Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Two Novel Models for Traffic Sign Detection Based on YOLOv5s

Object detection and image recognition are some of the most significant and challenging branches in the field of computer vision. The prosperous development of unmanned driving technology has made the detection and recognition of traffic signs crucial. Affected by diverse factors such as light, the presence of small objects, and complicated backgrounds, the results of traditional traffic sign detection technology are not satisfactory. To solve this problem, this paper proposes two novel traffic sign detection models, called YOLOv5-DH and YOLOv5-TDHSA, based on the YOLOv5s model with the following improvements (YOLOv5-DH uses only the second improvement): (1) replacing the last layer of the ‘Conv + Batch Normalization + SiLU’ (CBS) structure in the YOLOv5s backbone with a transformer self-attention module (T in the YOLOv5-TDHSA’s name), and also adding a similar module to the last layer of its neck, so that the image information can be used more comprehensively, (2) replacing the YOLOv5s coupled head with a decoupled head (DH in both models’ names) so as to increase the detection accuracy and speed up the convergence, and (3) adding a small-object detection layer (S in the YOLOv5-TDHSA’s name) and an adaptive anchor (A in the YOLOv5-TDHSA’s name) to the YOLOv5s neck to improve the detection of small objects. Based on experiments conducted on two public datasets, it is demonstrated that both proposed models perform better than the original YOLOv5s model and three other state-of-the-art models (Faster R-CNN, YOLOv4-Tiny, and YOLOv5n) in terms of the mean accuracy (mAP) and F1 score, achieving mAP values of 77.9% and 83.4% and F1 score values of 0.767 and 0.811 on the TT100K dataset, and mAP values of 68.1% and 69.8% and F1 score values of 0.71 and 0.72 on the CCTSDB2021 dataset, respectively, for YOLOv5-DH and YOLOv5-TDHSA. This was achieved, however, at the expense of both proposed models having a bigger size, greater number of parameters, and slower processing speed than YOLOv5s, YOLOv4-Tiny and YOLOv5n, surpassing only Faster R-CNN in this regard. The results also confirmed that the incorporation of the T and SA improvements into YOLOv5s leads to further enhancement, represented by the YOLOv5-TDHSA model, which is superior to the other proposed model, YOLOv5-DH, which avails of only one YOLOv5s improvement (i.e., DH).
Review on the Application of Photovoltaic Forecasting Using Machine Learning for Very Short- to Long-Term Forecasting

Advancements in renewable energy technology have significantly reduced the consumer dependence on conventional energy sources for power generation. Solar energy has proven to be a sustainable source of power generation compared to other renewable energy sources. The performance of a photovoltaic (PV) system is highly dependent on the amount of solar penetration to the solar cell, the type of climatic season, the temperature of the surroundings, and the environmental humidity. Unfortunately, every renewable’s technology has its limitation. Consequently, this prevents the system from operating to a maximum or optimally. Achieving a precise PV system output power is crucial to overcoming solar power output instability and intermittency performance. This paper discusses an intensive review of machine learning, followed by the types of neural network models under supervised machine learning implemented in photovoltaic power forecasting. The literature of past researchers is collected, mainly focusing on the duration of forecasts for very short-, short-, and long-term forecasts in a photovoltaic system. The performance of forecasting is also evaluated according to a different type of input parameter and time-step resolution. Lastly, the crucial aspects of a conventional and hybrid model of machine learning and neural networks are reviewed comprehensively.
OCA: Ordered Clustering-Based Algorithm for E-Commerce Recommendation System

The industry of e-commerce (EC) has become more popular and creates tremendous business opportunities for many firms. Modern societies are gradually shifting towards convenient online shopping as a result of the emergence of EC. The rapid growth in the volume of the data puts users in a big challenge when purchasing products that best meet their preferences. The reason for this is that people will be overwhelmed with many similar products with different brands, prices, and ratings. Consequently, they will be unable to make the best decision about what to purchase. Various studies on recommendation systems have been reported in the literature, concentrating on the issues of cold-start and data sparsity, which are among the most common challenges in recommendation systems. This study attempts to examine a new clustering technique named the Ordered Clustering-based Algorithm (OCA), with the aim of reducing the impact of the cold-start and the data sparsity problems in EC recommendation systems. A comprehensive review of data clustering techniques has been conducted, to discuss and examine these data clustering techniques. The OCA attempts to exploit the collaborative filtering strategy for e-commerce recommendation systems to cluster users based on their similarities in preferences. Several experiments have been conducted over a real-world e-commerce data set to evaluate the efficiency and the effectiveness of the proposed solution. The results of the experiments confirmed that OCA outperforms the previous approaches, achieving higher percentages of Precision (P), Recall (R), and F-measure (F).
Task interleaving and orientation estimation for high-precision oriented object detection in aerial images

