Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Uncertainty in Self-adaptive Systems: A Research Community Perspective

One of the primary drivers for self-adaptation is ensuring that systems achieve their goals regardless of the uncertainties they face during operation. Nevertheless, the concept of uncertainty in self-adaptive systems is still insufficiently understood. Several taxonomies of uncertainty have been proposed, and a substantial body of work exists on methods to tame uncertainty. Yet, these taxonomies and methods do not fully convey the research community’s perception on what constitutes uncertainty in self-adaptive systems and on the key characteristics of the approaches needed to tackle uncertainty. To understand this perception and learn from it, we conducted a survey comprising two complementary stages in which we collected the views of 54 and 51 participants, respectively. In the first stage, we focused on current research and development, exploring how the concept of uncertainty is understood in the community and how uncertainty is currently handled in the engineering of self-adaptive systems. In the second stage, we focused on directions for future research to identify potential approaches to dealing with unanticipated changes and other open challenges in handling uncertainty in self-adaptive systems. The key findings of the first stage are: (a) an overview of uncertainty sources considered in self-adaptive systems, (b) an overview of existing methods used to tackle uncertainty in concrete applications, (c) insights into the impact of uncertainty on non-functional requirements, (d) insights into different opinions in the perception of uncertainty within the community and the need for standardised uncertainty-handling processes to facilitate uncertainty management in self-adaptive systems. The key findings of the second stage are: (a) the insight that over 70% of the participants believe that self-adaptive systems can be engineered to cope with unanticipated change, (b) a set of potential approaches for dealing with unanticipated change, (c) a set of open challenges in mitigating uncertainty in self-adaptive systems, in particular in those with safety-critical requirements. From these findings, we outline an initial reference process to manage uncertainty in self-adaptive systems. We anticipate that the insights on uncertainty obtained from the community and our proposed reference process will inspire valuable future research on self-adaptive systems.
Learning Calibrated-Guidance for Object Detection in Aerial Images

Object detection is one of the most fundamental yet challenging research topics in the domain of computer vision. Recently, the study on this topic in aerial images has made tremendous progress. However, complex background and worse imaging quality are obvious problems in aerial object detection. Most state-of-the-art approaches tend to develop elaborate attention mechanisms for the space-time feature calibrations with arduous computational complexity, while surprisingly ignoring the importance of feature calibrations in channel-wise. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective calibrated-guidance (CG) scheme to enhance channel communications in a feature transformer fashion, which can adaptively determine the calibration weights for each channel based on the global feature affinity correlations. Specifically, for a given set of feature maps, CG first computes the feature similarity between each channel and the remaining channels as the intermediary calibration guidance. Then, rerepresenting each channel by aggregating all the channels weighted together via the guidance operation. Our CG is a general module that can be plugged into any deep neural networks, which is named as CG-Net. To demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency, extensive experiments are carried out on both oriented object detection task and horizontal object detection task in aerial images. Experimental results on two challenging benchmarks (<i>i</i>.<i>e</i>., DOTA and HRSC2016) demonstrate that our CG-Net can achieve the new state-of-the-art performance in accuracy with a fair computational overhead. The source code has been open sourced at <uri>https://github.com/WeiZongqi/CG-Net</uri>.
Request Scheduling in Quantum Networks

Quantumnetworking is emerging as a new research area to explore the opportunities of interconnecting quantum systems through end-to-end entanglement of qubits at geographical distance via quantum repeaters. A promising architecture has been proposed in the literature that decouples entanglement between adjacent quantum nodes/repeaters from establishing end-to-end paths by adopting a time slotted approach. Within this model, we destructure further end-to-end path establishment into two subproblems: path selection and scheduling. The former is set to determine the best repeaters to connect two end nodes, provided that all their local entanglements have succeeded. On the other hand, scheduling is concerned with deciding, which pairs of end nodes are served in the current time slot, while the others remain queued for later time slots. Unlike path selection, scheduling has not been investigated so far in the literature, particularly in presence of quantum noise, which makes both problems even more challenging. In this article, we propose to address it via a general framework of heuristic algorithms, for which we propose three illustrative instances with the objective of keeping the application delay small while achieving a good system utilization, in terms of high entanglement rate and fidelity of remotely entangled qubits. The system proposed is evaluated extensively via event-driven quantum network simulations, with noisy repeaters, in different node topologies under a Poisson arrival of requests from quantum applications. The results show the existence of a fundamental tradeoff between system- and application-level metrics, such as fairness versus entanglement and fidelity, which lays the foundations for further studies in this thriving research area.
Out-of-Scope Intent Detection with Self-Supervision and Discriminative Training

