Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Data Engagement Reconsidered: A Study of Automatic Stress Tracking Technology in Use

In today's fast-paced world, stress has become a growing health concern. While more automatic stress tracking technologies have recently become available on wearable or mobile devices, there is still a limited understanding of how they are actually used in everyday life. This paper presents an empirical study of automatic stress-tracking technologies in use in China, based on semi-structured interviews with 17 users. The study highlights three challenges of stress-tracking data engagement that prevent effective technology usage: the lack of immediate awareness, the lack of pre-required knowledge, and the lack of corresponding communal support. Drawing on the stress-tracking practices uncovered in the study, we bring these issues to the fore, and unpack assumptions embedded in related works on self-tracking and how data engagement is approached. We end by calling for a reconsideration of data engagement as part of self-tracking practices with technologies rather than simply looking at the user interface.
A hierarchical knowledge guided backtracking search algorithm with self-learning strategy

To improve the performance of the backtracking search optimization algorithm (BSA), a multi-population cooperative evolution strategy guided BSA with hierarchical knowledge (HKBSA) is proposed in this paper. According to the domain knowledge of the candidates in objective space, the population is divided into the dominant population, the ordinary population and the inferior population. The information between the sub-populations has interacted with the evolution processes of the three sub-populations. The individuals in the dominant population are maintained as the optimal solutions and are utilized to guide the evolution of the other two sub-populations. A multi-strategy mutation mechanism is applied to solve non-separable problems. The distribution vector of inferior individuals is constructed by sampling, and a mechanism of the individual generation with feedback is proposed by combining self-learning strategy and elite learning strategy. The convergence of HKBSA is analyzed with the Markov model. Compared with the state-of-the-art BSA variants, HKBSA outperforms other algorithms in terms of the speed of convergence, solution accuracy and stability.
A Further Study of Unsupervised Pretraining for Transformer Based Speech Recognition

The construction of an effective good speech recognition system typically requires large amounts of transcribed data, which is expensive to collect. To overcome this problem, many unsupervised pretraining methods have been proposed. Among these methods, Masked Predictive Coding achieved significant improvements on various speech recognition datasets with BERT-like Masked Reconstruction loss and transformer backbone. However, many aspects of MPC have yet to be fully investigated. In this paper, we conduct a further study on MPC and focus on three important aspects: the effect of pretraining data speaking style, its extension on streaming model, and strategies for better transferring learned knowledge from pretraining stage to downstream tasks. The experimental results demonstrated that pretraining data with a matching speaking style is more useful on downstream recognition tasks. A unified training objective with APC and MPC provided an 8.46% relative error reduction on the streaming model trained on HKUST. Additionally, the combination of target data adaption and layerwise discriminative training facilitated the knowledge transfer of MPC, which realized 3.99% relative error reduction on AISHELL over a strong baseline.
Multi-modal Discrete Collaborative Filtering for Efficient Cold-start Recommendation

Hashing is an effective technique to improve the efficiency of large-scale recommender system by representing both users and items into binary codes. However, existing hashing-based recommendation methods still suffer from two important problems: 1) Cold-start. They employ the user-item interactions and single auxiliary information to learn the binary hash codes. But the full interaction history is not always available and the single auxiliary information may be missing. 2) Efficient optimization. They learn the hash codes with two-step relaxed optimization or one-step discrete hash optimization based on the cyclic coordinate descent, which results in significant quantization loss or still consumes considerable computation time. In this paper, we propose a Multi-modal Discrete Collaborative Filtering (MDCF) for efficient cold-start recommendation. We map the multi-modal features of users and items to a consensus Hamming space based on the matrix factorization framework. Specifically, a low-rank self-weighted multi-modal fusion module is designed to adaptively fuse the multi-modal features into binary hash codes. Additionally, to support large-scale recommendation, a fast discrete optimization method based on augmented Lagrangian multiplier is developed to directly compute the binary hash codes with simple operations. Experiments show the superior performance of the proposed method over state-of-the-art baselines.
HoloCast+: Hybrid Digital-Analog Transmission for Graceful Point Cloud Delivery With Graph Fourier Transform