Oriented object detection in aerial images has received extensive attention due to its wide range of application scenarios. Although great success has been achieved, current methods still suffer from inferior high-precision detection performance. Firstly, the classification scores cannot truly represent the localization accuracy of the predictions. Secondly, the orientation prediction in these detectors is not accurate enough for high-precision object detection. In this paper, we propose a Task Interleaving and Orientation Estimation Detector (TIOE-Det) for high-quality oriented object detection in aerial images. Specifically, a posterior hierarchical alignment (PHA) label is proposed to optimize the detection pipeline. TIOE-Det adopts PHA label to integrate fine-grained posterior localization guidance into classification task to address the misalignment between classification and localization subtasks. Then, a balanced alignment loss is developed to solve the imbalance localization loss contribution in PHA prediction. Moreover, we propose a progressive orientation estimation (POE) strategy to approximate the orientation of objects with n-ary codes. On this basis, an angular deviation weighting strategy is proposed to achieve accurate evaluation of angle deviation in POE strategy. TIOE-Det achieves significant gains on high-precision detection performance. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets prove the superiority of our approach. Codes are available at https://github.com/ming71/TIOE.
Video Transformers: A Survey

Transformer models have shown great success handling long-range interactions, making them a promising tool for modeling video. However, they lack inductive biases and scale quadratically with input length. These limitations are further exacerbated when dealing with the high dimensionality introduced by the temporal dimension. While there are surveys analyzing the advances of Transformers for vision, none focus on an in-depth analysis of video-specific designs. In this survey, we analyze the main contributions and trends of works leveraging Transformers to model video. Specifically, we delve into how videos are handled at the input level first. Then, we study the architectural changes made to deal with video more efficiently, reduce redundancy, re-introduce useful inductive biases, and capture long-term temporal dynamics. In addition, we provide an overview of different training regimes and explore effective self-supervised learning strategies for video. Finally, we conduct a performance comparison on the most common benchmark for Video Transformers (i.e., action classification), finding them to outperform 3D ConvNets even with less computational complexity.
Customers’ Perception of the Social Responsibility in the Private Hospitals in Greater Amman

The study determines the level of patients’ and visitors’ perception of social responsibility in private hospitals in Greater Amman. The population of the study consisted of all patients and visitors of private hospitals in Greater Amman. The sample of the study consisted of patients and visitors of three private hospitals (Jordan Hospital, Istishari Hospital, AlKhalidi Hospital),100 patients and visitors from each hospital, the total number of patients and visitors are three hundred. Those patients and visitors are randomly selected, three hundred questionnaires were distributed by hand, out of them 210 questionnaires are returned complete with a response rate of 70%. This study identifies to managers and decision-makers in private hospitals that to which extent the patients and visitors of private hospitals perceive their social responsibility programs and consequently encourages them to develop successful social responsibility programs which compatible with customer's perceptions and preferences. The results show that all dimensions of social responsibility are moderately perceived by patients and visitors of private hospitals in Greater Amman.
Broadband squeezed microwaves and amplification with a Josephson travelling-wave parametric amplifier

Squeezing of the electromagnetic vacuum is an essential metrological technique used to reduce quantum noise in applications spanning gravitational wave detection, biological microscopy, and quantum information science. In superconducting circuits, the resonator-based Josephson-junction parametric amplifiers conventionally used to generate squeezed microwaves are constrained by a narrow bandwidth and low dynamic range. In this work, we develop a dual-pump, broadband Josephson traveling-wave parametric amplifier that combines a phase-sensitive extinction ratio of 56 dB with single-mode squeezing on par with the best resonator-based squeezers. We also demonstrate two-mode squeezing at microwave frequencies with bandwidth in the gigahertz range that is almost two orders of magnitude wider than that of contemporary resonator-based squeezers. Our amplifier is capable of simultaneously creating entangled microwave photon pairs with large frequency separation, with potential applications including high-fidelity qubit readout, quantum illumination and teleportation.
Sustainable and efficient E-learning internet of things system through blockchain technology

