Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
HeartPrint: Exploring a Heartbeat-Based Multiuser Authentication With Single mmWave Radar

Continuous authentication is crucial for protecting user’s privacy throughout their login session. Existing studies employ wireless sensing technologies to provide device-free and unobtrusive authentication; the user’s behavior is continually assessed without their direct involvement until it deviates from their normal pattern. However, these works primarily concentrate on single-user authentication, which poses challenges in multiuser scenarios, such as smart homes and offices, where more than one user usually exists. In this article, we propose HeartPrint, a continuous multiuser authentication system, that employs a single commodity mmWave radar to capture the unique self-driving heartbeat motions from multiple users. Specifically, HeartPrint leverages the effect of skin surface vibrations caused by heartbeat on radio frequency (RF) transmissions. To profile individual heartbeat signals from the entangled components that are induced by multiple users, we first use a clustering method to position each user in the environment, then focus on the signal reflected from each position separately. The irrelevant body movements are eliminated from the RF signal by using a proposed signal energy comparison method for preserving fine-grained heartbeat traits. We then develop a pipeline to extract the most informative features for characterizing each user and feed them to an elaborated classifier for user authentication. We evaluate HeartPrint with 54 participants and demonstrate that it achieves an average authentication accuracy of over 95%. Additionally, we show that it is resilient against spoofing attacks, with an average attack success rate of less than 3%.
Self-Supervised Online and Lightweight Anomaly and Event Detection for IoT Devices

The increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and low-cost sensors have facilitated developments in large-scale monitoring applications. However, the accuracy of low-cost sensors remains questionable. Monitoring applications, such as environmental monitoring, try to detect “interesting” data points or patterns, known as anomalies, that do not conform to the norm. These include erroneous data caused by hardware failures or malicious attacks, and nonerroneous data due to unexpected phenomenon, caused by events, such as unexpected high traffic volume. Traditionally, IoT devices collect raw data and periodically upload them to the cloud for processing, which includes anomaly detection. However, the increasing processing capabilities of IoT devices have made the on-device anomaly detection possible in an online and real-time manner. In this article, multivariate long short-term memory (LSTM) autoencoder is proposed for anomaly and event detection in IoT devices. In addition, the proposed approach integrates smart inference, based on a game-theoretical approach, which dynamically changes the period of detection based on the stability of the data, aiming to optimize power consumption and elongate the lifetime of the device. The proposed anomaly and event detection model was simulated and implemented on an STM32H743 Nucleo board, and results show the robustness of the model regardless of the number of anomalies and events present.
Describing Linguistic Vagueness of Evaluative Expressions Using Fuzzy Natural Logic and Linguistic Constraints

In recent years, the study of evaluative linguistic expressions has crossed the field of theoretical linguistics and has aroused interest in very different research areas such as artificial intelligence, psychology or cognitive linguistics. The interest in this type of expressions may be due to its relevance in applications such as opinion mining or sentiment analysis. This paper brings together Fuzzy Natural Logic and Fuzzy Property Grammars to approach evaluative expressions. Our contribution includes the marriage of mathematical and linguistic methods for providing a formalism to deal with the linguistic vagueness of evaluative expressions by describing the syntax and semantics of these structures. We contribute to the study of evaluative linguistic expressions by proposing a formal characterization of them where the concepts of semantic prime, borderline evaluative expressions and markedness are defined and where the relation between the semantic constraints of evaluations and their sentiment can be established. A proof-of-concept of how to create a lexicon of evaluative expressions for future computational applications is presented. The results demonstrate that linguistic evaluative expressions are gradient, have sentiment, and that the evaluations work as a relation of hypernym and hyponym, the hypernym being a semantic prime. Our findings provide the basis for building an ontology of evaluative expressions for future computational applications.
Blockchain: Consensus Algorithm Key Performance Indicators, Trade-Offs, Current Trends, Common Drawbacks, and Novel Solution Proposals

Consensus protocols stand behind the success of blockchain technology. This is because parties that distrust each other can make secure transactions without the oversight of a central authority. The first consensus protocol emerged with Bitcoin. Since then, many others have appeared. Some of them have been implemented by official blockchain platforms, whereas others, for the time being, remain as proposals. A blockchain consensus is a trade-off. The new solutions promise to overcome the known drawbacks of blockchain, but they may also bring new vulnerabilities. Moreover, blockchain performance metrics are not clearly defined, as some metrics, such as delay and throughput, which are key factors for the efficiency of standard networks, are purposely constrained by most mainstream blockchain platforms. The main body of this paper consolidates knowledge of blockchains, focusing on the seminal consensus protocols in large-scale market capitalization platforms, and how consensus is achieved for large-scale, decentralized, blockchain architectures. The benefits, limitations, and tradeoffs, as well as the subsequent trend in current consensus development, and its limitations as a general paradigm, are highlighted. The paper also sheds light on overlooked potential performance metrics, and it proposes some novel solutions to some of the identified problems.
Detection of loosening angle for mark bolted joints with computer vision and geometric imaging

