Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Economic model for evaluating the value creation through information sharing within the cybersecurity information sharing ecosystem

Based on a comprehensive literature survey, the constructs of the cybersecurity information sharing ecosystem have been defined in detail. Using this ecosystem, the interrelationships among the stakeholders with respect to cybersecurity information sharing are analyzed, the value parameters are determined, the value functions are defined, and the values obtained by the stakeholders through simulation are calculated. Furthermore, it is investigated whether the stakeholders involved in this ecosystem can create sufficient value to sustain in the market. The outcome of this research includes an economic model for evaluating the value creation and distribution among the stakeholders. This model is a critical step forward to better align the values (i.e., utilities and profits) of stakeholders. The simulation results of the model show that end users are the main source of value generation. Cybersecurity solution providers and cybersecurity information providers get benefits from a growing installed base of end users. However, in saturated markets, there is a risk of un-sustainability of the ecosystem, as the cost of cybersecurity solutions and cybersecurity information cannot be recovered through their fees. The simulation model and the findings of this study can help business managers to make better decisions related to business strategies, sustainability, and pricing schemes for cybersecurity solution and cybersecurity information. Moreover, a working cybersecurity information sharing ecosystem is essential for the adoption of cloud computing and, especially, edge computing. It allows capturing, disseminating, and aggregating cybersecurity information from a large number of computing devices and computing providers reliably and accurately.
Accurate Segmentation of Nuclear Regions with Multi-Organ Histopathology Images Using Artificial Intelligence for Cancer Diagnosis in Personalized Medicine

Accurate nuclear segmentation in histopathology images plays a key role in digital pathology. It is considered a prerequisite for the determination of cell phenotype, nuclear morphometrics, cell classification, and the grading and prognosis of cancer. However, it is a very challenging task because of the different types of nuclei, large intraclass variations, and diverse cell morphologies. Consequently, the manual inspection of such images under high-resolution microscopes is tedious and time-consuming. Alternatively, artificial intelligence (AI)-based automated techniques, which are fast and robust, and require less human effort, can be used. Recently, several AI-based nuclear segmentation techniques have been proposed. They have shown a significant performance improvement for this task, but there is room for further improvement. Thus, we propose an AI-based nuclear segmentation technique in which we adopt a new nuclear segmentation network empowered by residual skip connections to address this issue. Experiments were performed on two publicly available datasets: (1) The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), and (2) Triple-Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC). The results show that our proposed technique achieves an aggregated Jaccard index (AJI) of 0.6794, Dice coefficient of 0.8084, and F1-measure of 0.8547 on TCGA dataset, and an AJI of 0.7332, Dice coefficient of 0.8441, precision of 0.8352, recall of 0.8306, and F1-measure of 0.8329 on the TNBC dataset. These values are higher than those of the state-of-the-art methods.
Designing a Pseudorandom Bit Generator With a Novel Five-Dimensional-Hyperchaotic System

Dynamic and non-linear systems are emerging as potential candidates for random bit generation. In this context, chaotic systems, which are both dynamic and stochastic, are particularly suitable. This paper introduces a new continuous chaotic system along with its corresponding implementation, which targets field-programmable gate array (FPGA). This chaotic system has five dimensions, which exhibit complex chaotic dynamics, thus enabling the utilization of chaotic signals in cryptography. A mathematical analysis is presented to demonstrate the dynamic characteristics of the proposed hyperchaotic system. A novel digital implementation of the proposed system is presented. Moreover, a data scrambling circuit is implemented to eliminate the bias effect and increase the randomness of the bitstream generated from the chaotic signals. We show that the proposed random bit generator has high randomness. The generated bits successfully pass well-known statistical randomness test-suites, i.e., NIST SP800-22, Diehard, and TestU01. The ready-to-use random bit generator is deployed on a Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC ZC702 Evaluation Kit. Experimental results show that the proposed random bit generator can achieve a maximum throughput of 6.78 Gbps, which is over 3.6 times greater than state-of-the-art designs while requiring under 4% of the resources available on the targeted FPGA.
A new biologically inspired global optimization algorithm based on firebug reproductive swarming behaviour

