Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Implementing secure applications in smart city clouds using microservices

Smart Cities make use of ICT technology to address the challenges of modern urban management. The cloud provides an efficient and cost-effective platform on which they can manage, store and process data, as well as build applications performing complex computations and analyses. The quickly changing requirements in a Smart City require flexible software architectures that let these applications scale in a distributed environment such as the cloud. Smart Cities have to deal with huge amounts of data including sensitive information about infrastructure and citizens. In order to leverage the benefits of the cloud, in particular in terms of scalability and cost-effectiveness, this data should be stored in a public cloud. However, in such an environment, sensitive data needs to be encrypted to prevent unauthorized access. In this paper, we present a software architecture design that can be used as a template for the implementation of Smart City applications. The design is based on the microservice architectural style, which provides properties that help make Smart City applications scalable and flexible. In addition, we present a hybrid approach to securing sensitive data in the cloud. Our architecture design combines a public cloud with a trusted private environment. To store data in a cost-effective manner in the public cloud, we encrypt metadata items with CP-ABE (Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption) and actual Smart City data with symmetric encryption. This approach allows data to be shared across multiple administrations and makes efficient use of cloud resources. We show the applicability of our design by implementing a web-based application for urban risk management. We evaluate our architecture based on qualitative criteria, benchmark the performance of our security approach, and discuss it regarding honest-but-curious cloud providers as well as attackers trying to access user data through eavesdropping. Our findings indicate that the microservice architectural style fits the requirements of scalable Smart City applications while the proposed security approach helps prevent unauthorized access.
Demonstration of Adiabatic Variational Quantum Computing with a Superconducting Quantum Coprocessor

Adiabatic quantum computing enables the preparation of many-body ground states. Realization poses major experimental challenges: Direct analog implementation requires complex Hamiltonian engineering, while the digitized version needs deep quantum gate circuits. To bypass these obstacles, we suggest an adiabatic variational hybrid algorithm, which employs short quantum circuits and provides a systematic quantum adiabatic optimization of the circuit parameters. The quantum adiabatic theorem promises not only the ground state but also that the excited eigenstates can be found. We report the first experimental demonstration that many-body eigenstates can be efficiently prepared by an adiabatic variational algorithm assisted with a multiqubit superconducting coprocessor. We track the real-time evolution of the ground and excited states of transverse-field Ising spins with a fidelity that can reach about 99%.
A Robust Human Activity Recognition Approach Using OpenPose, Motion Features, and Deep Recurrent Neural Network

With the emerging advancements in computer vision and pattern recognition, methods for human activity recognition have become increasingly accessible. In this paper, we present a robust approach for human activity recognition which uses the open source library OpenPose to extract anatomical key points from RGB images. We further use these key points to extract robust motion features considering their movements in consecutive frames'. Then, a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with Long Short-term Memory cells (LSTM) is used to recognize the activities associated with these features. To make the approach person-independent, different subjects from different camera angles are used. The proposed method shows promising performance, with the best result reaching an overall accuracy of 92.4% on a publicly available activity data set, which outperforms the conventional approaches (i.e. support vector machines, decision trees, and random forests) which achieve maximum accuracy of 78.5%. The proposed activity recognition system can contribute in prominent research fields such as image processing and computer vision with practical applications such as caregiving for older people to help them live more independently.
A Large Scale Study of Long-Time Contributor Prediction for GitHub Projects

The continuous contributions made by long time contributors (LTCs) are a key factor enabling open source software (OSS) projects to be successful and survival. We study Github as it has a large number of OSS projects and millions of contributors, which enables the study of the transition from newcomers to LTCs. In this paper, we investigate whether we can effectively predict newcomers in OSS projects to be LTCs based on their activity data that is collected from Github. We collect Github data from GHTorrent, a mirror of Github data. We select the most popular 917 projects, which contain 75,046 contributors. We determine a developer as a LTC of a project if the time interval between his/her first and last commit in the project is larger than a certain time <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">T</i> . In our experiment, we use three different settings on the time interval: 1, 2, and 3 years. There are 9,238, 3,968, and 1,577 contributors who become LTCs of a project in three settings of time interval, respectively. To build a prediction model, we extract many features from the activities of developers on Github, which group into five dimensions: developer profile, repository profile, developer monthly activity, repository monthly activity, and collaboration network. We apply several classifiers including naive Bayes, SVM, decision tree, kNN and random forest. We find that random forest classifier achieves the best performance with AUCs of more than 0.75 in all three settings of time interval for LTCs. We also investigate the most important features that differentiate newcomers who become LTCs from newcomers who stay in the projects for a short time. We find that the number of followers is the most important feature in all three settings of the time interval studied. We also find that the programming language and the average number of commits contributed by other developers when a newcomer joins a project also belong to the top 10 most important features in all three settings of time interval for LTCs. Finally, we provide several implications for action based on our analysis results to help OSS projects retain newcomers.
Secure conjunctive multi-keyword ranked search over encrypted cloud data for multiple data owners