Out-of-scope intent detection is of practical importance in task-oriented dialogue systems.Since the distribution of outlier utterances is arbitrary and unknown in the training stage, existing methods commonly rely on strong assumptions on data distribution such as mixture of Gaussians to make inference, resulting in either complex multi-step training procedures or hand-crafted rules such as confidence threshold selection for outlier detection.In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to train an out-of-scope intent classifier in a fully end-to-end manner by simulating the test scenario in training, which requires no assumption on data distribution and no additional postprocessing or threshold setting.Specifically, we construct a set of pseudo outliers in the training stage, by generating synthetic outliers using inliner features via self-supervision and sampling out-of-scope sentences from easily available open-domain datasets.The pseudo outliers are used to train a discriminative classifier that can be directly applied to and generalize well on the test task.We evaluate our method extensively on four benchmark dialogue datasets and observe significant improvements over state-of-the-art approaches.
ReTraCk: A Flexible and Efficient Framework for Knowledge Base Question Answering

We present Retriever-Transducer-Checker (ReTraCk), a neural semantic parsing framework for large scale knowledge base question answering (KBQA).ReTraCk is designed as a modular framework to maintain high flexibility.It includes a retriever to retrieve relevant KB items efficiently, a transducer to generate logical form with syntax correctness guarantees and a checker to improve the transduction procedure.ReTraCk is ranked at top1 overall performance on the GrailQA leaderboard 1 and obtains highly competitive performance on the typical WebQuestionsSP benchmark.Our system can interact with users timely, demonstrating the efficiency of the proposed framework. 2
Blockchain-Based VEC Network Trust Management: A DRL Algorithm for Vehicular Service Offloading and Migration

To meet the execution requirements of delay-sensitive services in vehicular edge computing (VEC) networks, vehicular services need to be offloaded to edge computing nodes. For complex, large-scale services, the services need to be migrated if the services are not completed before the vehicles leave the coverage of edge computing nodes. Trust and resource matching between areas thus become major problems. This paper studies the decision model of vehicular service offloading and migration. First, software-defined network (SDN) technology is introduced into the traditional network architecture, and a two-layer distributed SDN-controlled VEC network architecture is designed, which is divided into a domain control layer and an area control layer. In this framework, we use the consortium blockchain as a carrier to share network topology information between SDN controllers to prevent information leakage. We then established a service offloading and migration optimization problem model to minimize service execution delay, reduce energy consumption and maximize the throughput of the blockchain system. We describe the problem model as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), introduce a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm named asynchronous advantage actor-critic (A3C) and design a dynamic service offloading and migration algorithm (DSOMA) based on A3C to solve the problem. Simulation results show that DSOMA can increase the throughput of the blockchain system, and DSOMA is superior to the deep Q-learning (DQN) algorithm and greedy offloading algorithm in reducing service execution delay and system energy consumption.
A Graph-Based Approach for Mitigating Multi-Sided Exposure Bias in Recommender Systems

Fairness is a critical system-level objective in recommender systems that has been the subject of extensive recent research. A specific form of fairness is supplier exposure fairness, where the objective is to ensure equitable coverage of items across all suppliers in recommendations provided to users. This is especially important in multistakeholder recommendation scenarios where it may be important to optimize utilities not just for the end user but also for other stakeholders such as item sellers or producers who desire a fair representation of their items. This type of supplier fairness is sometimes accomplished by attempting to increase aggregate diversity to mitigate popularity bias and to improve the coverage of long-tail items in recommendations. In this article, we introduce FairMatch, a general graph-based algorithm that works as a post-processing approach after recommendation generation to improve exposure fairness for items and suppliers. The algorithm iteratively adds high-quality items that have low visibility or items from suppliers with low exposure to the users’ final recommendation lists. A comprehensive set of experiments on two datasets and comparison with state-of-the-art baselines show that FairMatch, although it significantly improves exposure fairness and aggregate diversity, maintains an acceptable level of relevance of the recommendations.
Blocking Without Breaking: Identification and Mitigation of Non-Essential IoT Traffic