Mark bars drawn on the surfaces of bolted joints are widely used to indicate the severity of loosening. The automatic and accurate determination of the loosening angle of mark bolted joints is a challenging issue that has not been investigated previously. This determination will release workers from heavy workloads. This study proposes an automated method for detecting the loosening angle of mark bolted joints by integrating computer vision and geometric imaging theory. This novel method contained three integrated modules. The first module used a Keypoint Regional Convolutional Neural Network (Keypoint-RCNN)-based deep learning algorithm to detect five keypoints and locate the region of interest (RoI). The second module recognised the mark ellipse and mark points using the transformation of the five detected keypoints and several image processing technologies such as dilation and expansion algorithms, a skeleton algorithm, and the least square method. In the last module, according to the geometric imaging theory, we derived a precise expression to calculate the loosening angle using the information for the mark points and mark ellipse. In lab-scale and real-scale environments, the average relative detection error was only 3.5%. This indicated that our method could accurately calculate the loosening angles of marked bolted joints even when the images were captured from an arbitrary view. In the future, some segmentation algorithms based on deep learning, distortion correction, accurate angle and length measuring instruments, and advanced transformation methods can be applied to further improve detection accuracy.
Identifying Struggling Teams in Software Engineering Courses Through Weekly Surveys

Teaming is increasingly a core aspect of professional software engineering and most undergraduate computer science curricula. At NC State University, we teach communication and project-management skills explicitly through a junior-level software engineering course. However, some students may have a dysfunctional team experience that imperils their ability to learn these skills. Identifying these teams during a team project is important so the teaching staff can intervene early and hopefully alleviate the issues.
Momentum Pseudo-Labeling: Semi-Supervised ASR With Continuously Improving Pseudo-Labels

End-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a popular alternative to traditional module-based systems, simplifying the model-building process with a single deep neural network architecture. However, the training of end-to-end ASR systems is generally data-hungry: a large amount of labeled data (speech-text pairs) is necessary to learn direct speech-to-text conversion effectively. To make the training less dependent on labeled data, pseudo-labeling, a semi-supervised learning approach, has been successfully introduced to end-to-end ASR, where a seed model is self-trained with pseudo-labels generated from unlabeled (speech-only) data. Here, we propose <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">momentum pseudo-labeling</i> (MPL), a simple yet effective strategy for semi-supervised ASR. MPL consists of a pair of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">online</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">offline</i> models that interact and learn from each other, inspired by the mean teacher method. The online model is trained to predict pseudo-labels generated on the fly by the offline model. The offline model maintains an exponential moving average of the online model parameters. The interaction between the two models allows better ASR training on unlabeled data by continuously improving the quality of pseudo-labels. We apply MPL to a connectionist temporal classification-based model and evaluate it on various semi-supervised scenarios with varying amounts of data or domain mismatch. The results demonstrate that MPL significantly improves the seed model by stabilizing the training on unlabeled data. Moreover, we present additional techniques, e.g., the use of Conformer and an external language model, to further enhance MPL, which leads to better performance than other semi-supervised methods based on pseudo-labeling.
Decentralized Federated Learning for Nonintrusive Load Monitoring in Smart Energy Communities

Federated Learning is a distributed learning solution for machine learning problems without the need of collecting the available data in a single centralized data centre. With the standard FL approaches, model training is performed locally and a centralized server collects and elaborates the trainable parameters of the local models: even if data are not shared, the presence of the centralized server still rises trust and security issues. In this work, we introduce the Decentralized Federated Learning (DECFEDAVG) algorithm, which aims at achieving complete decentralization by the lack of a coordination server, and compare its performance against the original federated learning algorithm Federated Averaging (FEDAVG) over the Nonintrusive Load Monitoring problem.
Classification of Cold and Non-Cold Speech Using Vowel-Like Region Segments