Recently, secure search over encrypted cloud data has become a hot research spot and challenging task. A number of secure search schemes have been proposed to try to meet this challenge. However, most of them only consider the single data owner model. In this paper, we propose a conjunctive multi-keyword ranked secure search scheme for multiple data owners. To guarantee data security and system flexibility in the multiple data owners environment, we design an ingenious secure query scheme that allows each data owner to adopt randomly chosen temporary keys to build secure indexes for different data files. An authorized data user does not need to know these temporary keys of constructing indexes and can instead randomly choose another temporary query keys to encrypt query keywords, while the cloud server can correctly perform keywords matching over encrypted data files. To rank the query results of a conjunctive multi-keyword query, the cloud server computes the similarity scores between the query and its query results according to encrypted relevance scores of keywords without obtaining any sensitive information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the correctness and practicality of the proposed scheme.
Privacy-Preserving Outsourced Speech Recognition for Smart IoT Devices

Most of the current intelligent Internet of Things (IoT) products take neural network-based speech recognition as the standard human–machine interaction interface. However, the traditional speech recognition frameworks for smart IoT devices always collect and transmit voice information in the form of plaintext, which may cause the disclosure of user privacy. Due to the wide utilization of speech features as biometric authentication, the privacy leakage can cause immeasurable losses to personal property and privacy. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an outsourced privacy-preserving speech recognition framework (OPSR) for smart IoT devices in the long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network and edge computing. In the framework, a series of additive secret sharing-based interactive protocols between two edge servers are designed to achieve lightweight outsourced computation. And based on the protocols, we implement the neural network training process of LSTM for intelligent IoT device voice control. Finally, combined with the universal composability theory and experiment results, we theoretically prove the correctness and security of our framework.
Cloud Computing in natural hazard modeling systems: Current research trends and future directions

Every year, natural disasters cause major loss of human life, damage to infrastructure and significant economic impact on the areas involved. Geospatial Scientists aim to help in mitigating or managing such hazards by computational modeling of these complex events, while Information Communication Technology (ICT) supports the execution of various models addressing different aspects of disaster management. The execution of natural hazard models using traditional ICT foundations is not possible in a timely manner due to the complex nature of the models, the need for large-scale computational resources as well as intensive data and concurrent-access requirements. Cloud Computing can address these challenges with near-unlimited capacity for computation, storage, and networking, and the ability, to offer natural hazard modeling systems as end services, has now become more realistic than ever. However, researchers face several open challenges in adopting and utilizing Cloud Computing technologies during disasters. As such, this survey paper aggregates all these challenges, reflects on the current research trends and outlines a conceptual Cloud-based solution framework for more effective natural hazards modeling and management systems using Cloud infrastructure in conjunction with other technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) networks, fog, and edge computing. We draw a clear picture of the current research state in the area and suggest further research directions for future systems.
On a new method of estimating shear wave velocity from conventional well logs

Shear wave velocity is a critical parameter for the characterization of hydrocarbon reservoirs. Compared with compressional wave velocity which almost exist in every well, shear wave velocity hasn't been recorded in those days for the older wells due to the lack of logging equipment or limited funds. Furthermore, measuring shear wave velocity is fairly time- and money-consuming as it can only be gained by the analysis of core samples conducted in the lab or from the dipole sonic imager (DSI). To cope with the above puzzles, a new methodology, by integrating extreme learning machines (ELM) and technique of mean impact value (MIV), is proposed in this paper with the support of log data collected from two wells located in unconventional shale gas reservoir in Ordos Basin, China. Based on mean impact value, a well-trained ELM model is taken to identify optimal well logs and five well logs are identified to provide the significant and valid information for the estimation of shear wave velocity. 3201 data points collected from well L4 are used in constructing the model. Compared with artificial neural network used in the former studies Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm (ANN-LM), the ELM model's prediction accuracy has been evaluated, the results indicates that the ELM model outperforms ANN-LM model with faster calculating speed and better performance. Additionally, the efficiency of the model proposed here is well investigated by using another well with 3201 data points. Through the comparison among ELM, support vector regression (SVR), convolutional neural network (CNN) and four widely known empirical formulas, what can be concluded is that ELM model is more efficient in fast calculation and high precision. From the result, it can be demonstrated that the use of ELM model, combined with the analysis of mean impact value (MIV), is a more efficient and promising method for shear wave velocity estimation process from conventional well log data, which can be recognized as a promising tool with an extended application. And this research can be applied into a software system for rapid acquisition of shear wave velocity logs.
Temporal Transformer Networks: Joint Learning of Invariant and Discriminative Time Warping

