Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Vehicle Re-identification: an Efficient Baseline Using Triplet Embedding

In this paper we tackle the problem of vehicle re-identification in a camera network utilizing triplet embeddings. Re-identification is the problem of matching appearances of objects across different cameras. With the proliferation of surveillance cameras enabling smart and safer cities, there is an ever-increasing need to re-identify vehicles across cameras. Typical challenges arising in smart city scenarios include variations of viewpoints, illumination and self occlusions. Most successful approaches for re-identification involve (deep) learning an embedding space such that the vehicles of same identities are projected closer to one another, compared to the vehicles representing different identities. Popular loss functions for learning an embedding (space) include contrastive or triplet loss. In this paper we provide an extensive evaluation of these losses applied to vehicle re-identification and demonstrate that using the best practices for learning embeddings outperform most of the previous approaches proposed in the vehicle re-identification literature. Compared to most existing state-of-the-art approaches, our approach is simpler and more straightforward for training utilizing only identity-level annotations, along with one of the smallest published embedding dimensions for efficient inference. Furthermore in this work we introduce a formal evaluation of a triplet sampling variant (batch sample) into the re-identification literature.
Heterogeneous oblique random forest

Decision trees in random forests use a single feature in non-leaf nodes to split the data. Such splitting results in axis-parallel decision boundaries which may fail to exploit the geometric structure in the data. In oblique decision trees, an oblique hyperplane is employed instead of an axis-parallel hyperplane. Trees with such hyperplanes can better exploit the geometric structure to increase the accuracy of the trees and reduce the depth. The present realizations of oblique decision trees do not evaluate many promising oblique splits to select the best. In this paper, we propose a random forest of heterogeneous oblique decision trees that employ several linear classifiers at each non-leaf node on some top ranked partitions which are obtained via one-vs-all and two-hyperclasses based approaches and ranked based on ideal Gini scores and cluster separability. The oblique hyperplane that optimizes the impurity criterion is then selected as the splitting hyperplane for that node. We benchmark 190 classifiers on 121 UCI datasets. The results show that the oblique random forests proposed in this paper are the top 3 ranked classifiers with the heterogeneous oblique random forest being statistically better than all 189 classifiers in the literature.
MI6

Recent attacks have broken process isolation by exploiting microarchitectural side channels that allow indirect access to shared microarchitectural state. Enclaves strengthen the process abstraction to restore isolation guarantees.
Blockchain for explainable and trustworthy artificial intelligence

Abstract The increasing computational power and proliferation of big data are now empowering Artificial Intelligence (AI) to achieve massive adoption and applicability in many fields. The lack of explanation when it comes to the decisions made by today's AI algorithms is a major drawback in critical decision‐making systems. For example, deep learning does not offer control or reasoning over its internal processes or outputs. More importantly, current black‐box AI implementations are subject to bias and adversarial attacks that may poison the learning or the inference processes. Explainable AI (XAI) is a new trend of AI algorithms that provide explanations of their AI decisions. In this paper, we propose a framework for achieving a more trustworthy and XAI by leveraging features of blockchain, smart contracts, trusted oracles, and decentralized storage. We specify a framework for complex AI systems in which the decision outcomes are reached based on decentralized consensuses of multiple AI and XAI predictors. The paper discusses how our proposed framework can be utilized in key application areas with practical use cases. This article is categorized under: Technologies &gt; Machine Learning Technologies &gt; Computer Architectures for Data Mining Fundamental Concepts of Data and Knowledge &gt; Key Design Issues in Data Mining
Quantum Autoencoders to Denoise Quantum Data

Entangled states are an important resource for quantum computation, communication, metrology, and the simulation of many-body systems. However, noise limits the experimental preparation of such states. Classical data can be efficiently denoised by autoencoders---neural networks trained in unsupervised manner. We develop a novel quantum autoencoder that successfully denoises Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states subject to spin-flip errors and random unitary noise. Various emergent quantum technologies could benefit from the proposed unsupervised quantum neural networks.
NOTE-RCNN: NOise Tolerant Ensemble RCNN for Semi-Supervised Object Detection