E-Learning Education systems are gaining attention day-to-day because of their inclusive pertinence in the distance education system. Due to COVID-19, the online learning education system has become very popular. Most probably, all education systems have been using the IoT-based E-Learning system to continue the students’ education without hindrance during the COVID lockdown. Several E-Learning IoT schemes are explored that reflect privacy and security, but still, there is no detailed scheme; hence, it needs a sustainable, secure E-Learning IoT system. The characteristics and prospects of the Internet of Things are discussed in this article. By analyzing the various functions and capabilities of the Internet of Things, this article aims to provide an overview of the various advantages and challenges of using the platform for e-learning. This paper proposed the E-Learning IoT architecture with Blockchain technology, with layers of different IoT and Blockchain concepts to secure the online education system. Also, the block diagram of the proposed architecture demonstrates how students can securely access or interact with the online learning system through Blockchain technology. By implementing the proposed e-learning IoT architecture, universities and colleges can improve their distance learning programs and increase efficiency without affecting their academic activities. Finally, the study found that e-learning positively impacts students' learning experience and overall quality of education. It also exhibited a significant positive impact on their flexibility and academic productivity.
Gradient and Channel Aware Dynamic Scheduling for Over-the-Air Computation in Federated Edge Learning Systems

To satisfy the expected plethora of computation-heavy applications, federated edge learning (FEEL) is a new paradigm featuring distributed learning to carry the capacities of low-latency and privacy-preserving. To further improve the efficiency of wireless data aggregation and model learning, over-the-air computation (AirComp) is emerging as a promising solution by using the superposition characteristics of wireless channels. However, the fading and noise of wireless channels can cause aggregate distortions in AirComp enabled federated learning. In addition, the quality of collected data and energy consumption of edge devices may also impact the accuracy and efficiency of model aggregation as well as convergence. To solve these problems, this work proposes a dynamic device scheduling mechanism, which can select qualified edge devices to transmit their local models with a proper power control policy so as to participate the model training at the server in federated learning via AirComp. In this mechanism, the data importance is measured by the gradient of local model parameter, channel condition and energy consumption of the device jointly. In particular, to fully use distributed datasets and accelerate the convergence rate of federated learning, the local updates of unselected devices are also retained and accumulated for future potential transmission, instead of being discarded directly. Furthermore, the Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty optimization problem is formulated for searching the optimal device selection strategy. Simulation results validate that the proposed scheduling mechanism can achieve higher test accuracy and faster convergence rate, and is robust against different channel conditions.
Self-Supervised Graph Completion for Incomplete Multi-View Clustering

Incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC) is challenging, as it requires adequately exploring complementary and consistency information under the incompleteness of data. Most existing approaches attempt to overcome the incompleteness at instance-level. In this work, we develop a new approach to facilitate IMVC from a new perspective. Specifically, we transfer the issue of missing instances to a similarity graph completion problem for incomplete views, and propose a self-supervised multi-view graph completion algorithm to infer the associated missing entries. Further, by incorporating constrained feature learning, the inferred graph can be naturally leveraged in representation learning. We theoretically show that our feature learning process performs an Auto-Regressive filter function by encoding the learned similarity graph, which could yield discriminative representation for a clustering task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with state-of-the-art methods.
Density peaks clustering algorithm based on fuzzy and weighted shared neighbor for uneven density datasets

Uneven density data refers to data with a certain difference in sample density between clusters. The local density of density peaks clustering algorithm (DPC) does not consider the effect of sample density difference between clusters of uneven density data, which may lead to wrong selection of cluster centers; the algorithm allocation strategy makes it easy to incorrectly allocate samples originally belonging to sparse clusters to dense clusters, which reduces clustering efficiency. In this study, we proposed the density peaks clustering algorithm based on fuzzy and weighted shared neighbor for uneven density datasets (DPC-FWSN). First, a nearest neighbor fuzzy kernel function is obtained by combining K-nearest neighbor and fuzzy neighborhood. Then, local density is redefined by the nearest neighbor fuzzy kernel function. The local density can better characterize the distribution characteristics of the sample by balancing the contribution of sample density in dense and sparse areas, in order to avoid the situation that the sparse cluster does not have a cluster center. Finally, the allocation strategy for weighted shared neighbor similarity is proposed to optimize the sample allocation at the boundary of the sparse cluster. Experiments are performed on IDPC-FA, FKNN-DPC, FNDPC, DPCSA and DPC for uneven density datasets, complex morphologies datasets and real datasets. The clustering results demonstrate that DPC-FWSN effectively handles datasets with uneven density distribution.
An Adaptable and Unsupervised TinyML Anomaly Detection System for Extreme Industrial Environments

