Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Which cryptocurrency data sources should scholars use?

Inspired by Alexander and Dakos (2020), we shed more light on the adequacy of data in the cryptocurrency literature by analysing the scaling properties and underlying processes of the main cryptocurrency databases (Coinmarketcap, Coingecko, BraveNewCoin and Cryptocompare) and exchange platforms (Coinbase, Bitstamp, Bittrex, Cexio and Exmo). Our results show that coin-ranking sites, such as Coinmarketcap, Coingecko and BraveNewCoin (i) include most of the cryptocurrency trading activity and (ii) are essentially characterised by the same underlying processes as the main exchange platforms (Coinbase and Bitstamp) and alternative coin-ranking sites (Cryptocompare), regardless of the possible issues arising from the aggregation of different exchanges to compute a unique cryptocurrency price. Therefore, we state that these databases are appropriate to conduct research. At any rate, we observe that all the databases analysed in this paper show the same underlying process for most liquid cryptocurrencies; consequently, scholars could use any of them for their studies, as long as they consider the different trading activity included by each database. This result is supported by an empirical analysis focused on weak-form market efficiency, since we report the same degree of efficiency regardless of the database and exchange platform. Nevertheless, we recognise the need for further research, given the gap in the literature and the black-box method used by coin-ranking sites to compute a unique cryptocurrency price.
Hate speech detection on Twitter using transfer learning

Social Media has become an ultimate driver of social change in the global society. Implications of the events, that take place in one corner of the word, reverberate across the globe in various geographies. This is so because the huge amount of data generated on these platforms, reaches the far corners of the world in the blink of an eye. Developers of these platforms are facing numerous challenges to keep cyber space as inclusive and healthy as possible. However, in recent years, the phenomena of offensive speech and hate speech have risen their ugly heads. Despite manual efforts, the scope of this problem is so immense that it cannot be tackled by using concerted teams. In fact, there is a need that an automated technique is designed that detects and removes offensive and hateful comments before the materialization of their harmful impacts. In this research work, we develop an Urdu language hate lexicon, on the basis of this lexicon we formulate annotated dataset of 10,526 Urdu tweets. Furthermore, as baseline experiments, we use various machine learning techniques for hate speech detection. In addition, we use transfer learning to exploit pre-trained FastText Urdu word embeddings and multi-lingual BERT embeddings for our task. Finally, we experiment with four different variants of BERT to exploit transfer learning, and we show that BERT, xlm-roberta and distil-Bert are able to achieve encouraging F1-scores of 0.68, 0.68 and 0.69 respectively, on our multi class classification task. All these models exhibited success to varying degree but outperform a number of deep learning and machine learning baseline models.
A Lightweight Hybrid Deep Learning Privacy Preserving Model for FC-Based Industrial Internet of Medical Things

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is gaining importance as most technologies and applications are integrated with the IIoT. Moreover, it consists of several tiny sensors to sense the environment and gather the information. These devices continuously monitor, collect, exchange, analyze, and transfer the captured data to nearby devices or servers using an open channel, i.e., internet. However, such centralized system based on IIoT provides more vulnerabilities to security and privacy in IIoT networks. In order to resolve these issues, we present a blockchain-based deep-learning framework that provides two levels of security and privacy. First a blockchain scheme is designed where each participating entities are registered, verified, and thereafter validated using smart contract based enhanced Proof of Work, to achieve the target of security and privacy. Second, a deep-learning scheme with a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) technique for privacy and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) for intrusion detection is designed. The experimental results are based on the IoT-Botnet and ToN-IoT datasets that are publicly available. The proposed simulations results are compared with the benchmark models and it is validated that the proposed framework outperforms the existing system.
Nonadiabatic geometric quantum computation with cat-state qubits via invariant-based reverse engineering

We propose a protocol to realize nonadiabatic geometric quantum computation of small-amplitude Schr\"odinger cat qubits via invariant-based reverse engineering. We consider a system with a two-photon driven Kerr nonlinearity, which provides a pair of dressed even and odd coherent states, i.e., Schr\"odinger cat states for fault-tolerant quantum computations. An additional coherent field is applied to linearly drive a cavity mode, to induce oscillations between dressed cat states. By designing this linear drive with invariant-based reverse engineering, nonadiabatic geometric quantum computation with cat qubits can be implemented. The performance of the protocol is estimated by taking into account the influence of systematic errors, additive white Gaussian noise, and decoherence including photon loss and dephasing. Numerical results demonstrate that our protocol is robust against these negative factors. Therefore, this protocol may provide a feasible method for nonadiabatic geometric quantum computation in bosonic systems.
LOC-FLOW: An End-to-End Machine Learning-Based High-Precision Earthquake Location Workflow