Many time-series classification problems involve developing metrics that are invariant to temporal misalignment. In human activity analysis, temporal misalignment arises due to various reasons including differing initial phase, sensor sampling rates, and elastic time-warps due to subject-specific biomechanics. Past work in this area has only looked at reducing intra-class variability by elastic temporal alignment. In this paper, we propose a hybrid model-based and data-driven approach to learn warping functions that not just reduce intra-class variability, but also increase inter-class separation. We call this a temporal transformer network (TTN). TTN is an interpretable differentiable module, which can be easily integrated at the front end of a classification network. The module is capable of reducing intra-class variance by generating input-dependent warping functions which lead to rate-robust representations. At the same time, it increases inter-class variance by learning warping functions that are more discriminative. We show improvements over strong baselines in 3D action recognition on challenging datasets using the proposed framework. The improvements are especially pronounced when training sets are smaller.
Atlas of Digital Pathology: A Generalized Hierarchical Histological Tissue Type-Annotated Database for Deep Learning

In recent years, computer vision techniques have made large advances in image recognition and been applied to aid radiological diagnosis. Computational pathology aims to develop similar tools for aiding pathologists in diagnosing digitized histopathological slides, which would improve diagnostic accuracy and productivity amidst increasing workloads. However, there is a lack of publicly-available databases of (1) localized patch-level images annotated with (2) a large range of Histological Tissue Type (HTT). As a result, computational pathology research is constrained to diagnosing specific diseases or classifying tissues from specific organs, and cannot be readily generalized to handle unexpected diseases and organs. In this paper, we propose a new digital pathology database, the ``Atlas of Digital Pathology'' (or ADP), which comprises of 17,668 patch images extracted from 100 slides annotated with up to 57 hierarchical HTTs. Our data is generalized to different tissue types across different organs and aims to provide training data for supervised multi-label learning of patch-level HTT in a digitized whole slide image. We demonstrate the quality of our image labels through pathologist consultation and by training three state-of-the-art neural networks on tissue type classification. Quantitative results support the visually consistency of our data and we demonstrate a tissue type-based visual attention aid as a sample tool that could be developed from our database.
Multi-Patch Collaborative Point Cloud Denoising via Low-Rank Recovery with Graph Constraint

Point cloud is the primary source from 3D scanners and depth cameras. It usually contains more raw geometric features, as well as higher levels of noise than the reconstructed mesh. Although many mesh denoising methods have proven to be effective in noise removal, they hardly work well on noisy point clouds. We propose a new multi-patch collaborative method for point cloud denoising, which is solved as a low-rank matrix recovery problem. Unlike the traditional single-patch based denoising approaches, our approach is inspired by the geometric statistics which indicate that a number of surface patches sharing approximate geometric properties always exist within a 3D model. Based on this observation, we define a rotation-invariant height-map patch (HMP) for each point by robust Bi-PCA encoding bilaterally filtered normal information, and group its non-local similar patches together. Within each group, all patches are geometrically similar, while suffering from noise. We pack the height maps of each group into an HMP matrix, whose initial rank is high, but can be significantly reduced. We design an improved low-rank recovery model, by imposing a graph constraint to filter noise. Experiments on synthetic and raw datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both noise removal and feature preservation.
TIE

In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), deep neural networks (DNNs) have emerged as the most important and powerful AI technique. However, large DNN models are both storage and computation intensive, posing significant challenges for adopting DNNs in resource-constrained scenarios. Thus, model compression becomes a crucial technique to ensure wide deployment of DNNs.
Dual Sequential Prediction Models Linking Sequential Recommendation and Information Dissemination