A new biologically inspired derivative-free global optimization algorithm called Firebug Swarm Optimization (FSO) inspired by reproductive swarming behaviour of Firebugs (Pyrrhocoris apterus) is proposed. The search for fit reproductive partners by individual bugs in a swarm of Firebugs can be viewed naturally as a search for optimal solutions in a search space. This work proposes a mathematical model for five different Firebug behaviours most relevant to optimization and uses these behaviours as the basis of a new global optimization algorithm. Performance of the FSO algorithm is compared with 17 popular heuristic algorithms on the Congress of Evolutionary Computation 2013 (CEC 2013) benchmark suite that contains high dimensional multimodal as well as shifted and rotated functions. Statistical analysis based on Wilcoxon Rank-Sum Test indicates that the proposed FSO algorithm outperforms 17 popular state-of-the-art heuristic global optimization algorithms like Guided Sparks Fireworks Algorithm (GFWA), Dynamic Learning PSO (DNLPSO), and Artificial Bee Colony Bollinger Bands (ABCBB) on the CEC 2013 benchmark.
Human detection in aerial thermal imaging using a fully convolutional regression network

Thermal imaging can play a critical role in surveillance by promising higher robustness to the bad weather and night vision. Human detection and localization are important surveillance tasks for security purposes and maintaining law and order. This paper proposes a novel regression-based method for human detection from thermal infrared images. A fully convolutional regression network is designed to map the human heat signature in the input thermal image to the spatial density maps. The regressed density map is then post-processed for human detection and localization in the image. 25% data holdout validation scheme is used to train and test the proposed regression model using two benchmark thermal image datasets, the autonomous system lab thermal infrared dataset and the Ohio state university thermal pedestrian database. The proposed regression-based method can detect humans with 99.16% precision and 98.69% recall, outperforming the state-of-the-art conventional hand-crafted and CNN-based techniques for human detection from thermal images. Further, the designed fully convolutional regression network has much reduced computational complexity; yet, the detection performance is on par with the state-of-the-art fully convolutional architectures for predicting the density maps for human detection in thermal images.
Temporal Data Analytics on COVID-19 Data with Ubiquitous Computing

With technological advancements in computing and communications, huge amounts of big data are generated and collected at a very rapid rate from a wide variety of rich data sources. Embedded in these big data are useful information and valuable knowledge. An example is healthcare and epidemiological data such as data related to patients who suffered from viral diseases like the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Knowledge discovered from these epidemiological data via data science helps researchers, epidemiologists and policy makers to get a better understanding of the disease, which may inspire them to come up ways to detect, control and combat the disease. In this paper, we present a temporal data science algorithm for analyzing big COVID-19 epidemiological data, with focus on the temporal data analytics with ubiquitous computing. The algorithm helps users to get a better understanding of information about the confirmed cases of COVID-19. Evaluation results show the benefits of our system in temporal data analytics of big COVID-19 data with ubiquitous computing. Although the algorithm is designed for temporal data analytics of big epidemiological data, it would be applicable to other temporal data analytics of big data in many real-life applications and services.
Certified Robustness of Graph Neural Networks against Adversarial Structural Perturbation

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have recently gained much attention for node and graph classification tasks on graph-structured data. However, multiple recent works showed that an attacker can easily make GNNs predict incorrectly via perturbing the graph structure, i.e., adding or deleting edges in the graph. We aim to defend against such attacks via developing certifiably robust GNNs. Specifically, we prove the first certified robustness guarantee of any GNN for both node and graph classifications against structural perturbation. Moreover, we show that our certified robustness guarantee is tight. Our results are based on a recently proposed technique called randomized smoothing, which we extend to graph data. We also empirically evaluate our method for both node and graph classifications on multiple GNNs and multiple benchmark datasets. For instance, on the Cora dataset, Graph Convolutional Network with our randomized smoothing can achieve a certified accuracy of 0.49 when the attacker can arbitrarily add/delete at most 15 edges in the graph.
MLTR: Multi-Label Classification with Transformer

The task of multi-label image classification is to recognize all the object labels presented in an image. Though advancing for years, small objects, and objects with high conditional probability are still the main bottlenecks of previous convolutional neural network (CNN) based models, limited by convolutional kernels' representational capacity. Recent vision transformer networks utilize the self-attention mechanism to extract the feature of pixel granularity. It expresses richer local semantic information, while insufficient for mining global spatial dependence. In this paper, we point out the three crucial problems that CNN-based methods encounter and explore the possibility of conducting specific transformer modules to settle them. We put forward a Multi-label Transformer architecture (MlTr) constructed with windows partitioning, in-window pixel attention, cross-window attention, particularly improving the performance of multi-label image classification tasks. The proposed MlTr shows state-of-the-art results on various prevalent multi-label datasets such as MS-COCO, Pascal-VOC, NUS-WIDE with 88.8%, 95.8%, 65.5% respectively.
Perception Matters: Detecting Perception Failures of VQA Models Using Metamorphic Testing