Abstract Despite the prevalence of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, there is little information about the purpose and risks of the Internet traffic these devices generate, and consumers have limited options for controlling those risks. A key open question is whether one can mitigate these risks by automatically blocking some of the Internet connections from IoT devices, without rendering the devices inoperable. In this paper, we address this question by developing a rigorous methodology that relies on automated IoT-device experimentation to reveal which network connections (and the information they expose) are essential, and which are not. We further develop strategies to automatically classify network traffic destinations as either required ( i.e. , their traffic is essential for devices to work properly) or not, hence allowing firewall rules to block traffic sent to non-required destinations without breaking the functionality of the device. We find that indeed 16 among the 31 devices we tested have at least one blockable non-required destination, with the maximum number of blockable destinations for a device being 11. We further analyze the destination of network traffic and find that all third parties observed in our experiments are blockable, while first and support parties are neither uniformly required or non-required. Finally, we demonstrate the limitations of existing blocklists on IoT traffic, propose a set of guidelines for automatically limiting non-essential IoT traffic, and we develop a prototype system that implements these guidelines.
A Real-Time Framework for Human Face Detection and Recognition in CCTV Images

This paper aims to develop a machine learning and deep learning-based real-time framework for detecting and recognizing human faces in closed-circuit television (CCTV) images. The traditional CCTV system needs a human for 24/7 monitoring, which is costly and insufficient. The automatic recognition system of faces in CCTV images with minimum human intervention and reduced cost can help many organizations, such as law enforcement, identifying the suspects, missing people, and people entering a restricted territory. However, image-based recognition has many issues, such as scaling, rotation, cluttered backgrounds, and variation in light intensity. This paper aims to develop a CCTV image-based human face recognition system using different techniques for feature extraction and face recognition. The proposed system includes image acquisition from CCTV, image preprocessing, face detection, localization, extraction from the acquired images, and recognition. We use two feature extraction algorithms, principal component analysis (PCA) and convolutional neural network (CNN). We use and compare the performance of the algorithms K-nearest neighbor (KNN), decision tree, random forest, and CNN. The recognition is done by applying these techniques to the dataset with more than 40K acquired real-time images at different settings such as light level, rotation, and scaling for simulation and performance evaluation. Finally, we recognized faces with a minimum computing time and an accuracy of more than 90%.
Quantum Algorithm Implementations for Beginners

As quantum computers become available to the general public, the need has arisen to train a cohort of quantum programmers, many of whom have been developing classical computer programs for most of their careers. While currently available quantum computers have less than 100 qubits, quantum computing hardware is widely expected to grow in terms of qubit count, quality, and connectivity. This review aims to explain the principles of quantum programming, which are quite different from classical programming, with straightforward algebra that makes understanding of the underlying fascinating quantum mechanical principles optional. We give an introduction to quantum computing algorithms and their implementation on real quantum hardware. We survey 20 different quantum algorithms, attempting to describe each in a succinct and self-contained fashion. We show how these algorithms can be implemented on IBM's quantum computer, and in each case, we discuss the results of the implementation with respect to differences between the simulator and the actual hardware runs. This article introduces computer scientists, physicists, and engineers to quantum algorithms and provides a blueprint for their implementations.
Demystifying the vulnerability propagation and its evolution via dependency trees in the NPM ecosystem

Third-party libraries with rich functionalities facilitate the fast development of JavaScript software, leading to the explosive growth of the NPM ecosystem. However, it also brings new security threats that vulnerabilities could be introduced through dependencies from third-party libraries. In particular, the threats could be excessively amplified by transitive dependencies. Existing research only considers direct dependencies or reasoning transitive dependencies based on reachability analysis, which neglects the NPM-specific dependency resolution rules as adapted during real installation, resulting in wrongly resolved dependencies. Consequently, further fine-grained analysis, such as precise vulnerability propagation and their evolution over time in dependencies, cannot be carried out precisely at a large scale, as well as deriving ecosystem-wide solutions for vulnerabilities in dependencies.
Adoption of cloud computing as innovation in the organization

