Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
BeepTrace: Blockchain-Enabled Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing for COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond

The outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has exposed an urgent need for effective contact tracing solutions through mobile phone applications to prevent the infection from spreading further. However, due to the nature of contact tracing, public concern on privacy issues has been a bottleneck to the existing solutions, which is significantly affecting the uptake of contact tracing applications across the globe. In this article, we present a blockchain-enabled privacy-preserving contact tracing scheme: BeepTrace, where we propose to adopt blockchain bridging the user/patient and the authorized solvers to desensitize the user ID and location information. Compared with recently proposed contact tracing solutions, our approach shows higher security and privacy with the additional advantages of being battery friendly and globally accessible. Results show viability in terms of the required resource at both server and mobile phone perspectives. Through breaking the privacy concerns of the public, the proposed BeepTrace solution can provide a timely framework for authorities, companies, software developers, and researchers to fast develop and deploy effective digital contact tracing applications, to conquer the COVID-19 pandemic soon. Meanwhile, the open initiative of BeepTrace allows worldwide collaborations, integrate existing tracing and positioning solutions with the help of blockchain technology.
A survey on long short-term memory networks for time series prediction

Recurrent neural networks and exceedingly Long short-term memory (LSTM) have been investigated intensively in recent years due to their ability to model and predict nonlinear time-variant system dynamics. The present paper delivers a comprehensive overview of existing LSTM cell derivatives and network architectures for time series prediction. A categorization in LSTM with optimized cell state representations and LSTM with interacting cell states is proposed. The investigated approaches are evaluated against defined requirements being relevant for an accurate time series prediction. These include short-term and long-term memory behavior, the ability for multimodal and multi-step ahead predictions and the according error propagation. Sequence-to-sequence networks with partially conditioning outperform the other approaches, such as bidirectional or associative networks, and are best suited to fulfill the requirements.
Camouflaged Object Segmentation with Distraction Mining

Camouflaged object segmentation (COS) aims to identify objects that are "perfectly" assimilate into their surroundings, which has a wide range of valuable applications. The key challenge of COS is that there exist high intrinsic similarities between the candidate objects and noise background. In this paper, we strive to embrace challenges towards effective and efficient COS. To this end, we develop a bio-inspired framework, termed Positioning and Focus Network (PFNet), which mimics the process of predation in nature. Specifically, our PFNet contains two key modules, i.e., the positioning module (PM) and the focus module (FM). The PM is designed to mimic the detection process in predation for positioning the potential target objects from a global perspective and the FM is then used to perform the identification process in predation for progressively refining the coarse prediction via focusing on the ambiguous regions. Notably, in the FM, we develop a novel distraction mining strategy for the distraction discovery and removal, to benefit the performance of estimation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PFNet runs in real-time (72 FPS) and significantly outperforms 18 cutting-edge models on three challenging datasets under four standard metrics.
A new nested ensemble technique for automated diagnosis of breast cancer

Nowadays, breast cancer is reported as one of most common cancers amongst women. Early detection of this cancer is an essential to aid in informing subsequent treatments. This study investigates automated breast cancer prediction using machine learning and data mining techniques. We proposed the nested ensemble approach which used the Stacking and Vote (Voting) as the classifiers combination techniques in our ensemble methods for detecting the benign breast tumors from malignant cancers. Each nested ensemble classifier contains “Classifiers” and “MetaClassifiers”. MetaClassifiers can have more than two different classification algorithms. In this research, we developed the two-layer nested ensemble classifiers. In our two-layer nested ensemble classifiers the MetaClassifiers have two or three different classification algorithms. We conducted the experiments on Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer (WDBC) dataset and K-fold Cross Validation technique are used for the model evaluation. We compared the proposed two-layer nested ensemble classifiers with single classifiers (i.e., BayesNet and Naïve Bayes) in terms of the classification accuracy, precision, recall, F1 measure, ROC and computational times of training single and nested ensemble classifiers. We also compared our best model with previous works reported in the literatures in terms of accuracy. The results demonstrate that the proposed two-layer nested ensemble models outperformance the single classifiers and most of the previous works. Both SV-BayesNet-3-MetaClassifier and SV-Naïve Bayes-3-MetaClassifier achieved accuracy 98.07% (K=10). However, SV-Naïve Bayes-3-MetaClassifier is more efficiency as it needs less time to build the model.
The Impact of Features Extraction on the Sentiment Analysis