The labeling cost of large number of bounding boxes is one of the main challenges for training modern object detectors. To reduce the dependence on expensive bounding box annotations, we propose a new semi-supervised object detection formulation, in which a few seed box level annotations and a large scale of image level annotations are used to train the detector. We adopt a training-mining framework, which is widely used in weakly supervised object detection tasks. However, the mining process inherently introduces various kinds of labelling noises: false negatives, false positives and inaccurate boundaries, which can be harmful for training the standard object detectors (e.g. Faster RCNN). We propose a novel NOise Tolerant Ensemble RCNN (NOTE-RCNN) object detector to handle such noisy labels. Comparing to standard Faster RCNN, it contains three highlights: an ensemble of two classification heads and a distillation head to avoid overfitting on noisy labels and improve the mining precision, masking the negative sample loss in box predictor to avoid the harm of false negative labels, and training box regression head only on seed annotations to eliminate the harm from inaccurate boundaries of mined bounding boxes. We evaluate the methods on ILSVRC 2013 and MSCOCO 2017 dataset; we observe that the detection accuracy consistently improves as we iterate between mining and training steps, and state-of-the-art performance is achieved.
SegSort: Segmentation by Discriminative Sorting of Segments

Almost all existing deep learning approaches for semantic segmentation tackle this task as a pixel-wise classification problem. Yet humans understand a scene not in terms of pixels, but by decomposing it into perceptual groups and structures that are the basic building blocks of recognition. This motivates us to propose an end-to-end pixel-wise metric learning approach that mimics this process. In our approach, the optimal visual representation determines the right segmentation within individual images and associates segments with the same semantic classes across images. The core visual learning problem is therefore to maximize the similarity within segments and minimize the similarity between segments. Given a model trained this way, inference is performed consistently by extracting pixel-wise embeddings and clustering, with the semantic label determined by the majority vote of its nearest neighbors from an annotated set. As a result, we present the SegSort, as a first attempt using deep learning for unsupervised semantic segmentation, achieving 76% performance of its supervised counterpart. When supervision is available, SegSort shows consistent improvements over conventional approaches based on pixel-wise softmax training. Additionally, our approach produces more precise boundaries and consistent region predictions. The proposed SegSort further produces an interpretable result, as each choice of label can be easily understood from the retrieved nearest segments.
Deep Transfer Learning for Multiple Class Novelty Detection

We propose a transfer learning-based solution for the problem of multiple class novelty detection. In particular, we propose an end-to-end deep-learning based approach in which we investigate how the knowledge contained in an external, out-of-distributional dataset can be used to improve the performance of a deep network for visual novelty detection. Our solution differs from the standard deep classification networks on two accounts. First, we use a novel loss function, membership loss, in addition to the classical cross-entropy loss for training networks. Secondly, we use the knowledge from the external dataset more effectively to learn globally negative filters, filters that respond to generic objects outside the known class set. We show that thresholding the maximal activation of the proposed network can be used to identify novel objects effectively. Extensive experiments on four publicly available novelty detection datasets show that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.
Class-Specific Reconstruction Transfer Learning for Visual Recognition Across Domains

Subspace learning and reconstruction have been widely explored in recent transfer learning work. Generally, a specially designed projection and reconstruction transfer functions bridging multiple domains for heterogeneous knowledge sharing are wanted. However, we argue that the existing subspace reconstruction based domain adaptation algorithms neglect the class prior, such that the learned transfer function is biased, especially when data scarcity of some class is encountered. Different from those previous methods, in this paper, we propose a novel class-wise reconstruction-based adaptation method called Class-specific Reconstruction Transfer Learning (CRTL), which optimizes a well modeled transfer loss function by fully exploiting intra-class dependency and inter-class independency. The merits of the CRTL are three-fold. 1) Using a class-specific reconstruction matrix to align the source domain with the target domain fully exploits the class prior in modeling the domain distribution consistency, which benefits the cross-domain classification. 2) Furthermore, to keep the intrinsic relationship between data and labels after feature augmentation, a projected Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (pHSIC), that measures the dependency between data and label, is first proposed in transfer learning community by mapping the data from raw space to RKHS. 3) In addition, by imposing low-rank and sparse constraints on the class-specific reconstruction coefficient matrix, the global and local data structure that contributes to domain correlation can be effectively preserved. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art representation-based domain adaptation methods. The demo code is available in https://github.com/wangshanshanCQU/CRTL.
Digital transformation in higher education: critiquing the five-year development plans (2016-2020) of 75 Chinese universities