Point cloud is an emerging data format useful for various applications such has holographic display, autonomous vehicle, and augmented reality. Conventionally, communications of point cloud data have relied on digital compression and digital modulation for three-dimensional (3D) data streaming. However, such digital-based delivery schemes have fundamental issues called cliff and leveling effects, where the 3D reconstruction quality is a step function in terms of wireless channel quality. We propose a novel scheme of point cloud delivery, called HoloCast+, to overcome cliff and leveling effects. Specifically, our method utilizes hybrid digital-analog coding, integrating digital compression and analog coding based on graph Fourier transform (GFT), to gracefully improve 3D reconstruction quality with the improvement of channel quality. We demonstrate that HoloCast+ offers better 3D reconstruction quality in terms of the symmetric mean square error (sMSE) by up to 18.3 dB and 10.5 dB, respectively, compared to conventional digital-based and analog-based delivery methods in wireless fading environments.
Virtual Reality-Based High-Intensity Interval Training For Pulmonary Rehabilitation: A Feasibility and Acceptability Study

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is an irreversible lung disease affecting over 174 million worldwide. Pulmonary rehabilitation (PR), including cardiovascular exercise such as highintensity interval training (HIIT), can reduce frequency and severity of symptoms. However, oftentimes exercise regimens suffer from low motivation and poor adherence. This has previously been addressed by augmenting exercises with digital gaming experiences. However, to our knowledge no studies have yet investigated the feasibility of using immersive virtual reality (IVR) equipment on COPDpatients in HIIT. Through a longitudinal observational study, we investigated the feasibility and acceptability of using VR-headsets in a HIIT-based exercise program. Three older adults (age between 68-86) consented to participate. Heart rate, cadence, perceived exertion, nausea and motivation was measured both during VR-usage and standard training. Though the sample size implies low statistical power, which constitutes a serious limitation to external validity, motivation was retained during the study, and the use of VR did not lead to higher dyspnea, cardiovascular demands, nor serious adverse effects such as provoking exacerbation or instilling cybersickness. The results are encouraging and calls for further studies on how VR can be applied to HIIT exercise programs seeking to increase adherence. Future studies should investigate new ways of retaining motivation through higher interactivity or social collaborative experiences.
A novel hybrid ensemble LSTM‐FFNN forecasting model for very short‐term and short‐term PV generation forecasting

The increasing penetration of photovoltaic (PV) systems into the electrical energy systems brings forward several technical and economic issues that mostly relate to their unpredictable nature. A promising solution to many of these is the implementation of robust PV generation forecasting models. In this paper a novel hybrid Ensemble Long Short-Term Memory-Feed Forward Neural Network (ELSTM-FFNN) model is proposed, that is able to perform both very-short and short-term forecasting. The performance of the proposed model is compared with individual LSTM models, and its forecasting accuracy is assessed in two different forecasting horizons: (a) 15-min ahead and (b) 1-h ahead. Moreover, in order to fully examine the contribution of the utilized data to the performance of the model, several scenarios have been formulated for each forecasting horizon. The results indicate that the proposed ELSTM-FFNN model can increase the forecasting accuracy in both horizons between 3–11.9% and 0.2–17.8%, respectively, considering the Mean Absolute Range Normalized Error (MARNE).
Campaign participation prediction with deep learning

Increasingly, on-demand nature of customer interactions put pressure on companies to build real-time campaign management systems. Instead of having managers to decide on the campaign rules, such as, when, how and whom to offer, creating intelligent campaign management systems that can automate such decisions is essential. In addition, regulations or company policies usually restrict the number of accesses to the customers. Efficient learning of customer behaviour through dynamic campaign participation observations becomes a crucial feature that may ultimately define customer satisfaction and retention. This paper builds on the recent successes of deep learning techniques and proposes a classification model to predict customer responses for campaigns. Classic deep neural networks are good at learning hidden relations within data (i.e., patterns) but with limited capability for memorization. One solution to increase memorization is to use manually craft features, as in Wide & Deep networks, which are originally proposed for Google Play App. recommendations. We advocate using decision trees as an easier way of mining high-level relationships for enhancing Wide & Deep networks. Such an approach has the added benefit of beating manually created rules, which, most of the time, use incomplete data and have biases. A set of comprehensive experiments on campaign participation data from a leading GSM provider shows that automatically crafted features make a significant increase in the accuracy and outperform Deep and Wide & Deep models with manually crafted features.
Multi-Scale Feature-Guided Stereoscopic Video Quality Assessment Based on 3d Convolutional Neural Network

With the huge development of stereoscopic video technology, the research of stereoscopic video quality assessment (SVQA) has become very important for promoting the development of stereoscopic video system. These years, many SVQA methods based on convolutional neural network (CNN) have emerged. In this paper, we proposed a multi-scale feature-guided 3D convolutional neural network for SVQA which not only use 3D convolution to capture spatio-temporal features but also aggregate multi-scale information by a new multi-scale unit. Besides, we employ a multi-stage growing attention mechanism in this network to learn more critical deep semantic information. The proposed method is tested on two public stereoscopic video quality datasets, and the result shows that this method correlates highly with human visual perception and outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
Lightweight and Interpretable Neural Modeling of an Audio Distortion Effect Using Hyperconditioned Differentiable Biquads