In today’s world, everyone is expressive in one way or other. Many social websites and android applications whether being Facebook, WhatsApp or Twitter, in this highly advance and the modernized world is flooded with views and data. One of the most global and popular platforms is Twitter. This is seen as the main source of sentiments where almost every enthusiastic or social person tends to express his or her views in form of comments. These comments not only express the people but also give the understanding of their mood. Text present on these medias are unstructured in nature, so to process them firstly we need to pre-process, six pre-processing techniques are used and then features are extracted from the pre-processed data. There are so many feature extraction techniques such as Bag of Words, TF-IDF, word embedding, NLP(Natural Language Processing) based features like word count, noun count etc. In this paper we analysed the impact of two features TF-IDF word level and, N-Gram on SS-Tweet dataset of sentiment analysis. We found that by using TF-IDF word level (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) performance of sentiment analysis is 3-4% higher than using N-gram features, analysis is done using six classification algorithms(Decision Tree, Support vector Machine, K-Nearest Neighbour, Random Forest, Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes) and considering F-Score, Accuracy, Precision, and Recall performance parameters.
A CNN-BiLSTM Model for Document-Level Sentiment Analysis

Document-level sentiment analysis is a challenging task given the large size of the text, which leads to an abundance of words and opinions, at times contradictory, in the same document. This analysis is particularly useful in analyzing press articles and blog posts about a particular product or company, and it requires a high concentration, especially when the topic being discussed is sensitive. Nevertheless, most existing models and techniques are designed to process short text from social networks and collaborative platforms. In this paper, we propose a combination of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) models, with Doc2vec embedding, suitable for opinion analysis in long texts. The CNN-BiLSTM model is compared with CNN, LSTM, BiLSTM and CNN-LSTM models with Word2vec/Doc2vec embeddings. The Doc2vec with CNN-BiLSTM model was applied on French newspapers articles and outperformed the other models with 90.66% accuracy.
Deep Learning for Video Game Playing

In this paper, we review recent deep learning advances in the context of how they have been applied to play different types of video games such as first-person shooters, arcade games, and real-time strategy games. We analyze the unique requirements that different game genres pose to a deep learning system and highlight important open challenges in the context of applying these machine learning methods to video games, such as general game playing, dealing with extremely large decision spaces and sparse rewards.
TS-LSTM and temporal-inception: Exploiting spatiotemporal dynamics for activity recognition

Recent two-stream deep Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have made significant progress in recognizing human actions in videos. Despite their success, methods extending the basic two-stream ConvNet have not systematically explored possible network architectures to further exploit spatiotemporal dynamics within video sequences. Further, such networks often use different baseline two-stream networks. Therefore, the differences and the distinguishing factors between various methods using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) or Convolutional Neural Networks on temporally-constructed feature vectors (Temporal-ConvNets) are unclear. In this work, we would like to answer the question: given the spatial and motion feature representations over time, what is the best way to exploit the temporal information? Toward this end, we first demonstrate a strong baseline two-stream ConvNet using ResNet-101. We use this baseline to thoroughly examine the use of both RNNs and Temporal-ConvNets for extracting spatiotemporal information. Building upon our experimental results, we then propose and investigate two different networks to further integrate spatiotemporal information: (1) Temporal Segment RNN and (2) Inception-style Temporal-ConvNet. We demonstrate that using both RNNs (with LSTMs) and Temporal-ConvNets on spatiotemporal feature matrices are able to exploit spatiotemporal dynamics to improve the overall performance. Our analysis identifies specific limitations for each method that could form the basis of future work. Our experimental results on UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets achieve comparable state-of-the-art performances, 94.1% and 69.0%, respectively, without requiring extensive temporal augmentation or end-to-end training.
Dual Student: Breaking the Limits of the Teacher in Semi-Supervised Learning

Recently, consistency-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art results in semi-supervised learning (SSL). These methods always involve two roles, an explicit or implicit teacher model and a student model, and penalize predictions under different perturbations by a consistency constraint. However, the weights of these two roles are tightly coupled since the teacher is essentially an exponential moving average (EMA) of the student. In this work, we show that the coupled EMA teacher causes a performance bottleneck. To address this problem, we introduce Dual Student, which replaces the teacher with another student. We also define a novel concept, stable sample, following which a stabilization constraint is designed for our structure to be trainable. Further, we discuss two variants of our method, which produce even higher performance. Extensive experiments show that our method improves the classification performance significantly on several main SSL benchmarks. Specifically, it reduces the error rate of the 13-layer CNN from 16.84% to 12.39% on CIFAR-10 with 1k labels and from 34.10% to 31.56% on CIFAR-100 with 10k labels. In addition, our method also achieves a clear improvement in domain adaptation.
Real-time supply chain—A blockchain architecture for project deliveries

