Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
BiSeNet V3: Bilateral segmentation network with coordinate attention for real-time semantic segmentation

For the semantic segmentation task, spatial information and the receptive field are indispensable. For semantic segmentation to be practically applicable, it must have real-time inference speed. However, most of today’s methods almost choose to compromise the spatial resolution and low-level detail information, which leads to a significant decrease in accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new architecture based on Bilateral Segmentation Network (BiSeNet) called BiSeNet V3. It introduces a new feature refinement module to optimize the feature map and a feature fusion module to combine the features efficiently. An attention mechanism is introduced to assist the model in capturing contextual information. We also use edge detection to enhance features for boundaries. Extensive experiments on the Cityscapes dataset show that our proposed approach achieves an excellent performance between segmentation accuracy and inference speed. Specifically, for a 768 × 1536 input, BiSeNet V3 achieved 79.0% mIoU on the Cityscapes test set with a speed of 93.8 FPS on an NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti. For a 720 × 960 input, BiSeNet V3 achieved 76.6% mIoU on the CamVid dataset with a speed of 147.6 FPS on an NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti. The result is significantly better than the other methods.
Interaction between joining platform blockchain technology and channel encroachment for fresh agricultural product firms

Abstract In recent years, some e‐commerce platforms (e.g., JD.com), which allow firms to set up third‐party stores on them, have established their own blockchain technology and publicly provided blockchain technology to firms. Besides, source tracing of fresh agricultural products on blockchain is a concern for consumers. For firms selling fresh agricultural products, whether to join the platform blockchain technology to disclose product freshness and whether to set up third‐party stores on platforms are thorny problems. To research the interaction between joining the platform blockchain technology strategy and channel encroachment decision for fresh agricultural product firms, we consider four theoretical models. The main results demonstrate that whether firms set up third‐party stores on the platforms or not, their strategies of joining the platform blockchain technology are dependent on consumer's sensitivity to the freshness‐keeping effort level of fresh agricultural product, consumer's trust degree of freshness‐keeping effort level, and the unit blockchain operation cost. Besides, if firms set up third‐party stores, the willingness of joining the platform blockchain technology will increase. Firms’ channel encroachment willingness will also be affected by their joining the platform blockchain technology strategy. Moreover, when considering the fresh agricultural product supply chain, these main conclusions are still held.
Parameter Transfer for Quantum Approximate Optimization of Weighted MaxCut

Finding high-quality parameters is a central obstacle to using the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). Previous work partially addresses this issue for QAOA on unweighted MaxCut problems by leveraging similarities in the objective landscape among different problem instances. However, we show that the more general weighted MaxCut problem has significantly modified objective landscapes, with a proliferation of poor local optima. Our main contribution is a simple rescaling scheme that overcomes these deleterious effects of weights. We show that for a given QAOA depth, a single “typical” vector of QAOA parameters can be successfully transferred to weighted MaxCut instances. This transfer leads to a median decrease in the approximation ratio of only 2.0 percentage points relative to a considerably more expensive direct optimization on a dataset of 34,701 instances with up to 20 nodes and multiple weight distributions. This decrease can be reduced to 1.2 percentage points at the cost of only 10 additional QAOA circuit evaluations with parameters sampled from a pretrained metadistribution, or the transferred parameters can be used as a starting point for a single local optimization run to obtain approximation ratios equivalent to those achieved by exhaustive optimization in 96.35% of our cases.
A Survey on Consensus Protocols and Attacks on Blockchain Technology

In the current era, blockchain has approximately 30 consensus algorithms. This architecturally distributed database stores data in an encrypted form with multiple checks, including elliptical curve cryptography (ECC) and Merkle hash tree. Additionally, many researchers aim to implement a public key infrastructure (PKI) cryptography mechanism to boost the security of blockchain-based data management. However, the issue is that many of these are required for advanced cryptographic protocols. For all consensus protocols, security features are required to be discussed because these consensus algorithms have recently been attacked by address resolution protocols (ARP), distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), and sharding attacks in a permission-less blockchain. The existence of a byzantine adversary is perilous, and is involved in these ongoing attacks. Considering the above issues, we conducted an informative survey based on the consensus protocol attack on blockchain through the latest published article from IEEE, Springer, Elsevier, ACM, Willy, Hindawi, and other publishers. We incorporate various methods involved in blockchain. Our main intention is to gain clarity from earlier published articles to elaborate numerous key methods in terms of a survey article.
GIScience can facilitate the development of solar cities for energy transition