In this work, we propose using differentiable cascaded biquads to model an audio distortion effect. We extend trainable infinite impulse response (IIR) filters to the hyperconditioned case, in which a transformation is learned to directly map external parameters of the distortion effect to its internal filter and gain parameters, along with activations necessary to ensure filter stability. We propose a novel, efficient training scheme of IIR filters by means of a Fourier transform. Our models have significantly fewer parameters and reduced complexity relative to more traditional black-box neural audio effect modeling methodologies using finite impulse response filters. Our smallest, best-performing model adequately models a BOSS MT-2 pedal at 44.1 kHz, using a total of 40 biquads and only 210 parameters. Its model parameters are interpretable, can be related back to the original analog audio circuit, and can even be intuitively altered by machine learning non-specialists after model training. Quantitative and qualitative results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Learning Disentangled Phone and Speaker Representations in a Semi-Supervised VQ-VAE Paradigm

We present a new approach to disentangle speaker voice and phone content by introducing new components to the VQ-VAE architecture for speech synthesis. The original VQ-VAE does not generalize well to unseen speakers or content. To alleviate this problem, we have incorporated a speaker encoder and speaker VQ codebook that learns global speaker characteristics entirely separate from the existing sub-phone codebooks. We also compare two training methods: self-supervised with global conditions and semi-supervised with speaker labels. Adding a speaker VQ component improves objective measures of speech synthesis quality (estimated MOS, speaker similarity, ASR-based intelligibility) and provides learned representations that are meaningful. Our speaker VQ codebook indices can be used in a simple speaker diarization task and perform slightly better than an x-vector baseline. Additionally, phones can be recognized from sub-phone VQ codebook indices in our semi-supervised VQ-VAE better than self-supervised with global conditions.
Designing with the Mind in Mind

UI design rules and guidelines are not simple recipes. Applying them effectively requires determining rule applicability and precedence and balancing trade-offs when rules compete. By understanding the underlying psychology, designers and evaluators enhance their ability to apply design rules. This two-part (160-minute) course explains that psychology.
Making Punctuation Restoration Robust and Fast with Multi-Task Learning and Knowledge Distillation

In punctuation restoration, we try to recover the missing punctuation from automatic speech recognition output to improve understandability. Currently, large pre-trained transformers such as BERT set the benchmark on this task but there are two main drawbacks to these models. First, the pre-training data does not match the output data from speech recognition that contains errors. Second, the large number of model parameters increases inference time. To address the former, we use a multi-task learning framework with ELECTRA, a recently proposed improvement on BERT, that has a generator-discriminator structure. The generator allows us to inject errors into the training data and, as our experiments show, this improves robustness against speech recognition errors during inference. To address the latter, we investigate knowledge distillation and parameter pruning of ELECTRA. In our experiments on the IWSLT 2012 benchmark data, a model with less than 11% the size of BERT achieved better performance while having an 82% faster inference time.
Heterogeneous Graphlets

In this article, we introduce a generalization of graphlets to heterogeneous networks called typed graphlets . Informally, typed graphlets are small typed induced subgraphs. Typed graphlets generalize graphlets to rich heterogeneous networks as they explicitly capture the higher-order typed connectivity patterns in such networks. To address this problem, we describe a general framework for counting the occurrences of such typed graphlets. The proposed algorithms leverage a number of combinatorial relationships for different typed graphlets. For each edge, we count a few typed graphlets, and with these counts along with the combinatorial relationships, we obtain the exact counts of the other typed graphlets in o (1) constant time. Notably, the worst-case time complexity of the proposed approach matches the time complexity of the best known untyped algorithm. In addition, the approach lends itself to an efficient lock-free and asynchronous parallel implementation. While there are no existing methods for typed graphlets, there has been some work that focused on computing a different and much simpler notion called colored graphlet. The experiments confirm that our proposed approach is orders of magnitude faster and more space-efficient than methods for computing the simpler notion of colored graphlet. Unlike these methods that take hours on small networks, the proposed approach takes only seconds on large networks with millions of edges. Notably, since typed graphlet is more general than colored graphlet (and untyped graphlets), the counts of various typed graphlets can be combined to obtain the counts of the much simpler notion of colored graphlets. The proposed methods give rise to new opportunities and applications for typed graphlets.
SAR Image Segmentation Based on Constrained Smoothing and Hierarchical Label Correction

