Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Analog Gradient Aggregation for Federated Learning Over Wireless Networks: Customized Design and Convergence Analysis

This article investigates the analog gradient aggregation (AGA) solution to overcome the communication bottleneck for wireless federated learning applications by exploiting the idea of analog over-the-air transmission. Despite the various advantages, this special transmission solution also brings new challenges to both transceiver design and learning algorithm design due to the nonstationary local gradients and the time-varying wireless channels in different communication rounds. To address these issues, we propose a novel design of both the transceiver and learning algorithm for the AGA solution. In particular, the parameters in the transceiver are optimized with the consideration of the nonstationarity in the local gradients based on a simple feedback variable. Moreover, a novel learning rate design is proposed for the stochastic gradient descent algorithm, which is adaptive to the quality of the gradient estimation. Theoretical analyses are provided on the convergence rate of the proposed AGA solution. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed solution is confirmed by two separate experiments based on linear regression and the shallow neural network. The simulation results verify that the proposed solution outperforms various state-of-the-art baseline schemes with a much faster convergence speed.
Automatic precursor recognition and real-time forecasting of sudden explosive volcanic eruptions at Whakaari, New Zealand

Abstract Sudden steam-driven eruptions strike without warning and are a leading cause of fatalities at touristic volcanoes. Recent deaths following the 2019 Whakaari eruption in New Zealand expose a need for accurate, short-term forecasting. However, current volcano alert systems are heuristic and too slowly updated with human input. Here, we show that a structured machine learning approach can detect eruption precursors in real-time seismic data streamed from Whakaari. We identify four-hour energy bursts that occur hours to days before most eruptions and suggest these indicate charging of the vent hydrothermal system by hot magmatic fluids. We developed a model to issue short-term alerts of elevated eruption likelihood and show that, under cross-validation testing, it could provide advanced warning of an unseen eruption in four out of five instances, including at least four hours warning for the 2019 eruption. This makes a strong case to adopt real-time forecasting models at active volcanoes.
Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in Trinidad and Tobago: challenges and opportunities for teacher education

Trinidad and Tobago responded decisively to the COVID 19 pandemic and was successful in containing community spread of the virus. By mid-march 2020, there was closure of key business and educational institutions. To minimise the loss of learning time, emergency remote learning became the modus-operandi, a response which challenged the most socially vulnerable students. At the University of the West Indies (UWI) the 500 participants enrolled in the Early Childhood, and Primary education programmes, and the in-service post-graduate diploma in Secondary education were struggling to adjust to online teaching, the existential anxiety of coping with a dangerous disease, and programme completion. The UWI instituted a COVID-19 policy that facilitated a structured response to programme completion and assessment across all faculties.The paper analysed the decisions taken by the UWI School of Education that supported its teachers through the practicum and pedagogy courses. Using a qualitative case study methodology, data were collected through observations, documents, and informal discussions with faculty. Thematic analyses allowed the emergence of three key constructs that facilitated effective learning during the crisis period : Community as an empathetic connection to stakeholders, Creativity as the ability for agile and imaginative responses, and Connectivity through technological readiness.
Active Learning Augmented Reality for STEAM Education—A Case Study

Immersive technologies are rapidly transforming the field of education. Amongst them, Augmented Reality (AR) has shown promise as a resource, particularly for education in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM). There are, however, few teachers deploying this new medium in the classroom directly, and, consequently, only a few, elect students benefit from the AR-enriched offers. Curricula are already overloaded, and schools generally lack developmental resources, thus leaving no room for experimentation. This situation is further aggravated by the too few educational applications available with sufficient learning content. In this article, we investigate the method of Active Learning for the teaching of STEAM subjects, using a format where students are tasked with building an AR application as part of their learning. We evaluate the applicability of the Active Learning for STEAM subjects with a qualitative, case study approach, applying the workshop format as an extracurricular activity in our work with students from a range of secondary schools in Oxford. We discuss how the format works, so it can be embedded into regular curricula, not just as an extracurricular activity, also providing an overview on the involved teaching units and rationale. All teams in our preview audience of the case study succeeded in building working applications, several of impressive complexity. Students found that the lessons were enjoyable and AR technology can enhance their learning experience. The Active Learning method served as a catalyst for students’ skills development, with the case study providing evidence of learning to code, working with a physics simulation engine, ray-tracing, and geometry, learning how to manage teams and interact with other students/instructors, and engineering a working prototype of a game. We consequentially argue that combining the STEM subjects and the arts, using the proposed Active Learning format, is able to provide a more holistic and engaging education.
An Efficient Binary Equilibrium Optimizer Algorithm for Feature Selection