The energy transition is increasingly being discussed and implemented to cope with the growing environmental crisis. However, great challenges remain for effectively harvesting and utilizing solar energy in cities related to time and location-dependant supply and demand, which needs more accurate forecasting- and an in-depth understanding of the electricity production and dynamic balancing of the flexible energy supplies concerning the electricity market. To tackle this problem, this article discusses the development of solar cities over the past few decades and proposes a refined and enriched concept of a sustainable solar city with six integrated modules, namely, land surface solar irradiation, three-dimensional (3D) urban surfaces, spatiotemporal solar distribution on 3D urban surfaces, solar photovoltaic (PV) planning, solar PV penetration into different urban systems, and the consequent socio-economic and environmental impacts. In this context, Geographical Information Science (GIScience) demonstrates its potent capability in building the conceptualized solar city with a dynamic balance between power supply and demand over time and space, which includes the production of multi-sourced spatiotemporal big data, the development of spatiotemporal data modelling, analysing and optimization, and geo-visualization. To facilitate the development of such a solar city, this article from the GIScience perspective discusses the achievements and challenges of (i) the development of spatiotemporal big data used for solar farming, (ii) the estimation of solar PV potential on 3D urban surfaces, (iii) the penetration of distributed PV systems in digital cities that contains the effects of urban morphology on solar accessibility, optimization of PV systems for dynamic balancing between supply and demand, and PV penetration represented by the solar charging of urban mobility, and (iv) the interaction between PV systems and urban thermal environment. We suggest that GIScience is the foundation, while further development of GIS models is required to achieve the proposed sustainable solar city.
Relation-mining self-attention network for skeleton-based human action recognition

Modeling spatiotemporal global dependencies and dynamics of body joints are crucial to recognizing actions from 3D skeleton sequences. We propose a Relation-mining Self-Attention Network (RSA-Net) for skeleton-based human action recognition. The proposed RSA-Net is motivated by two important observations: (1) body joint relationships can be modeled independently as pairwise and unary to reduce the difficulty of action feature learning. (2) Computing action semantics and position information independently removes noisy correlations over heterogeneous embedding. The proposed RSA-Net contains pairwise self-attention, unary self-attention, and position embedding attention modules. The pairwise self-attention captures the relationship between every two body joints. The unary self-attention learns a general correlation features among one key joint over all other query joints. The position embedding attention module computes the correlation between action semantics and position information independently with separate projection matrices. Extensive evaluations are performed in the NTU-60, NTU-120, and UESTC datasets with CS, CV, CSet, and A-view evaluation benchmarks. The proposed RSA-Net outperforms existing transformer-based approaches and comparable results with state-of-the-art graph ConvNet methods. The source code is available in Github1.
Recent progress on coherent computation based on quantum squeezing

Abstract Squeezed vacuum state of light is an important concept of quantum optics which has an uncertainty reduction in a specific quadrature compared to the coherent vacuum state. The coherent Ising machines (CIMs) based on the squeezed state are capable of searching the ground state of the Ising model, which can be used to solve combinatorial optimization problems and have been experimentally demonstrated to have excellent computational performance. This review introduces the recent progress of a CIM hardware solver based on optical parametric oscillators, including the delayed optical path scheme and a measurement feedback scheme. Also, the basic principles, unique advantages, and potential challenges are described. We expect that the applications of large-scale CIM hardware solvers will have a huge impact on the acceleration of the computation power.
A comparative study of the predictive power of component-based approaches to structural equation modeling

Purpose Generalized structured component analysis (GSCA) and partial least squares path modeling (PLSPM) are two key component-based approaches to structural equation modeling that facilitate the analysis of theoretically established models in terms of both explanation and prediction. This study aims to offer a comparative evaluation of GSCA and PLSPM in a predictive modeling framework. Design/methodology/approach A simulation study compares the predictive performance of GSCA and PLSPM under various simulation conditions and different prediction types of correctly specified and misspecified models. Findings The results suggest that GSCA with reflective composite indicators (GSCA R ) is the most versatile approach. For observed prediction, which uses the component scores to generate prediction for the indicators, GSCA R performs slightly better than PLSPM with mode A. For operative prediction, which considers all parameter estimates to generate predictions, both methods perform equally well. GSCA with formative composite indicators and PLSPM with mode B generally lag behind the other methods. Research limitations/implications Future research may further assess the methods’ prediction precision, considering more experimental factors with a wider range of levels, including more extreme ones. Practical implications When prediction is the primary study aim, researchers should generally revert to GSCA R , considering its performance for observed and operative prediction together. Originality/value This research is the first to compare the relative efficacy of GSCA and PLSPM in terms of predictive power.
The coming of age of interpretable and explainable machine learning models