Abstract The ever-increasing networks and quantity of seismic data drive the need for seamless and automatic workflows for rapid and accurate earthquake detection and location. In recent years, machine learning (ML)-based pickers have achieved remarkable accuracy and efficiency with generalization, and thus can significantly improve the earthquake location accuracy of previously developed sequential location methods. However, the inconsistent input or output (I/O) formats between multiple packages often limit their cross application. To reduce format barriers, we incorporated a widely used ML phase picker—PhaseNet—with several popular earthquake location methods and developed a “hands-free” end-to-end ML-based location workflow (named LOC-FLOW), which can be applied directly to continuous waveforms and build high-precision earthquake catalogs at local and regional scales. The renovated open-source package assembles several sequential algorithms including seismic first-arrival picking (PhaseNet and STA/LTA), phase association (REAL), absolute location (VELEST and HYPOINVERSE), and double-difference relative location (hypoDD and GrowClust). We provided different location strategies and I/O interfaces for format conversion to form a seamless earthquake location workflow. Different algorithms can be flexibly selected and/or combined. As an example, we apply LOC-FLOW to the 28 September 2004 Mw 6.0 Parkfield, California, earthquake sequence. LOC-FLOW accomplished seismic phase picking, association, velocity model updating, station correction, absolute location, and double-difference relocation for 16-day continuous seismic data. We detected and located 3.7 times (i.e., 4357) as many as earthquakes with cross-correlation double-difference locations from the Northern California Earthquake Data Center. Our study demonstrates that LOC-FLOW is capable of building high-precision earthquake catalogs efficiently and seamlessly from continuous seismic data.
Teachers’ professional digital competence: an overview of conceptualisations in the literature

Educational research has increasingly drawn attention to teachers’ professional digital competence.Various theoretical and methodological perspectives involving a plethora of terms are used to investigate teachers’ competences in relation to technology-based teaching. The concept of teachers’ professional digital competence still appears to be ambiguous and elusive. This literature overview aims to scrutinise if, and how the concepts addressing teachers’ professional digital competence are defined or conceptualised in research. In the publications retrieved from the search in educational databases, we found that the concept of teachers’ professional digital competence, or related concepts, was frequently mentioned in abstracts, keywords and full texts, but to a large extent, it was rarely described in detail. In our final corpus of 18 publications, we could distinguish seven recurring aspects of teachers’ professional digital competence; 1) technological competence, 2) content knowledge, 3) attitudes to technology use, 4) pedagogical competence, 5) cultural awareness, 6) critical approach and 7) professional engagement, with the technological and pedagogical competences as the most prominent. Inspired by Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, these aspects are analysed as operating within microsystems of individual teachers and within meso- and macrosystems of interactive teachers in interplay with the situated classroom contexts and on larger societal systems.
Learning Discriminative Cross-Modality Features for RGB-D Saliency Detection

How to explore useful information from depth is the key success of the RGB-D saliency detection methods. While the RGB and depth images are from different domains, a modality gap will lead to unsatisfactory results for simple feature concatenation. Towards better performance, most methods focus on bridging this gap and designing different cross-modal fusion modules for features, while ignoring explicitly extracting some useful consistent information from them. To overcome this problem, we develop a simple yet effective RGB-D saliency detection method by learning discriminative cross-modality features based on the deep neural network. The proposed method first learns modality-specific features for RGB and depth inputs. And then we separately calculate the correlations of every pixel-pair in a cross-modality consistent way, i.e., the distribution ranges are consistent for the correlations calculated based on features extracted from RGB (RGB correlation) or depth inputs (depth correlation). From different perspectives, color or spatial, the RGB and depth correlations end up at the same point to depict how tightly each pixel-pair is related. Secondly, to complemently gather RGB and depth information, we propose a novel correlation-fusion to fuse RGB and depth correlations, resulting in a cross-modality correlation. Finally, the features are refined with both long-range cross-modality correlations and local depth correlations to predict salient maps. In which, the long-range cross-modality correlation provides context information for accurate localization, and the local depth correlation keeps good subtle structures for fine segmentation. In addition, a lightweight DepthNet is designed for efficient depth feature extraction. We solve the proposed network in an end-to-end manner. Both quantitative and qualitative experimental results demonstrate the proposed algorithm achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods.
Hyperbolic Deep Neural Networks: A Survey

