structure provides supplemental information for the primary CNN in order to detect PHMs from tweets more effectively. The experiment shows that the proposed structure could alleviate the effect of class imbalance and could achieve promising results. This automated approach could monitor public health in real time and save disease-prevention departments from the tedious manual work in public health surveillance.
Real-Time Face Mask Detection to Ensure COVID-19 Precautionary Measures in the Developing Countries

Recently, the rapid transmission of Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) is causing a significant health crisis worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) issued several guidelines for protection against the spreading of COVID-19. According to the WHO, the most effective preventive measure against COVID-19 is wearing a mask in public and crowded areas. It is quite difficult to manually monitor and determine people with masks and no masks. In this paper, different deep learning architectures were used for better results evaluations. After extensive experimentation, we selected a custom model having the best performance to identify whether people wear a face mask or not and allowing an easy deployment on a small device such as a Jetson Nano. The experimental evaluation is performed on the custom dataset that is developed from the website (See data collection section) after applying different masks on those images. The proposed model in comparison with other methods produced higher accuracy (99% for training accuracy and 99% for validation accuracy). Moreover, the proposed method can be deployed on resource-constrained devices.
Improving imbalanced classification using near-miss instances

The class imbalance is a major issue in classification, i.e., the sample size of a rare class (positive) is often a performance bottleneck. In real-world situations, however, “near-miss” positive instances, i.e., negative but nearly-positive instances, are sometimes plentiful. For example, natural disasters such as floods are rare, while there are relatively plentiful near-miss cases where actual floods did not occur but the water level approached the bank height. We show that even when the true positive cases are quite limited, such as in disaster forecasting, the accuracy can be improved by obtaining refined label-like side-information “positivity” (e.g., the water level of the river) to distinguish near-miss cases from other negatives. Conventional cost-sensitive classification cannot utilize such side-information, and the small size of the positive sample causes high estimation variance. Our approach is in line with learning using privileged information (LUPI), which exploits side-information for training without predicting the side-information itself. We theoretically prove that our method reduces the estimation variance, provided that near-miss positive instances are plentiful, in exchange for additional bias. Results of extensive experiments demonstrate that our method tends to outperform or compares favorably to existing approaches.
A touch-based multimodal and cryptographic bio-human–machine interface

The awareness of individuals’ biological status is critical for creating interactive and adaptive environments that can actively assist the users to achieve optimal outcomes. Accordingly, specialized human–machine interfaces—equipped with bioperception and interpretation capabilities—are required. To this end, we devised a multimodal cryptographic bio-human–machine interface (CB-HMI), which seamlessly translates the user’s touch-based entries into encrypted biochemical, biophysical, and biometric indices. As its central component, the CB-HMI features thin hydrogel-coated chemical sensors and inference algorithms to noninvasively and inconspicuously acquire biochemical indices such as circulating molecules that partition onto the skin (here, ethanol and acetaminophen). Additionally, the CB-HMI hosts physical sensors and associated algorithms to simultaneously acquire the user’s heart rate, blood oxygen level, and fingerprint minutiae pattern. Supported by human subject studies, we demonstrated the CB-HMI’s capability in terms of acquiring physiologically relevant readouts of target bioindices, as well as user-identifying and biometrically encrypting/decrypting these indices in situ (leveraging the fingerprint feature). By upgrading the common surrounding objects with the CB-HMI, we created interactive solutions for driving safety and medication use. Specifically, we demonstrated a vehicle-activation system and a medication-dispensing system, where the integrated CB-HMI uniquely enabled user bioauthentication (on the basis of the user’s biological state and identity) prior to rendering the intended services. Harnessing the levels of bioperception achieved by the CB-HMI and other intelligent HMIs, we can equip our surroundings with a comprehensive and deep awareness of individuals’ psychophysiological state and needs.
Facing the heat: Political instability and firm new product innovation in sub‐Saharan Africa

Abstract We examine how political instability (PI) affects firms' product innovation and the strategies that firms can employ in response to PI. We argue that while higher levels of PI influence firms' innovation negatively, greater international exposure (through foreign ownership and exporting) can help firms partly overcome this external challenge and innovate. We test these predictions using a dataset of 3000 manufacturing firms across 15 countries from Sub‐Saharan Africa. The empirical results confirm a robust and negative effect of PI on firms' product innovation through several mechanisms. They also suggest that all firms in a country, regardless of ownership structure, are equally affected by PI. Finally, higher levels of exporting weaken the deleterious effects of PI on innovation for both domestic and foreign firms. Our study offers insights into the barriers of innovation in emerging economies and explicates why some firms are more innovative than others in politically unstable contexts.
Solar radiation prediction using improved soft computing models for semi-arid, slightly-arid and humid climates