Machine-learning-based systems are now part of a wide array of real-world applications seamlessly embedded in the social realm. In the wake of this realization, strict legal regulations for these systems are currently being developed, addressing some of the risks they may pose. This is the coming of age of the concepts of interpretability and explainability in machine-learning-based data analysis, which can no longer be seen just as an academic research problem. In this paper, we discuss explainable and interpretable machine learning as post hoc and ante-hoc strategies to address regulatory restrictions and highlight several aspects related to them, including their evaluation and assessment and the legal boundaries of application.
Reservoir computing as digital twins for nonlinear dynamical systems

We articulate the design imperatives for machine learning based digital twins for nonlinear dynamical systems, which can be used to monitor the "health" of the system and anticipate future collapse. The fundamental requirement for digital twins of nonlinear dynamical systems is dynamical evolution: the digital twin must be able to evolve its dynamical state at the present time to the next time step without further state input-a requirement that reservoir computing naturally meets. We conduct extensive tests using prototypical systems from optics, ecology, and climate, where the respective specific examples are a chaotic CO2 laser system, a model of phytoplankton subject to seasonality, and the Lorenz-96 climate network. We demonstrate that, with a single or parallel reservoir computer, the digital twins are capable of a variety of challenging forecasting and monitoring tasks. Our digital twin has the following capabilities: (1) extrapolating the dynamics of the target system to predict how it may respond to a changing dynamical environment, e.g., a driving signal that it has never experienced before, (2) making continual forecasting and monitoring with sparse real-time updates under non-stationary external driving, (3) inferring hidden variables in the target system and accurately reproducing/predicting their dynamical evolution, (4) adapting to external driving of different waveform, and (5) extrapolating the global bifurcation behaviors to network systems of different sizes. These features make our digital twins appealing in applications, such as monitoring the health of critical systems and forecasting their potential collapse induced by environmental changes or perturbations. Such systems can be an infrastructure, an ecosystem, or a regional climate system.
A Survey of Important Issues in Quantum Computing and Communications

Driven by the rapid progress in quantum hardware, recent years have witnessed a furious race for quantum technologies in both academia and industry. Universal quantum computers have supported up to hundreds of qubits, while the scale of quantum annealers has reached three orders of magnitude (i.e., thousands of qubits). Quantum computing power keeps climbing. Race has consequently generated an overwhelming number of research papers and documents. This article provides an entry point for interested readers to learn the key aspects of quantum computing and communications from a computer science perspective. It begins with a pedagogical introduction and then reviews the key milestones and recent advances in quantum computing. In this article, the key elements of a quantum Internet are categorized into four important issues, which are investigated in detail: a) quantum computers, b) quantum networks, c) quantum cryptography, and d) quantum machine learning. Finally, the article identifies and discusses the main barriers, the major research directions, and trends.
Effective contact tracing for COVID-19: A systematic review

Contact tracing is commonly recommended to control outbreaks of COVID-19, but its effectiveness is unclear. Following PRISMA guidelines, we searched four databases using a range of terms related to contact tracing effectiveness for COVID-19. We found 343 papers; 32 were included. All were observational or modelling studies. Observational studies (n = 14) provided consistent, very-low certainty evidence that contact tracing (alone or in combination with other interventions) was associated with better control of COVID-19 (e.g. in Hong Kong, only 1084 cases and four deaths were recorded in the first 4.5 months of the pandemic). Modelling studies (n = 18) provided consistent, high-certainty evidence that under assumptions of prompt and thorough tracing with effective quarantines, contact tracing could stop the spread of COVID-19 (e.g. by reducing the reproduction number from 2.2 to 0.57). A cautious interpretation indicates that to stop the spread of COVID-19, public health practitioners have 2-3 days from the time a new case develops symptoms to isolate the case and quarantine at least 80% of its contacts.
Deployment of Framework for Charging Electric Vehicle based on Various Topologies

In order to the increase the popularity of Electric Vehicles in the community the vital component i.e. Charging stations should be properly developed so as they give seamless, reliable service to the customers. With the advancement of technology, the number of electric cars increased, necessitating an increase in the number of charging stations. A charging station prototype is an intelligent device that utilizes automation technologies to handle the whole electrical infrastructure. It is constructed with the latest automation technologies, including a PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) and a graphical user interface (GUI). This section discusses automated electric car charging systems. To enable tethered charging, a completely automated system facilitates the whole procedure. Our final year project, the Advanced Charging Station, addresses this issue directly. This report contains comprehensive information on this project, including specifics about the equipment and components used to construct it. Additionally, the report details the project's operation and key variables in plain language that is intelligible to the common individual. The chapters are organized in such a way that it is simpler for readers to grasp the idea of our project. We trust that we have communicated our opinions in this report in the most suitable manner possible by thoroughly discussing each issue and also by removing any concerns or complaints from the reader's mind.
Managing Security of Healthcare Data for a Modern Healthcare System