Recently, hyperbolic deep neural networks (HDNNs) have been gaining momentum as the deep representations in the hyperbolic space provide high fidelity embeddings with few dimensions, especially for data possessing hierarchical structure. Such a hyperbolic neural architecture is quickly extended to different scientific fields, including natural language processing, single-cell RNA-sequence analysis, graph embedding, financial analysis, and computer vision. The promising results demonstrate its superior capability, significant compactness of the model, and a substantially better physical interpretability than its counterpart in the euclidean space. To stimulate future research, this paper presents a comprehensive review of the literature around the neural components in the construction of HDNN, as well as the generalization of the leading deep approaches to the hyperbolic space. It also presents current applications of various tasks, together with insightful observations and identifying open questions and promising future directions.
Regional Semantic Contrast and Aggregation for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Learning semantic segmentation from weakly-labeled (e.g., image tags only) data is challenging since it is hard to infer dense object regions from sparse semantic tags. Despite being broadly studied, most current efforts directly learn from limited semantic annotations carried by individual image or image pairs, and struggle to obtain integral localization maps. Our work alleviates this from a novel perspective, by exploring rich semantic contexts synergistically among abundant weakly-labeled training data for network learning and inference. In particular, we propose regional semantic contrast and aggregation (RCA). RCA is equipped with a regional memory bank to store massive, diverse object patterns appearing in training data, which acts as strong support for exploration of dataset-level semantic structure. Particularly, we propose i) semantic contrast to drive network learning by contrasting massive categorical object regions, leading to a more holistic object pattern understanding, and ii) semantic aggregation to gather diverse relational contexts in the memory to enrich semantic repre-sentations. In this manner, RCA earns a strong capability of fine-grained semantic understanding, and eventually establishes new state-of-the-art results on two popular benchmarks, i.e., PASCAL VOC 2012 and COCO 2014.
Estimating the spatial distribution of solar photovoltaic power generation potential on different types of rural rooftops using a deep learning network applied to satellite images

Rooftop photovoltaic (PV) power generation is an important form of solar energy development, especially in rural areas where there is a large quantity of idle rural building roofs. Existing methods to estimate the spatial distribution of PV power generation potential are either unable to obtain spatial information or are too expensive to be applied in rural areas. Herein, we propose a novel approach to estimate the spatial distribution of the general potential of rural rooftop power from publicly available satellite images. We divide rural building roofs into three categories based on their orientation and roof angle and propose a revised U-Net deep learning network to extract roof images from satellite images at the macro level. Based on the rooftop detection, a calculation method for the potential area of the installed PV panel at the micro level was developed, considering different types of PV panels and their maintenance methods. By combining the above results and setting the solar radiation parameters and PV system efficiency, we can obtain the spatial distribution of the rooftop PV power generation potential in rural areas. This method is applied in northern China on a village and a town scale, and the overall accuracy of the revised U-Net model can reach over 92%. The spatial distribution information was analyzed and displayed. The annual average PV power generation potential ranges from 26.5 to 36.2 MWh per household and from 7.3 to 10 GWh per village.
Multi-Instance Pose Networks: Rethinking Top-Down Pose Estimation

A key assumption of top-down human pose estimation approaches is their expectation of having a single person/instance present in the input bounding box. This often leads to failures in crowded scenes with occlusions. We propose a novel solution to overcome the limitations of this fundamental assumption. Our Multi-Instance Pose Network (MIPNet) allows for predicting multiple 2D pose instances within a given bounding box. We introduce a Multi-Instance Modulation Block (MIMB) that can adaptively modulate channel-wise feature responses for each instance and is parameter efficient. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by evaluating on COCO, CrowdPose, and OCHuman datasets. Specifically, we achieve 70.0 AP on CrowdPose and 42.5 AP on OCHuman test sets, a significant improvement of 2.4 AP and 6.5 AP over the prior art, respectively. When using ground truth bounding boxes for inference, MIP-Net achieves an improvement of 0.7 AP on COCO, 0.9 AP on CrowdPose, and 9.1 AP on OCHuman validation sets compared to HRNet. Interestingly, when fewer, high confidence bounding boxes are used, HRNet’s performance degrades (by 5 AP) on OCHuman, whereas MIPNet maintains a relatively stable performance (drop of 1 AP) for the same inputs.
The Effect of Focal Distance, Age, and Brightness on Near-Field Augmented Reality Depth Matching