Feature selection (FS) is a classic and challenging optimization task in the field of machine learning and data mining.An equilibrium optimizer (EO) is a novel physics-based optimization algorithm; it was inspired by controlled volume mass balance models for estimating dynamic and equilibrium states.This article presents two binary equilibrium optimizer algorithm and for selecting the optimal feature subset for classification problems.The first algorithm maps the continuous EO into a discrete type using S-shaped and V-shaped transfer functions (BEO-S and BEO-V).The second algorithm is based on the position of the current optimal solution (target) and position vector (BEO-T).To verify the performance of the proposed algorithm, 19 well-known UCI datasets are tested and compared with other advanced FS methods.The experimental results show that among the proposed binary EO algorithms, BEO-V2 has the best comprehensive performance and has better performance than other state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms in terms of the performance measures.
Survival Study on Blockchain Based 6G-Enabled Mobile Edge Computation for IoT Automation

Internet of Things (IoT) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) technology acts as a significant part of daily lives to facilitate control and monitoring of objects to revolutionize the ways that human interacts with physical world. IoT system includes large volume of data with network connectivity, power, and storage resources to transform data into meaningful information. Blockchain has decentralized nature to provide useful mechanism for addressing IoT challenges. Blockchain is distributed ledger with fundamental attributes, namely recorded, transparent, and decentralized. Blockchain formed participants in distributed ledger to record the transactions and communicate with other through trustless method. Security is considered as the most valuable features of Blockchain. IoT and Blockchain are emerging ideas for creating the applications to share the intrinsic features. Several existing works has been developed for the integration of blockchain with IoT. But, Blockchain protocols in the state-of-the-art works with IoT failed to consider the computational loads, delays, and bandwidth overhead which lead to new set of problems. The review estimates main challenges in integration of Blockchain and IoT technologies to attain high-level solutions by addressing the shortcomings and limitations of IoT and Blockchain technologies.
Virtual Reality as a Medium to Elicit Empathy: A Meta-Analysis

The current meta-analysis aims to investigate and clarify existing research on virtual reality (VR) as a medium to elicit empathy. An exhaustive literature search (updated to February 29, 2020) enabled us to locate seven published articles, yielding a total of nine independent samples. The results reveal statistically significant positive changes in perspective-taking outcomes after VR exposure (d+ = 0.51 [95 percent CI: 0.15–0.88]) but they did not note in empathy (d+ = 0.21 [95 percent confidence interval, CI: −0.37–0.79]). A potential limitation of this work is the low number of studies included. Implications and directions for theoretical development and empirical research are also discussed.
Evolution of V2X Communication and Integration of Blockchain for Security Enhancements

With the rapid evolution in wireless communications and autonomous vehicles, intelligent and autonomous vehicles will be launched soon. Vehicle to Everything (V2X) communications provides driving safety, traffic efficiency, and road information in real-time in vehicular networks. V2X has evolved by integrating cellular 5G and New Radio (NR) access technology in V2X communications (i.e., 5G NR V2X); it can fulfill the ever-evolving vehicular application, communication, and service demands of connected vehicles, such as ultra-low latency, ultra-high bandwidth, ultra-high reliability, and security. However, with the increasing number of intelligent and autonomous vehicles and their safety requirements, there is a backlash in deployment and management because of scalability, poor security and less flexibility. Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) plays a significant role in bringing cloud services closer to vehicular nodes, which reduces the scalability and flexibility issues. In addition, blockchain has evolved as an effective technology enabler to solve several security, privacy, and networking issues faced by the current 5G-based MEC systems in vehicular networks. Blockchain can be integrated as a strong security mechanism for securing and managing 5G V2X along with MEC. In this survey, we discuss, in detail, state-of-the-art V2X, its evolution based on cellular 5G technology and non-cellular 802.11bd. We investigate the integration of blockchain in 5G-based MEC vehicular networks for security, privacy protection, and content caching. We present the issues and challenges in existing edge computing and 5G V2X and, then, we shed some light on future research directions in these integrated and emerging technologies.
An Embarrassingly Simple Approach for Trojan Attack in Deep Neural Networks