This work uses vowel-like region segments of speech to classify cold and non-cold speech signals. As various articulators are affected by the common cold, speech produced during the common cold gets affected. These changes in a speech during common cold can be used to classify cold and non-cold speech. Vowel-like region (VLR) in speech includes vowels, semi-vowels, and diphthongs phonemes. Vowel-like regions are the dominant part of the speech signal. Hence, we have considered only vowel-like regions for cold and non-cold speech classification. The VLRs are identified by locating the VLR onset point (VLROP) and end point (VLREP). The Hilbert envelope and zero frequency filtering methods are used for detection of VLROPs and VLREPs. Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) feature are extracted from VLRs, and the performance of these features are evaluated using a deep neural network. Features extracted from VLRs give comparable results to features extracted from complete active speech (CAS) signal. Compared to the CAS technique, the number of frames that needs to be processed utilizing VLRs is significantly less.
Text Line Extraction in Historical Documents Using Mask R-CNN

Text line extraction is an essential preprocessing step in many handwritten document image analysis tasks. It includes detecting text lines in a document image and segmenting the regions of each detected line. Deep learning-based methods are frequently used for text line detection. However, only a limited number of methods tackle the problems of detection and segmentation together. This paper proposes a holistic method that applies Mask R-CNN for text line extraction. A Mask R-CNN model is trained to extract text lines fractions from document patches, which are further merged to form the text lines of an entire page. The presented method was evaluated on the two well-known datasets of historical documents, DIVA-HisDB and ICDAR 2015-HTR, and achieved state-of-the-art results. In addition, we introduce a new challenging dataset of Arabic historical manuscripts, VML-AHTE, where numerous diacritics are present. We show that the presented Mask R-CNN-based method can successfully segment text lines, even in such a challenging scenario.
Out-of-Core Edge Partitioning at Linear Run-Time

Graph edge partitioning is an important prepro-cessing step to optimize distributed computing jobs on graph-structured data. The edge set of a given graph is split into <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$k$</tex> equally-sized partitions, such that the replication of vertices across partitions is minimized. Out-of-core edge partitioning algorithms are able to tackle the problem with low memory over-head. Existing out-of-core algorithms mainly work in a streaming manner and can be grouped into two types. While stateless streaming edge partitioning is fast and yields low partitioning quality, stateful streaming edge partitioning yields better quality, but is expensive, as it requires a scoring function to be evaluated for every edge on every partition, leading to a time complexity of O(|E| *k). In this paper, we propose 2PS-L, a novel out-of-core edge partitioning algorithm that builds upon the stateful streaming model, but achieves linear run-time i.e.,O(|E|)). 2PS-L consists of two phases. In the first phase, vertices are separated into clusters by a lightweight streaming clustering algorithm. In the second phase, the graph is re-streamed and vertex clustering from the first phase is exploited to reduce the search space of graph partitioning to only two target partitions for every edge. Our evaluations show that 2PS-L can achieve better partitioning quality than existing stateful streaming edge partitioners while having a much lower run-time. As a consequence, the total run-time of partitioning and subsequent distributed graph processing can be significantly reduced.
Identification of misdiagnosis by deep neural networks on a histopathologic review of breast cancer lymph node metastases

The frozen section (FS) diagnoses of pathology experts are used in China to determine whether sentinel lymph nodes of breast cancer have metastasis during operation. Direct implementation of a deep neural network (DNN) in clinical practice may be hindered by misdiagnosis of the algorithm, which affects a patient's treatment decision. In this study, we first obtained the prediction result of the commonly used patch-DNN, then we present a relative risk classification and regression tree (RRCART) to identify the misdiagnosed whole-slide images (WSIs) and recommend them to be reviewed by pathologists. Applying this framework to 2362 WSIs of breast cancer lymph node metastasis, test on frozen section results in the mean area under the curve (AUC) reached 0.9851. However, the mean misdiagnosis rate (0.0248), was significantly higher than the pathologists' misdiagnosis rate (p < 0.01). The RRCART distinguished more than 80% of the WSIs as a high-accuracy group with an average accuracy reached to 0.995, but the difference with the pathologists' performance was not significant (p > 0.01). However, the other low-accuracy group included most of the misdiagnoses of DNN models. Our research shows that the misdiagnosis from deep learning model can be further enriched by our method, and that the low-accuracy WSIs must be selected for pathologists to review and the high-accuracy ones may be ready for pathologists to give diagnostic reports.
Anomaly Detection Using Explainable Random Forest for the Prediction of Undesirable Events in Oil Wells