Industrial assets often feature multiple sensing devices to keep track of their status by monitoring certain physical parameters. These readings can be analyzed with machine learning (ML) tools to identify potential failures through anomaly detection, allowing operators to take appropriate corrective actions. Typically, these analyses are conducted on servers located in data centers or the cloud. However, this approach increases system complexity and is susceptible to failure in cases where connectivity is unavailable. Furthermore, this communication restriction limits the approach’s applicability in extreme industrial environments where operating conditions affect communication and access to the system. This paper proposes and evaluates an end-to-end adaptable and configurable anomaly detection system that uses the Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing, and Tiny-MLOps methodologies in an extreme industrial environment such as submersible pumps. The system runs on an IoT sensing Kit, based on an ESP32 microcontroller and MicroPython firmware, located near the data source. The processing pipeline on the sensing device collects data, trains an anomaly detection model, and alerts an external gateway in the event of an anomaly. The anomaly detection model uses the isolation forest algorithm, which can be trained on the microcontroller in just 1.2 to 6.4 s and detect an anomaly in less than 16 milliseconds with an ensemble of 50 trees and 80 KB of RAM. Additionally, the system employs blockchain technology to provide a transparent and irrefutable repository of anomalies.
Forecasting Cryptocurrency Prices Using LSTM, GRU, and Bi-Directional LSTM: A Deep Learning Approach

Highly accurate cryptocurrency price predictions are of paramount interest to investors and researchers. However, owing to the nonlinearity of the cryptocurrency market, it is difficult to assess the distinct nature of time-series data, resulting in challenges in generating appropriate price predictions. Numerous studies have been conducted on cryptocurrency price prediction using different Deep Learning (DL) based algorithms. This study proposes three types of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs): namely, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and Bi-Directional LSTM (Bi-LSTM) for exchange rate predictions of three major cryptocurrencies in the world, as measured by their market capitalization—Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Litecoin (LTC). The experimental results on the three major cryptocurrencies using both Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) show that the Bi-LSTM performed better in prediction than LSTM and GRU. Therefore, it can be considered the best algorithm. Bi-LSTM presented the most accurate prediction compared to GRU and LSTM, with MAPE values of 0.036, 0.041, and 0.124 for BTC, LTC, and ETH, respectively. The paper suggests that the prediction models presented in it are accurate in predicting cryptocurrency prices and can be beneficial for investors and traders. Additionally, future research should focus on exploring other factors that may influence cryptocurrency prices, such as social media and trading volumes.
Federated Unlearning for On-Device Recommendation

The increasing data privacy concerns in recommendation systems have made federated recommendations attract more and more attention. Existing federated recommendation systems mainly focus on how to effectively and securely learn personal interests and preferences from their on-device interaction data. Still, none of them considers how to efficiently erase a user's contribution to the federated training process. We argue that such a dual setting is necessary. First, from the privacy protection perspective, "the right to be forgotten (RTBF)" requires that users have the right to withdraw their data contributions. Without the reversible ability, federated recommendation systems risk breaking data protection regulations. On the other hand, enabling a federated recommender to forget specific users can improve its robustness and resistance to malicious clients' attacks.
An Effective Privacy-Preserving Blockchain-Assisted Security Protocol for Cloud-Based Digital Twin Environment

Recently, the Digital Twin (DT) technology has procured a lot of attention because of its applicability in the manufacturing and space industries. The DT environment involves the formation of a clone of the tangible object to perform simulations in the virtual space. The combination of conceptual development, predictive maintenance, real-time monitoring, and simulation characteristics of DT has increased the utilization of DT in different scenarios, such as medical environments, healthcare, manufacturing industries, aerospace, etc. However, these utilizations have also brought serious security pitfalls in DT deployment. Towards this, several authentication protocols with different security and privacy features for DT environments have been proposed. In this article, we first review a recently proposed two-factor authentication protocol for DT environments that utilizes the blockchain technology. However, the analyzed scheme is unable to offer the desirable security and cannot withstand various security attacks like offline password-guessing attack, smart card stolen attack, anonymity property, and known session-specific temporary information attack. We also demonstrate that an attacker can impersonate the analyzed protocol’s legal user, owner, and cloud server. To mitigate these security loopholes, we devise an effective three-factor privacy-preserving authentication scheme for DT environments. The proposed work is demonstrated to be secure by performing the informal security analysis, the formal security analysis using the widely recognized Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, and the Real-or-Random (ROR) model. A detailed comparative study with the existing competing schemes including the analyzed scheme demonstrates that the devised framework furnishes better security features while also having lower computation costs and comparable communication costs than the existing schemes.