Real-time tracking and tracing are important in providing a unified view of global supply chains consisting of several parties. This paper illustrates the needs and requirements for managing supply chains in multi-company project environments by adopting various tracking and tracing technologies. This kind of tracking and tracing is especially needed within distributed architectures engaged in project-based businesses, where several vendors are involved in a single project. Such tracking and tracing data can be used extensively to generate key performance indicators, which can be used to measure and control supply chain processes. This paper also proposes a pilot system of a cloud-based portal for real-time tracking and tracing of logistics and supply chains. This portal is formed by the combination of RFID, IoT and blockchain technology into an integrated real-time view. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and IoT (Internet of Things) provides real-time information or data, while blockchain technology is used to provide a chain of immutable transactions. The architecture of the proposed portal system is connected to transport companies, tracking devices, consolidation points and suppliers. The pilot study also illustrates the benefits and advantages of such a portal system.
AMP: Adaptive Masked Proxies for Few-Shot Segmentation

Deep learning has thrived by training on large-scale datasets. However, in robotics applications sample efficiency is critical. We propose a novel adaptive masked proxies method that constructs the final segmentation layer weights from few labelled samples. It utilizes multiresolution average pooling on base embeddings masked with the label to act as a positive proxy for the new class, while fusing it with the previously learned class signatures. Our method is evaluated on PASCAL-5 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i</sup> dataset and outperforms the state-of-the-art in the few-shot semantic segmentation. Unlike previous methods, our approach does not require a second branch to estimate parameters or prototypes, which enables it to be used with 2-stream motion and appearance based segmentation networks. We further propose a novel setup for evaluating continual learning of object segmentation which we name incremental PASCAL (iPASCAL) where our method outperforms the baseline method. Our code is publicly available at https://github. com/MSiam/AdaptiveMaskedProxies.
BinDaaS: Blockchain-Based Deep-Learning as-a-Service in Healthcare 4.0 Applications

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) allows patients to control, share, and manage their health records among family members, friends, and healthcare service providers using an open channel, i.e., Internet. Thus, privacy, confidentiality, and data consistency are major challenges in such an environment. Although, cloud-based EHRs addresses the aforementioned discussions, but these are prone to various malicious attacks, trust management, and non-repudiation among servers. Hence, blockchain-based EHR systems are most popular to create the trust, security, and privacy among healthcare users. Motivated from the aforementioned discussions, we proposes a framework called as Blockchain-Based Deep Learning as-a-Service (BinDaaS). It integrates blockchain and deep-learning techniques for sharing the EHR records among multiple healthcare users and operates in two phases. In the first phase, an authentication and signature scheme is proposed based on lattices-based cryptography to resist collusion attacks among N-1 healthcare authorities from N. In the second phase, Deep Learning as-a-Service (DaaS) is used on stored EHR datasets to predict future diseases based on current indicators and features of patient. The obtained results are compared using various parameters such as accuracy, end-to-end latency, mining time, and computation and communication costs in comparison to the existing state-of-the-art proposals. From the results obtained, it is inferred that BinDaaS outperforms the other existing proposals with respect to the aforementioned parameters.
DeepCap: Monocular Human Performance Capture Using Weak Supervision

Human performance capture is a highly important computer vision problem with many applications in movie production and virtual/augmented reality. Many previous performance capture approaches either required expensive multi-view setups or did not recover dense space-time coherent geometry with frame-to-frame correspondences. We propose a novel deep learning approach for monocular dense human performance capture. Our method is trained in a weakly supervised manner based on multi-view supervision completely removing the need for training data with 3D ground truth annotations. The network architecture is based on two separate networks that disentangle the task into a pose estimation and a non-rigid surface deformation step. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that our approach outperforms the state of the art in terms of quality and robustness.
Borg

This paper analyzes a newly-published trace that covers 8 different Borg [35] clusters for the month of May 2019. The trace enables researchers to explore how scheduling works in large-scale production compute clusters. We highlight how Borg has evolved and perform a longitudinal comparison of the newly-published 2019 trace against the 2011 trace, which has been highly cited within the research community.
Twitter Sentiment Analysis on Worldwide COVID-19 Outbreaks