Many augmented reality (AR) applications operate within near-field reaching distances, and require matching the depth of a virtual object with a real object. The accuracy of this matching was measured in three experiments, which examined the effect of focal distance, age, and brightness, within distances of 33.3 to 50 cm, using a custom-built AR haploscope. Experiment I examined the effect of focal demand, at the levels of collimated (infinite focal distance), consistent with other depth cues, and at the midpoint of reaching distance. Observers were too young to exhibit age-related reductions in accommodative ability. The depth matches of collimated targets were increasingly overestimated with increasing distance, consistent targets were slightly underestimated, and midpoint targets were accurately estimated. Experiment II replicated Experiment I, with older observers. Results were similar to Experiment I. Experiment III replicated Experiment I with dimmer targets, using young observers. Results were again consistent with Experiment I, except that both consistent and midpoint targets were accurately estimated. In all cases, collimated results were explained by a model, where the collimation biases the eyes' vergence angle outwards by a constant amount. Focal demand and brightness affect near-field AR depth matching, while age-related reductions in accommodative ability have no effect.
Locality-Aware Scheduling for Containers in Cloud Computing

The state-of-the-art scheduler of containerized cloud services considers load balance as the only criterion; many other important properties, including application performance, are overlooked. In the era of Big Data, however, applications evolve to be increasingly more data-intensive thus perform poorly when deployed on containerized cloud services. To that end, this paper aims to improve today's cloud service by taking application performance into account for the next-generation container schedulers. More specifically, in this work we build and analyze a new model that respects both load balance and application performance. Unlike prior studies, our model abstracts the dilemma between load balance and application performance into a unified optimization problem and then employs a statistical method to efficiently solve it. The most challenging part is that some sub-problems are extremely complex (for example, NP-hard), and heuristic algorithms have to be devised. Last but not least, we implement a system prototype of the proposed scheduling strategy for containerized cloud services. Experimental results show that our system can significantly boost application performance while preserving high load balance.
Localization-Aware Active Learning for Object Detection

Active learning—a class of algorithms that iteratively searches for the most informative samples to include in a training dataset—has been shown to be effective at annotating data for image classification. However, the use of active learning for object detection is still largely unexplored as determining informativeness of an object-location hypothesis is more difficult. In this paper, we address this issue and present two metrics for measuring the informativeness of an object hypothesis, which allow us to leverage active learning to reduce the amount of annotated data needed to achieve a target object detection performance. Our first metric measures “localization tightness” of an object hypothesis, which is based on the overlapping ratio between the region proposal and the final prediction. Our second metric measures “localization stability” of an object hypothesis, which is based on the variation of predicted object locations when input images are corrupted by noise. Our experimental results show that by augmenting a conventional active-learning algorithm designed for classification with the proposed metrics, the amount of labeled training data required can be reduced up to 25%. Moreover, on PASCAL 2007 and 2012 datasets our localization-stability method has an average relative improvement of 96.5% and 81.9% over the baseline method using classification only.
Computing inter-document similarity with Context Semantic Analysis

We propose a novel knowledge-based technique for inter-document similarity computation, called Context Semantic Analysis (CSA). Several specialized approaches built on top of specific knowledge base (e.g. Wikipedia) exist in literature, but CSA differs from them because it is designed to be portable to any RDF knowledge base. In fact, our technique relies on a generic RDF knowledge base (e.g. DBpedia and Wikidata) to extract from it a Semantic Context Vector, a novel model for representing the context of a document, which is exploited by CSA to compute inter-document similarity effectively. Moreover, we show how CSA can be effectively applied in the Information Retrieval domain. Experimental results show that: (i) for the general task of inter-document similarity, CSA outperforms baselines built on top of traditional methods, and achieves a performance similar to the ones built on top of specific knowledge bases; (ii) for Information Retrieval tasks, enriching documents with context (i.e., employing the Semantic Context Vector model) improves the results quality of the state-of-the-art technique that employs such similar semantic enrichment.
Multi-Modality Multi-Task Recurrent Neural Network for Online Action Detection

Online action detection is a brand new challenge and plays a critical role in visual surveillance analytics. It goes one step further than a conventional action recognition task, which recognizes human actions from well-segmented clips. Online action detection is desired to identify the action type and localize action positions on the fly from the untrimmed stream data. In this paper, we propose a multi-modality multi-task recurrent neural network, which incorporates both RGB and Skeleton networks. We design different temporal modeling networks to capture specific characteristics from various modalities. Then, a deep long short-term memory subnetwork is utilized effectively to capture the complex long-range temporal dynamics, naturally avoiding the conventional sliding window design and thus ensuring high computational efficiency. Constrained by a multi-task objective function in the training phase, this network achieves superior detection performance and is capable of automatically localizing the start and end points of actions more accurately. Furthermore, embedding subtask of regression provides the ability to forecast the action prior to its occurrence. We evaluate the proposed method and several other methods in action detection and forecasting on the online action detection data set and gaming action data set datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both tasks.