With the widespread use of deep neural networks (DNNs) in high-stake applications, the security problem of the DNN models has received extensive attention. In this paper, we investigate a specific security problem called trojan attack, which aims to attack deployed DNN systems relying on the hidden trigger patterns inserted by malicious hackers. We propose a training-free attack approach which is different from previous work, in which trojaned behaviors are injected by retraining model on a poisoned dataset. Specifically, we do not change parameters in the original model but insert a tiny trojan module (TrojanNet) into the target model. The infected model with a malicious trojan can misclassify inputs into a target label when the inputs are stamped with the special trigger. The proposed TrojanNet has several nice properties including (1) it activates by tiny trigger patterns and keeps silent for other signals, (2) it is model-agnostic and could be injected into most DNNs, dramatically expanding its attack scenarios, and (3) the training-free mechanism saves massive training efforts comparing to conventional trojan attack methods. The experimental results show that TrojanNet can inject the trojan into all labels simultaneously (all-label trojan attack) and achieves 100% attack success rate without affecting model accuracy on original tasks. Experimental analysis further demonstrates that state-of-the-art trojan detection algorithms fail to detect TrojanNet attack. The code is available at https://github.com/trx14/TrojanNet.
Automatic Modulation Classification Based on Deep Residual Networks With Multimodal Information

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) is becoming increasingly important for its fundamental role in dynamic spectrum access, which can support 5G wireless communications to refarm the spectrum resource with low utilization. In order to achieve a better classification performance, several AMC methods based on prototype and variant of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been proposed. However, most existing AMC methods based on CNNs only use monomodal information from either time domain or frequency domain. The complementary processing gain, which can be obatianed by fusing multimodal information from multiple transformation domain together, is neglected. To address the issue, we exploit a waveform-spectrum multimodal fusion (WSMF) method to realize AMC based on deep residual networks (Resnet). After extracting features from multimodal information using Resnet, we adopt a feature fusion strategy to merge multimodal features of signals to obtain more discriminating features. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed WSMF method compared with traditional CNNs based AMC method using single modality information. Our proposed method can distinguish among sixteen modulation signals, and it works well even for higher-order digital modulation types like 256QAM and 1024QAM.
Transfer Learning With Adaptive Fine-Tuning

With the utilization of deep learning approaches, the key factors for a successful application are sufficient datasets with reliable ground truth, which are generally not easy to obtain, especially in the field of medicine. In recent years, this issue has been commonly addressed with the exploitation of transfer learning via fine-tuning, which enables us to start with a model, pre-trained for a specific task, and then fine-tune (train) only certain layers of the neural network for a related but different target task. However, the selection of fine-tunable layers is one of the major problems of such an approach. Since there is no general rule on how to select layers in order to achieve the highest possible performance, we developed the Differential Evolution based Fine-Tuning (DEFT) method for the selection of fine-tunable layers for a target dataset under the given constraints. The method was evaluated against the problem of identifying the osteosarcoma from the medical imaging dataset. The performance was compared against a conventionally trained convolutional neural network, a pre-trained model, and the model trained using a fine-tuning approach with manually handpicked fine-tunable layers. In terms of classification accuracy, our proposed method outperformed the compared methods by a margin of 4.45% to 32.75%.
Parametric generation of conditional geological realizations using generative neural networks

Deep learning techniques are increasingly being considered for geological applications where -- much like in computer vision -- the challenges are characterized by high-dimensional spatial data dominated by multipoint statistics. In particular, a novel technique called generative adversarial networks has been recently studied for geological parametrization and synthesis, obtaining very impressive results that are at least qualitatively competitive with previous methods. The method obtains a neural network parametrization of the geology -- so-called a generator -- that is capable of reproducing very complex geological patterns with dimensionality reduction of several orders of magnitude. Subsequent works have addressed the conditioning task, i.e. using the generator to generate realizations honoring spatial observations (hard data). The current approaches, however, do not provide a parametrization of the conditional generation process. In this work, we propose a method to obtain a parametrization for direct generation of conditional realizations. The main idea is to simply extend the existing generator network by stacking a second inference network that learns to perform the conditioning. This inference network is a neural network trained to sample a posterior distribution derived using a Bayesian formulation of the conditioning task. The resulting extended neural network thus provides the conditional parametrization. Our method is assessed on a benchmark image of binary channelized subsurface, obtaining very promising results for a wide variety of conditioning configurations.
A Machine Learning Approach for Blockchain-Based Smart Home Networks Security