In the past two decades, the growth of social data on the web has rapidly increased. This leads to researchers to access the data and information for many academic research and commercial uses. Social data on the web contains many real life events that occurred in daily life, today the global COVID-19 disease is spread worldwide. Many individuals including media organizations and government agencies are presenting the latest news and opinions regarding the coronavirus. In this study, the twitter data has been pulled out from Twitter social media, through python programming language, using Tweepy library, then by using TextBlob library in python, the sentiment analysis operation has been done. After the measuring sentiment analysis, the graphical representation has been provided on the data. The data we have collected on twitter are based on two specified hashtag keywords, which are (“COVID-19, coronavirus”). The date of searching data is seven days from 09-04-2020 to 15-04-2020. In the end a visualized presentation regarding the results and further explanation are provided.
Controllable Person Image Synthesis With Attribute-Decomposed GAN

This paper introduces the Attribute-Decomposed GAN, a novel generative model for controllable person image synthesis, which can produce realistic person images with desired human attributes (e.g., pose, head, upper clothes and pants) provided in various source inputs. The core idea of the proposed model is to embed human attributes into the latent space as independent codes and thus achieve flexible and continuous control of attributes via mixing and interpolation operations in explicit style representations. Specifically, a new architecture consisting of two encoding pathways with style block connections is proposed to decompose the original hard mapping into multiple more accessible subtasks. In source pathway, we further extract component layouts with an off-the-shelf human parser and feed them into a shared global texture encoder for decomposed latent codes. This strategy allows for the synthesis of more realistic output images and automatic separation of un-annotated attributes. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed method's superiority over the state of the art in pose transfer and its effectiveness in the brand-new task of component attribute transfer.
Illuminating the dark spaces of healthcare with ambient intelligence

Advances in machine learning and contactless sensors have given rise to ambient intelligence—physical spaces that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of humans. Here we review how this technology could improve our understanding of the metaphorically dark, unobserved spaces of healthcare. In hospital spaces, early applications could soon enable more efficient clinical workflows and improved patient safety in intensive care units and operating rooms. In daily living spaces, ambient intelligence could prolong the independence of older individuals and improve the management of individuals with a chronic disease by understanding everyday behaviour. Similar to other technologies, transformation into clinical applications at scale must overcome challenges such as rigorous clinical validation, appropriate data privacy and model transparency. Thoughtful use of this technology would enable us to understand the complex interplay between the physical environment and health-critical human behaviours. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and low-cost, contactless sensors have given rise to an ambient intelligence that can potentially improve the physical execution of healthcare delivery, if used in a thoughtful manner.
Learning to Generate Novel Domains for Domain Generalization

This paper focuses on domain generalization (DG), the task of learning from multiple source domains a model that generalizes well to unseen domains. A main challenge for DG is that the available source domains often exhibit limited diversity, hampering the model’s ability to learn to generalize. We therefore employ a data generator to synthesize data from pseudo-novel domains to augment the source domains. This explicitly increases the diversity of available training domains and leads to a more generalizable model. To train the generator, we model the distribution divergence between source and synthesized pseudo-novel domains using optimal transport, and maximize the divergence. To ensure that semantics are preserved in the synthesized data, we further impose cycle-consistency and classification losses on the generator. Our method, L2A-OT (Learning to Augment by Optimal Transport) outperforms current state-of-the-art DG methods on four benchmark datasets.
Secure Single-Server Aggregation with (Poly)Logarithmic Overhead

Secure aggregation is a cryptographic primitive that enables a server to learn the sum of the vector inputs of many clients. Bonawitz et al. (CCS 2017) presented a construction that incurs computation and communication for each client linear in the number of parties. While this functionality enables a broad range of privacy preserving computational tasks, scaling concerns limit its scope of use. We present the first constructions for secure aggregation that achieve polylogarithmic communication and computation per client. Our constructions provide security in the semi-honest and the semi-malicious settings where the adversary controls the server and a δ-fraction of the clients, and correctness with up to δ-fraction dropouts among the clients. Our constructions show how to replace the complete communication graph of Bonawitz et al., which entails the linear overheads, with a k-regular graph of logarithmic degree while maintaining the security guarantees. Beyond improving the known asymptotics for secure aggregation, our constructions also achieve very efficient concrete parameters. The semi-honest secure aggregation can handle a billion clients at the per-client cost of the protocol of Bonawitz et al. for a thousand clients. In the semi-malicious setting with 10 4 clients, each client needs to communicate only with 3% of the clients to have a guarantee that its input has been added together with the inputs of at least 5000 other clients, while withstanding up to 5% corrupt clients and 5% dropouts. We also show an application of secure aggregation to the task of secure shuffling which enables the first cryptographically secure instantiation of the shuffle model of differential privacy.