The worldwide demand for oil has been rising rapidly for many decades, being the first indicator of economic development. Oil is extracted from underneath reservoirs found below land or ocean using oil wells. An offshore oil well is an oil well type where a wellbore is drilled underneath the ocean bed to obtain oil to the surface that demands more stability than other oil wells. The sensors of oil wells generate massive amounts of multivariate time-series data for surveillance engineers to analyze manually and have continuous insight into drilling operations. The manual analysis of data is challenging and time-consuming. Additionally, it can lead to several faulty events that could increase costs and production losses since the engineers tend to focus on the analysis rather than detecting the faulty events. Recently, machine learning (ML) techniques have significantly solved enormous real-time data anomaly problems by decreasing the data engineers’ interaction processes. Accordingly, this study aimed to utilize ML techniques to reduce the time spent manually to establish rules that detect abnormalities in oil wells, leading to rapid and more precise detection. Four ML algorithms were utilized, including random forest (RF), logistic regression (LR), k-nearest neighbor (K-NN), and decision tree (DT). The dataset used in this study suffers from the class imbalance issue; therefore, experiments were conducted using the original and sampled datasets. The empirical results demonstrated promising outcomes, where RF achieved the highest accuracy, recall, precision, F1-score, and AUC of 99.60%, 99.64%, 99.91%, 99.77%, and 1.00, respectively, using the sampled data, and 99.84%, 99.91%, 99.91%, 99.91%, and 1.00, respectively, using the original data. Besides, the study employed Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) to enable surveillance engineers to interpret black box models to understand the causes of abnormalities. The proposed models can be used to successfully identify anomalous events in the oil wells.
Forgery-free signature verification with stroke-aware cycle-consistent generative adversarial network

In recent years, the performance of handwritten signature verification (HSV) has been considerably improved by deep learning methods. However, deep HSV still faces significant challenges due to the lack of training data, especially for skilled forgeries. In this context, signature synthesis is a promising alternative to address the problem of insufficient data. Compared with offline modality, online signatures are more likely to produce natural duplicates by virtue of their dynamic information. Therefore, we propose a novel convolutional neural network model for offline HSV, called SigCNN, and utilize CycleGAN in style transfer fields to generate realistic offline signatures from online specimens and their duplicates. To compensate for the deficiency of vanilla CycleGAN in generating diverse stroke widths, we propose a new method, Stoke-cCycleGAN, to generate signatures at desired stroke width levels. By online signature duplication and online-to-offline conversion, our SigCNN model can be trained without requiring skilled forgeries. Experimental results showed that our SigCNN trained on generated signatures achieved competitive results on public datasets compared to existing methods. Code of Stroke-cCycleGAN is available at https://github.com/KAKAFEI123/Stroke-cCycleGAN.
Application of Machine Learning to Characterizing Magma Fertility in Porphyry Cu Deposits

Abstract Large and easily accessible porphyry Cu deposits have already been identified, exploited, and gradually exhausted. Novel strategies, therefore, are required to identify new, deeply buried deposits. Previous studies have proposed several lithogeochemical and mineralogical approaches for identifying porphyry Cu systems. Most of these methods, however, require significant a priori knowledge of the exploration region and are, generally, of low effectiveness. In this study, machine learning models using Random Forest and Deep Neural Network algorithms are utilized to characterize magma fertility. The two models have first been trained using a large trace‐element data set of magmatic zircon and then validated on unseen data set during the training process. The performance of both models was evaluated using a fivefold cross‐validation technique, which demonstrates that the models provide consistent results and yield good classification accuracy (∼90% on average) with low false positive rates. Feature importance analysis of the models suggests that Eu/Eu*, Eu/Eu*/Y, Ce/Nd, Ce/Ce*, Dy, Hf, and Ti are the important parameters that distinguish fertile and barren zircons. The real‐world applicability of the validated models was evaluated using two well‐characterized porphyry Cu deposits in subduction and postcollisional settings—the Highland Valley porphyry Cu district (south‐central British Columbia, Canada) and the southern Gangdese belt (Tibet, China), respectively. The results demonstrate that our generalized models can discriminate zircon from igneous rocks associated with porphyry Cu deposits from those in nonmineralized systems with high accuracy and independent of geological setting, suggesting that this new approach can be used effectively in greenfield and brownfield exploration.
The Importance of Understanding Deep Learning

Abstract Some machine learning models, in particular deep neural networks (DNNs), are not very well understood; nevertheless, they are frequently used in science. Does this lack of understanding pose a problem for using DNNs to understand empirical phenomena? Emily Sullivan has recently argued that understanding with DNNs is not limited by our lack of understanding of DNNs themselves. In the present paper, we will argue, contra Sullivan, that our current lack of understanding of DNNs does limit our ability to understand with DNNs. Sullivan’s claim hinges on which notion of understanding is at play. If we employ a weak notion of understanding, then her claim is tenable, but rather weak. If, however, we employ a strong notion of understanding, particularly explanatory understanding, then her claim is not tenable.