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is widely used in the field of modern remote sensing due to its high resolution for a comparatively small antenna. However, there are still some difficulties in the processing of SAR images. In particular, accurate segmentation of small targets and image corners remains an important challenge, as these can easily be lost during conventional image smoothing and denoising methods. To address this, we propose an SAR image segmentation algorithm based on constrained smoothing and hierarchical label correction (CSHLC). First, a Canny algorithm is used to extract the edges of SAR images, and the Gaussian smoothing is performed on SAR images under edge constraints to achieve noise reduction so that the edges of small and big targets are well preserved. Second, a preliminary K-means clustering is conducted on the smoothing results, and then, a Markov random field (MRF) model is used on the clustering results (“original label” results), iteratively calculating a maximum likelihood set of pixel labels. Finally, through two label correction methods, pixel group counting comparison (PGCC) and gray similarity comparison (GSC), the labels of the MRF output are further checked and corrected to obtain final segmentation results. Compared with seven state-of-the-art algorithms, simulation results on both simulated SAR images and real SAR images show that the proposed CSHLC delivers higher accuracy while better retaining corners and small targets.
Occlusion-tolerant and personalized 3D human pose estimation in RGB images

We introduce a real-time method that estimates the 3D human pose directly in the popular Bio Vision Hierarchy (BVH) format, given estimations of the 2D body joints originating from monocular color images. Our contributions include: (a) A novel and compact 2D pose representation. (b) A human body orientation classifier and an ensemble of orientation-tuned neural networks that regress the 3D human pose by also allowing for the decomposition of the body to an upper and lower kinematic hierarchy. This permits the recovery of the human pose even in the case of significant occlusions. (c) An efficient Inverse Kinematics solver that refines the neural-network-based solution providing 3D human pose estimations that are consistent with the limb sizes of a target person (if known). All the above yield a 33% accuracy improvement on the Human 3.6 Million (H3.6M) dataset compared to the baseline method (MocapNET) while maintaining real-time performance (70 fps in CPU-only execution).
COVID-19 Zero-Interaction School Attendance System

For decades, school attendance has an important role in determining student success and ensuring that students regularly come to classes. Traditionally, a sheet of paper and a pencil or pen is used to document school attendance at universities. In most cases, the professor would hand out a piece of paper to a student. This student would mark their presence on the paper sheet and pass it to the person sitting next to them. The piece of paper would then travel throughout the classroom until the final student received the paper. Finally, the piece of paper would be given back to the professor or the teacher's assistant, so they may take note of which student is present and which student is absent. In the age of the COVID-19 pandemic, this method of taking attendance poses a great risk to possible disease transmission. Everyone within the room would be touching the same piece of paper, and sometimes students may even share the same pen or pencil with their classmates. Everyone in the classroom, including the professor, would be at risk if one student were infected with the COVID-19 virus. This is attributed to the attendance method. This paper proposes a zero-effort, zero-interaction attendance method based on two aspects that are currently present in a typical classroom: access points and a student's Wi-Fi enabled devices (e.g., smartphones). Our research found this method to be a no-hassle attendance-taking method that pinpoints where a student is within the classroom, without the class suffering from any disruption in learning.
Research on decision support system of sports assistant teaching and training based on association rules and support vector machine

In the decision-making system of sports assistant teaching and training, the performance of such system is not robust to different situations with a low accuracy. To solve the problems in the decision-making system, we proposed a decision-making method combining association rules and support vector machine (SVM) in this paper. First of all, we give a computer-aided decision support system for sports assistant learning and teaching training, which is fully elaborated from three aspects: virtual reality (VR) technology, VR based sports assistant learning and teaching and situational cognition, and VR based sports assistant learning and teaching mode. After that, the paper gives the feature extraction of sports auxiliary teaching training through association rules and the decision-making of the extracted association rules by SVM. We have done two different experiments for both association rules mining and SVM on both experiment group and control group of databases. Experimental results have shown that the training characteristics of sports auxiliary teaching very well. In the decision support of association rules, compared with the existing BP neural network, linear discriminant analysis and naive Bayes and other methods, the SVM method has better effect of action recognition in decision support system of sports assistant teaching and training. The robustness is the best for the application of SVM. We provide a new perspective for the decision support of sports auxiliary teaching training by using association rules and SVM. Through the method of this paper, we can obtain better decision-making effect and more robust process of sports auxiliary teaching and training.