Sequential recommendation and information dissemination are two traditional problems for sequential information retrieval. The common goal of the two problems is to predict future user-item interactions based on past observed interactions. The difference is that the former deals with users' histories of clicked items, while the latter focuses on items' histories of infected users.In this paper, we take a fresh view and propose dual sequential prediction models that unify these two thinking paradigms. One user-centered model takes a user's historical sequence of interactions as input, captures the user's dynamic states, and approximates the conditional probability of the next interaction for a given item based on the user's past clicking logs. By contrast, one item-centered model leverages an item's history, captures the item's dynamic states, and approximates the conditional probability of the next interaction for a given user based on the item's past infection records. To take advantage of the dual information, we design a new training mechanism which lets the two models play a game with each other and use the predicted score from the opponent to design a feedback signal to guide the training. We show that the dual models can better distinguish false negative samples and true negative samples compared with single sequential recommendation or information dissemination models. Experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of proposed model over some strong baselines as well as the effectiveness of dual training mechanism between two models.
Anticipating Smart Home Security and Privacy Threats with Survivors of Intimate Partner Abuse

This paper presents a design-led qualitative study investigating the (mis)use of digital technologies as tools for stalking, threats, and harassment within the context of intimate partner abuse (IPA). Results from interviews and domestic abuse forum data are reported on and set the foundation for a series of codesign workshops. The workshops invite participants to creatively anticipate smart home attack vectors, based on their lived experiences of IPA. Three workshops with seven IPA survivors and eleven professional support workers are detailed in this paper. Findings are organised into three phases through which survivors' privacy and security needs can be understood: 1) initial purchasing and configuring of smart home devices; 2) daily usage and; 3) (re-)securing devices after abuse has been identified. The speculative attack-vectors and design ideas generated by participants expose, for the first time, survivors' understanding of smart home security and privacy, as well as their needs, concerns, and requirements.
An Improved Multi-Source Data Fusion Method Based on the Belief Entropy and Divergence Measure

Dempster-Shafer (DS) evidence theory is widely applied in multi-source data fusion technology. However, classical DS combination rule fails to deal with the situation when evidence is highly in conflict. To address this problem, a novel multi-source data fusion method is proposed in this paper. The main steps of the proposed method are presented as follows. Firstly, the credibility weight of each piece of evidence is obtained after transforming the belief Jenson-Shannon divergence into belief similarities. Next, the belief entropy of each piece of evidence is calculated and the information volume weights of evidence are generated. Then, both credibility weights and information volume weights of evidence are unified to generate the final weight of each piece of evidence before the weighted average evidence is calculated. Then, the classical DS combination rule is used multiple times on the modified evidence to generate the fusing results. A numerical example compares the fusing result of the proposed method with that of other existing combination rules. Further, a practical application of fault diagnosis is presented to illustrate the plausibility and efficiency of the proposed method. The experimental result shows that the targeted type of fault is recognized most accurately by the proposed method in comparing with other combination rules.
Cuttlefish Algorithm-Based Multilevel 3-D Otsu Function for Color Image Segmentation

To overcome the shortcomings of 1-D and 2-D Otsu's thresholding methods, a 3-D Otsu method has been introduced. While yielding satisfactory segmentation results for images with a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and poor contrast, it has the downside of high computational complexity. In this paper, the cuttlefish algorithm (CFA)-based 3-D Otsu thresholding method is proposed to pace up the conventional 3-D Otsu thresholding for color image segmentation. In order to decrease the effects of noises and weak edges, an optimally selected multilevel 3-D Otsu image thresholding technique is brought into the proposed segmentation scheme. The CFA is a newly developed stochastic meta-heuristic optimization algorithm based on observing, mimicking, and modeling the camouflaging feature of cuttlefish. It is used to simplify the problem of exhaustive search for the optimal threshold vector in 3-D space. Experimental results, when compared to 1-D Otsu, 1-D Otsu-Cuckoo search (CS) algorithm, 1-D Otsu-lightning search algorithm (LSA), 1-D Otsu-CFA, conventional 3-D Otsu, 3-D Otsu-CS, and 3-D Otsu-LSA, indicate that the proposed algorithm CFA-based 3-D Otsu thresholding is superior to all the other multilevel thresholding algorithms. The proposed 3-D-CFA method produces promising segmentation results from the objective and subjective aspects.