The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) have recently created previously unimaginable opportunities for boosting clinical and patient services, reducing costs and improving community health. Yet, a fundamental challenge that the modern healthcare management system faces is storing and securely transferring data. Therefore, this research proposes a novel Lionized remora optimization-based serpent (LRO-S) encryption method to encrypt sensitive data and reduce privacy breaches and cyber-attacks from unauthorized users and hackers. The LRO-S method is the combination of hybrid metaheuristic optimization and improved security algorithm. The fitness functions of lion and remora are combined to create a new algorithm for security key generation, which is provided to the serpent encryption algorithm. The LRO-S technique encrypts sensitive patient data before storing it in the cloud. The primary goal of this study is to improve the safety and adaptability of medical professionals' access to cloud-based patient-sensitive data more securely. The experiment's findings suggest that the secret keys generated are sufficiently random and one of a kind to provide adequate protection for the data stored in modern healthcare management systems. The proposed method minimizes the time needed to encrypt and decrypt data and improves privacy standards. This study found that the suggested technique outperformed previous techniques in terms of reducing execution time and is cost-effective.
Lightweight object detection algorithm for robots with improved YOLOv5

Robot object detection is important for the realisation of robot intelligence. Currently, deep learning-based object detection algorithms are used for robotic object detection. However, it faces some challenges in practical applications, such as the fact that robots frequently use resource-constrained devices, resulting in detection algorithms with long computation times and undesired detection rates. In order to address these concerns, this paper proposes a lightweight object detection algorithm for robots with an improved YOLOv5. To reduce the amount of processing required for feature extraction and increase the speed of detection, the C3Ghost and GhostConv modules have been introduced into the YOLOv5 backbone. The DWConv module was used in conjunction with the C3Ghost module in the YOLOv5 neck network to further reduce the number of model parameters and maintain accuracy. The CA (Coordinated Attention) module is also introduced to improve the extraction of features from detected objects and suppress irrelevant features, thus improving the algorithm’s detection accuracy. To verify the performance of the method, we tested it with a self-built dataset (4561 robot images in total) and the PascalVOC dataset respectively. The results show that compared with the YOLOv5s on the self-built dataset, the algorithm has a 54% decrease in FLOPs and a 52.53% decrease in the number of model parameters without a decrease in mAP (0.5). The effectiveness and superiority of the algorithm is demonstrated through case studies and comparisons.
Neural Attractor-Based Adaptive Key Generator with DNA-Coded Security and Privacy Framework for Multimedia Data in Cloud Environments

Cloud services offer doctors and data scientists access to medical data from multiple locations using different devices (laptops, desktops, tablets, smartphones, etc.). Therefore, cyber threats to medical data at rest, in transit and when used by applications need to be pinpointed and prevented preemptively through a host of proven cryptographical solutions. The presented work integrates adaptive key generation, neural-based confusion and non-XOR, namely DNA diffusion, which offers a more extensive and unique key, adaptive confusion and unpredictable diffusion algorithm. Only authenticated users can store this encrypted image in cloud storage. The proposed security framework uses logistics, tent maps and adaptive key generation modules. The adaptive key is generated using a multilayer and nonlinear neural network from every input plain image. The Hopfield neural network (HNN) is a recurrent temporal network that updates learning with every plain image. We have taken Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Simple Storage Service (S3) to store encrypted images. Using benchmark evolution metrics, the ability of image encryption is validated against brute force and statistical attacks, and encryption quality analysis is also made. Thus, it is proved that the proposed scheme is well suited for hosting cloud storage for secure images.
Dynamic machine vision with retinomorphic photomemristor-reservoir computing

Abstract Dynamic machine vision requires recognizing the past and predicting the future of a moving object based on present vision. Current machine vision systems accomplish this by processing numerous image frames or using complex algorithms. Here, we report motion recognition and prediction in recurrent photomemristor networks. In our system, a retinomorphic photomemristor array, working as dynamic vision reservoir, embeds past motion frames as hidden states into the present frame through inherent dynamic memory. The informative present frame facilitates accurate recognition of past and prediction of future motions with machine learning algorithms. This in-sensor motion processing capability eliminates redundant data flows and promotes real-time perception of moving objects for dynamic machine vision.