This study examined how the role of digitalization is framed in the strategic development plans of 75 top universities in China. Findings show that digitalization as perceived by these universities features instrumentality (e-campus construction and application) and modernization (sustaining and efficiency innovations in teaching and learning), a situation also seen in other countries. On the other hand, there seems to be not enough incentive for them to use digital technologies to serve a wider community and to build technology-enhanced research capacity. There is also scanty evidence of open, flexible, distributed, and disaggregated learning encouraged in these plans. Finally, unique to Chinese higher education institutions are the goals of building a positive online ethos and developing political and ideological education via digital means. Influence of national policies and strategies on institutional digital strategies is also discussed.
Research on Recognition Method of Electrical Components Based on YOLO V3

The reliability of electrical components affects the stable operation of the power system. Electrical components inspection has long been important issues in the intelligent power system. The main problems of traditional recognition methods of electrical components are low detection accuracy and poor real-time performance, which are challenging to extract necessary features from the inspection images. This paper proposes a way to detect the electrical components in the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) inspection image based on You Only Look Once (YOLO) V3 algorithm. Due to some of the inspection images are not clear, which result in the reduction of the available dataset. On this basis, we adopt Super-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network (SRCNN) to realize super-resolution reconstruction on the blurred image, which achieves the expansion of the dataset. We compare the performance of the proposed method with other popular recognition methods. The results of experiment verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, and the technique reaches high recognition accuracy, good robustness, and strong real-time performance for UAV power inspection system.
Underwater image enhancement based on conditional generative adversarial network

Underwater images play an essential role in acquiring and understanding underwater information. High-quality underwater images can guarantee the reliability of underwater intelligent systems. Unfortunately, underwater images are characterized by low contrast, color casts, blurring, low light, and uneven illumination, which severely affects the perception and processing of underwater information. To improve the quality of acquired underwater images, numerous methods have been proposed, particularly with the emergence of deep learning technologies. However, the performance of underwater image enhancement methods is still unsatisfactory due to lacking sufficient training data and effective network structures. In this paper, we solve this problem based on a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN), where the clear underwater image is achieved by a multi-scale generator. Besides, we employ a dual discriminator to grab local and global semantic information, which enforces the generated results by the multi-scale generator realistic and natural. Experiments on real-world and synthetic underwater images demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorable against the state-of-the-art underwater image enhancement methods.
A multimodal approach for human activity recognition based on skeleton and RGB data

Human action recognition plays a fundamental role in the design of smart solution for home environments, particularly in relation to ambient assisted living applications, where the support of an automated system could improve the quality of life of humans trying to interpret and anticipate user needs, recognizing unusual behaviors or preventing dangerous situations (e.g. falls). In this work the potentialities of the Kinect sensor are fully exploited to design a robust approach for activity recognition combining the analysis of skeleton and RGB data streams. The skeleton representation is designed to capture the most representative body postures, while the temporal evolution of actions is better highlighted by the representation obtained from RGB images. The experimental results confirm that the combination of these two data sources allow to capture highly discriminative features resulting in an approach able to achieve state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks.
Inequality and gender economic inclusion: The moderating role of financial access in Sub-Saharan Africa

This study assesses how financial access can be used to modulate the effect of income inequality on gender economic inclusion. The focus is on 42 countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) for the period 2004–2014 and the empirical evidence is based on Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) and Fixed Effects (FE) regressions. Significant results are not apparent in the FE regressions The following main findings are established from the GMM estimations. There is a negative net effect from the role of financial access in modulating the effect of the Palma ratio on female labour force participation while there is a positive net effect from the relevance of financial access in moderating the effect of the Gini coefficient on female unemployment. There are also net negative effects from the role of financial access in modulating the Gini coefficient and the Palma ratio for female employment. The unexpected findings are elucidated and implications are discussed in the light of challenges to Sustainable Development Goals in the sub-region. Inter alia: financial access is a necessary but not a sufficient moderator of income inequality for the enhancement of women’s participation in the formal economic sector.
The Not Yet Exploited Goldmine of OSINT: Opportunities, Open Challenges and Future Trends