Over the years, there has been a heavy reliance on cloud computing as IT has innovated through time. In recent times cloud computing has grown monumentally. Many organizations rely on this technology to perform their business as usual and use it as a backbone of their companies' IT infrastructure. This paper investigates the organizational adaptation for cloud computing technology - reviewing case studies from various institutions and companies worldwide to provide a detailed analysis of innovative techniques with cloud computing. We investigate the features and delivery approaches cloud computing offers and the potential challenges and constraints we face when adopting cloud computing into the business setting. We also explore the cybersecurity elements associated with cloud computing, focusing on intrusion detection and prevention and understanding how that can be applied in the cloud. Finally, we investigate the future research directions for cloud computing and expand this paper into further articles with experiments and results.
Sentiment Analysis on Diabetes Diagnosis Health Care Using Machine Learning Technique

Sentiment analysis is a natural language processing technique that extricated data from the text to identify the positive and negative polarity of information. This work aims at analyzing sentiments in healthcare information on diabetes. This automatic analysis assists in better understanding of the patient’s health condition. Machine learning-based sentiment analysis is proposed in this work which uses SVM classifier for classifying the sentiments based on the medical opinion for diagnosis. The probability for getting diabetes is estimated using Gaussian distribution based on the health condition of patients. Experimental evaluation shows that the SVM classifier achieves high performance with greater accuracy.
Optimal search mapping among sensors in heterogeneous smart homes

There are huge differences in the layouts and numbers of sensors in different smart home environments. Daily activities performed by residents trigger a variety of sensor event streams. Solving the problem of sensor mapping is an important prerequisite for the transfer of activity features in smart homes. However, it is common practice among most of the existing approaches that only sensor profile information or the ontological relationship between sensor location and furniture attachment are used for sensor mapping. The rough mapping seriously restricts the performance of daily activity recognition. This paper presents a mapping approach based on the optimal search for sensors. To begin with, a source smart home that is similar to the target one is selected. Thereafter, sensors in both source and target smart homes are grouped by sensor profile information. In addition, sensor mapping space is built. Furthermore, a small amount of data collected from the target smart home is used to evaluate each instance in sensor mapping space. In conclusion, Deep Adversarial Transfer Network is employed to perform daily activity recognition among heterogeneous smart homes. Testing is conducted using the public CASAC data set. The results have revealed that the proposed approach achieves a 7-10% improvement in accuracy, 5-11% improvement in precision, and 6-11% improvement in F1 score, compared with the existing methods.
Uncertainty Inspired Underwater Image Enhancement

A main challenge faced in the deep learning-based Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) is that the ground truth high-quality image is unavailable. Most of the existing methods first generate approximate reference maps and then train an enhancement network with certainty. This kind of method fails to handle the ambiguity of the reference map. In this paper, we resolve UIE into distribution estimation and consensus process. We present a novel probabilistic network to learn the enhancement distribution of degraded underwater images. Specifically, we combine conditional variational autoencoder with adaptive instance normalization to construct the enhancement distribution. After that, we adopt a consensus process to predict a deterministic result based on a set of samples from the distribution. By learning the enhancement distribution, our method can cope with the bias introduced in the reference map labeling to some extent. Additionally, the consensus process is useful to capture a robust and stable result. We examined the proposed method on two widely used real-world underwater image enhancement datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach enables sampling possible enhancement predictions. Meanwhile, the consensus estimate yields competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art UIE methods. Code available at https://github.com/zhenqifu/PUIE-Net.
Metaheuristic-Based Hyperparameter Tuning for Recurrent Deep Learning: Application to the Prediction of Solar Energy Generation

As solar energy generation has become more and more important for the economies of numerous countries in the last couple of decades, it is highly important to build accurate models for forecasting the amount of green energy that will be produced. Numerous recurrent deep learning approaches, mainly based on long short-term memory (LSTM), are proposed for dealing with such problems, but the most accurate models may differ from one test case to another with respect to architecture and hyperparameters. In the current study, the use of an LSTM and a bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) is proposed for dealing with a data collection that, besides the time series values denoting the solar energy generation, also comprises corresponding information about the weather. The proposed research additionally endows the models with hyperparameter tuning by means of an enhanced version of a recently proposed metaheuristic, the reptile search algorithm (RSA). The output of the proposed tuned recurrent neural network models is compared to the ones of several other state-of-the-art metaheuristic optimization approaches that are applied for the same task, using the same experimental setup, and the obtained results indicate the proposed approach as the better alternative. Moreover, the best recurrent model achieved the best results with R2 of 0.604, and a normalized MSE value of 0.014, which yields an improvement of around 13% over traditional machine learning models.