In this research, monthly solar radiation is predicted in semi-dry, dry, and wet climates. Adaptive neurofuzzy interface system (ANFIS), radial basis function neural network (RBFNN), and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) models are used for predicting solar radiation (SR). Grasshopper algorithm (GOA) is utilized to improve the performance of ANFIS, RBFNN, and MLP models. Three stations in Iran, namely Rasht (humid climate), Yazd (semi-arid) and Tehran (slightly arid), are considered as the case studies. The accuracy of GOA is benchmarked against particle swarm optimization (PSO) and salp swarm algorithm (SSA). The results reveal that the best-input combination is relative humidity, wind speed, rainfall, and temperature at these three stations. A comprehensive study is performed to select the best-input combination. The main contribution of paper is to create new hybrid ANFIS models for predicting monthly solar radiation in different climates. Besides, effects of different parameters are comprehensively investigated on solar radiation. This study indicates that temperature is the most effective parameter for estimating SR in dry and semi-dry climate. It is found that rainfall plays a key role for estimating SR in a wet region. The main finding of this paper is that the determination of the most suitable input scenario for predicting SR is an important issue because different input scenarios in different climates provide different performances. Besides, the use of a robust optimization algorithm as a training method is a significant step of the modeling process of SR. Results indicate that mean absolute error (MAE) of ANFIS-GOA is 3.8% and 8.9% less in comparison with that of MLP-GOA and RBFNN-GOA, respectively during the training stage at Yazd station. Besides, MAE of ANFIS-GOA is 26% and 31% less than that of MLP-GOA and RBFNN-GOA, respectively during the training stage at Tehran station. Results indicate that NSE values of ANFIS-GOA, ANFIS-SSA, ANFIS-PSO, and ANFIS models are 0.94, 0.88, 0.84, and 0.79, respectively during the testing stage at Rasht station. It is found that ANFIS-GOA attains higher accuracy in predicting SR under different climates.
Exploring applications of blockchain technology for Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 or the Fourth Industrial Revolution refers to the development of the functioning of modern factories to achieve better performance, end to end connectivity, lower cost and higher quality. It aims at achieving interconnectivity and automation using technologies of the Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics or Robotics. However, better connectivity and improved automation come with their challenges. Trust and reliability, enhancing transparency, product traceability, developing an efficient supply chain, storing and sharing the transactional data securely and certification for quality compliance are among them. Due to its property of decentralization, immutability, authenticity and transparency, blockchain technology has been in discussion for various industrial applications. This paper explores how blockchain technology is applicable in various Industry 4.0 applications and how it can effectively tackle the issues faced by them. Firstly, the fundamentals of Industry 4.0 are discussed. Then, the illustration of how blockchain works and why and how it can contribute in Industry 4.0 is given. The paper later mentions the challenges of Industry 4.0 and Blockchain technology-based solutions to solve them. Finally, the challenges of using blockchain technology for the growth of Industry 4.0 are also discussed.
Reducing Resource and Energy Consumption in Cryptocurrency Mining by using both Proof-of-Stake Algorithm and Renewable Energy

Cryptocurrency is a relatively new financial sector combination of encryption and currency that is gaining popularity throughout the world. The renewable energy business is likely to be transformed by blockchain technologies. However, no study has been conducted on the use of digital currency. As a result, the focus of this study is on a number of mining potency tests, notably for dogecoin mining. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have received a lot of attention in recent years. Mining generates bitcoins as a fee for corroboratory dealings. This methodology requires a large quantity of process power and electricity. Mining used to be done on personal computers, but now specialized equipment has been designed to boost the mining pace while simultaneously increasing power consumption. As a result, the goal of this study is to look at the influence of hardware efficiency and determine if changing the algorithm to Proof-of-Stake (POS) and using renewable energy as a source of power for mining cryptocurrency will reduce the consumption, improve the mining process, and increase mining profit. During this study, mineworker performance and therefore the profitableness of mining cryptocurrency with the assistance of solar renewable energy, because it is the main supply for mining dogecoin, and we even went through the method of mining dogecoin with the assistance of Nvidia RTX 3080, which could be a non-LHR card, have been performed with and without overclocking the GPU. Considering renewable energy because the supply for mining helps the miners and therefore the setting.
Automatically detecting groups using locality-sensitive hashing in group recommendations

Recommender systems provide personalized content from various choices by mining users’ past preferences. Recommendation helps to overcome the information overload problem as the available alternatives consume a large amount of data. In some applications, a group of people are involved in the process of generating a recommendation. This paper focuses on “automatically detected groups” formation for order and flexible preferences in group recommendation using locality-sensitive hashing. The MinHash technique is applied on a characteristic matrix to generate the signature matrix. The signature matrix is the reduced representation of the characteristic matrix and preserves the Jaccard similarity to a great extent. Locality-sensitive hashing is applied on the signature matrix to determine similar users efficiently. Similar users will be the members of an automatically identified group. Therefore, the group members are maximally satisfied with recommended items. This work also studies the performance of benchmark clustering approaches in group formation. We experimented on real-world datasets and found that the proposed models to identify communities in group recommendation maximizes consensus among users in a group.