Realizing secure and private communications on the Internet of Things (IoT) is challenging, primarily due to IoT's projected vast scale and extensive deployment. Recent efforts have explored the use of blockchain in decentralized protection and privacy supported. Such solutions, however, are highly demanding in terms of computation and time requirements, barring these solutions from the majority of IoT applications. Specifically, in this paper, we introduce a resource-efficient, blockchain-based solution for secure and private IoT. The solution is made possible through novel exploitation of computational resources in a typical IoT environment (e.g., smart homes), along with the use of an instance of Deep Extreme Learning Machine (DELM). In this proposed approach, the Smart Home Architecture based in Blockchain is protected by carefully evaluating its reliability in regard to the essential security aims of privacy, integrity, and accessibility. In addition, we present simulation results to emphasize that the overheads created by our method (in terms of distribution, processing time, and energy consumption) are marginal related to their protection and privacy benefits.
Diffusion of blockchain in insurance industry: An analysis through the review of academic and trade literature

Blockchain is attaining increasing attention across all sectors and industries. It has been considered in the literature as a breakthrough emerging technology with disruptive potential like combustion engines and internet. Although the companies are acknowledging the hype around the technology, they are still skeptical in adopting it for the actual value added for the firm. This paper reviews the academic literature as well as industry practices of implementation of blockchain in insurance sector. The systematic review by considering two sources is attempting to integrate insights from different bodies of knowledge. The objective of this review article is to compare both the literature sources to understand the actual levels of implementation and use cases, and to identify the direction in which the insurance sector is currently going in terms of adoption of this technology. This approach captures diffusion possibility versus actual diffusion in an industry based on collective intelligence of experts.
Beat the AI: Investigating Adversarial Human Annotation for Reading Comprehension

Innovations in annotation methodology have been a catalyst for Reading Comprehension (RC) datasets and models. One recent trend to challenge current RC models is to involve a model in the annotation process: humans create questions adversarially, such that the model fails to answer them correctly. In this work we investigate this annotation methodology and apply it in three different settings, collecting a total of 36,000 samples with progressively stronger models in the annotation loop. This allows us to explore questions such as the reproducibility of the adversarial effect, transfer from data collected with varying model-in-the-loop strengths, and generalisation to data collected without a model. We find that training on adversarially collected samples leads to strong generalisation to non-adversarially collected datasets, yet with progressive performance deterioration with increasingly stronger models-in-the-loop. Furthermore, we find that stronger models can still learn from datasets collected with substantially weaker models-in-the-loop. When trained on data collected with a BiDAF model in the loop, RoBERTa achieves 39.9F1 on questions that it cannot answer when trained on SQuAD - only marginally lower than when trained on data collected using RoBERTa itself (41.0F1).
Domain-Invariant Stereo Matching Networks

State-of-the-art stereo matching networks have difficulties in generalizing to new unseen environments due to significant domain differences, such as color, illumination, contrast, and texture. In this paper, we aim at designing a domain-invariant stereo matching network (DSMNet) that generalizes well to unseen scenes. To achieve this goal, we propose i) a novel “domain normalization” approach that regularizes the distribution of learned representations to allow them to be invariant to domain differences, and ii) an end-to-end trainable structure-preserving graph-based filter for extracting robust structural and geometric representations that can further enhance domain-invariant generalizations. When trained on synthetic data and generalized to real test sets, our model performs significantly better than all state-of-the-art models. It even outperforms some deep neural network models (e.g. MC-CNN [61]) fine-tuned with test-domain data. The code is available at https://github.com/feihuzhang/DSMNet .
RoboGrammar

We present RoboGrammar , a fully automated approach for generating optimized robot structures to traverse given terrains. In this framework, we represent each robot design as a graph, and use a graph grammar to express possible arrangements of physical robot assemblies. Each robot design can then be expressed as a sequence of grammar rules. Using only a small set of rules our grammar can describe hundreds of thousands of possible robot designs. The construction of the grammar limits the design space to designs that can be fabricated. For a given input terrain, the design space is searched to find the top performing robots and their corresponding controllers. We introduce Graph Heuristic Search - a novel method for efficient search of combinatorial design spaces. In Graph Heuristic Search, we explore the design space while simultaneously learning a function that maps incomplete designs (e.g., nodes in the combinatorial search tree) to the best performance values that can be achieved by expanding these incomplete designs. Graph Heuristic Search prioritizes exploration of the most promising branches of the design space. To test our method we optimize robots for a number of challenging and varied terrains. We demonstrate that RoboGrammar can successfully generate nontrivial robots that are optimized for a single terrain or a combination of terrains.