The amount of data generated by the current interconnected world is immeasurable, and a large part of such data is publicly available, which means that it is accessible by any user, at any time, from anywhere in the Internet.In this respect, Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is a type of intelligence that actually benefits from that open natureby collecting, processing and correlating points of the whole cyberspace to generate knowledge.In fact, recent advances in technology are causing OSINT to currently evolve at a dizzying rate, providing innovative data-driven and AI-powered applications for politics, economy or society, but also offering new lines of action against cyberthreats and cybercrime.The paper at hand describes the current state of OSINT and makes a comprehensive review of the paradigm, focusing on the services and techniques enhancing the cybersecurity field.On the one hand, we analyze the strong points of this methodology and propose numerous ways to apply it to cybersecurity.On the other hand, we cover the limitations when adopting it.Considering there is a lot left to explore in this ample field, we also enumerate some open challenges to be addressed in the future.Additionally, we study the role of OSINT in the public sphere of governments, which constitute an ideal landscape to exploit open data.
Named Entity Recognition Using BERT BiLSTM CRF for Chinese Electronic Health Records

As the generation and accumulation of massive electronic health records (EHR), how to effectively extract the valuable medical information from EHR has been a popular research topic. During the medical information extraction, named entity recognition (NER) is an essential natural language processing (NLP) task. This paper presents our efforts using neural network approaches for this task. Based on the Chinese EHR offered by CCKS 2019 and the Second Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University (SAHSU), several neural models for NER, including BiLSTM, have been compared, along with two pre-trained language models, word2vec and BERT. We have found that the BERT-BiLSTM-CRF model can achieve approximately 75% F1 score, which outperformed all other models during the tests.
Efficient Data Representation by Selecting Prototypes with Importance Weights

Prototypical examples that best summarize and compactly represent an underlying complex data distribution, communicate meaningful insights to humans in domains where simple explanations are hard to extract. In this paper, we present algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees to mine these data sets and select prototypes, a.k.a. representatives that optimally describes them. Our work notably generalizes the recent work by Kim et al. (2016) where in addition to selecting prototypes, we also associate non-negative weights which are indicative of their importance. This extension provides a single coherent framework under which both prototypes and criticisms (i.e. outliers) can be found. Furthermore, our framework works for any symmetric positive definite kernel thus addressing one of the key open questions laid out in Kim et al. (2016). By establishing that our objective function enjoys a key property of that of weak submodularity, we present a fast ProtoDash algorithm and also derive approximation guarantees for the same. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on diverse domains such as retail, digit recognition (MNIST) and on publicly available 40 health questionnaires obtained from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) website maintained by the US Dept. of Health. We validate the results quantitatively as well as qualitatively based on expert feedback and recently published scientific studies on public health, thus showcasing the power of our technique in providing actionability (for retail), utility (for MNIST), and insight (on CDC datasets), which arguably are the hallmarks of an effective interpretable machine learning method.
Private and Secure Distributed Matrix Multiplication With Flexible Communication Load

Large matrix multiplications are central to large-scale machine learning applications. These operations are often carried out on a distributed computing platform with a master server and multiple workers in the cloud operating in parallel. For such distributed platforms, it has been recently shown that coding over the input data matrices can reduce the computational delay, yielding a trade-off between recovery threshold, i.e., the number of workers required to recover the matrix product, and communication load, i.e., the total amount of data to be downloaded from the workers. In this paper, in addition to exact recovery requirements, we impose security and privacy constraints on the data matrices, and study the recovery threshold as a function of the communication load. We first assume that both matrices contain private information and that workers can collude to eavesdrop on the content of these data matrices. For this problem, we introduce a novel class of secure codes, referred to as secure generalized PolyDot (SGPD) codes, that generalize state-of-the-art non-secure codes for matrix multiplication. SGPD codes allow a flexible trade-off between recovery threshold and communication load for a fixed maximum number of colluding workers while providing perfect secrecy for the two data matrices. We then study a connection between secure matrix multiplication and private information retrieval. We specifically assume that one of the data matrices is taken from a public set known to all the workers. In this setup, the identity of the matrix of interest should be kept private from the workers. For this model, we present a variant of generalized PolyDot codes that can guarantee both secrecy of one matrix and privacy for the identity of the other matrix for the case of no colluding servers.