Visual question answering (VQA) takes an image and a natural-language question as input and returns a natural-language answer. To date, VQA models are primarily assessed by their accuracy on high-level reasoning questions. Nevertheless, Given that perception tasks (e.g., recognizing objects) are the building blocks in the compositional process required by high-level reasoning, there is a demanding need to gain insights into how much of a problem low-level perception is. Inspired by the principles of software metamorphic testing, we introduce MetaVQA, a model-agnostic framework for benchmarking perception capability of VQA models. Given an image i, MetaVQA is able to synthesize a low-level perception question q. It then jointly transforms (i, q) to one or a set of sub-questions and sub-images. MetaVQA checks whether the answer to (i, q) satisfies metamorphic relationships (MRs), denoting perception consistency, with the composed answers of transformed questions and images. Violating MRs denotes a failure of answering perception questions. MetaVQA successfully detects over 4.9 million perception failures made by popular VQA models with metamorphic testing. The state-of-the-art VQA models (e.g., the champion of VQA 2020 Challenge) suffer from perception consistency problems. In contrast, the Oscar VQA models, by using anchor points to align questions and images, show generally better consistency in perception tasks. We hope MetaVQA will revitalize interest in enhancing the low-level perceptual abilities of VQA models, a cornerstone of high-level reasoning.
HUGE: An Efficient and Scalable Subgraph Enumeration System

Subgraph enumeration is a fundamental problem in graph analytics, which aims to find all instances of a given query graph on a large data graph. In this paper, we propose a system called HUGE to efficiently process subgraph enumeration at scale in the distributed context. HUGE features 1) an optimiser to compute an advanced execution plan without the constraints of existing works; 2) a hybrid communication layer that supports both pushing and pulling communication; 3) a novel two-stage execution mode with a lock-free and zero-copy cache design; 4) a BFS/DFS-adaptive scheduler to bound memory consumption; and 5) two-layer intra- and inter-machine load balancing. HUGE is generic such that all existing distributed subgraph enumeration algorithms can be plugged in to enjoy automatic speed up and bounded-memory execution.
Supervised Video Summarization Via Multiple Feature Sets with Parallel Attention

The assignment of importance scores to particular frames or (short) segments in a video is crucial for summarization, but also a difficult task. Previous work utilizes only one source of visual features. In this paper, we suggest a novel model architecture that combines three feature sets for visual content and motion to predict importance scores. The proposed architecture utilizes an attention mechanism before fusing motion features and features representing the (static) visual content, i.e., derived from an image classification model. Comprehensive experimental evaluations are reported for two well-known datasets, SumMe and TVSum. In this context, we identify methodological issues on how previous work used these benchmark datasets, and present a fair evaluation scheme with appropriate data splits that can be used in future work. When using static and motion features with the parallel attention mechanism, we improve state-of-the-art results for SumMe, while being on par with the state of the art for TVSum dataset.
LAGA-Net: Local-and-Global Attention Network for Skeleton Based Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition has attracted significant attention and obtained widespread applications due to the robustness of 3D skeleton data. One of the key challenges is how to extract discriminative and robust spatio-temporal features from sparse skeleton data to describe actions and improve recognition accuracy. To address this issue, this paper combines convolutions with attention mechanisms and proposes a deep network for skeleton-based action recognition, termed as local-and-global attention network (LAGA-Net). First, we encode skeleton sequences into joint feature evolution maps to compactly describe the spatial and temporal characteristics of skeleton sequences. Then, a motion guided channel attention module (MGCAM) is proposed to model the interdependencies between feature channels by calculating temporal frame-level motion and enhance motion-salient features in a channel-wise way. Further, a spatio-temporal attention module (STAM) is proposed to model spatio-temporal context-aware collaboration at sequence level and extract spatio-temporal attention features that involve long-range dependencies. Together, MGCAM and STAM are combined to form LAGA-Net, which extracts discriminative features integrating both local and global representations of skeleton sequences. Moreover, a two-stream architecture is proposed to learn complementary features from joint and bone aspects. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art approaches on several benchmarks (e.g., NTU RGB+D, Northwestern-UCLA, UTD-MHAD and NTU RGB+D 120).
On the impact of security vulnerabilities in the npm and RubyGems dependency networks

The increasing interest in open source software has led to the emergence of large language-specific package distributions of reusable software libraries, such as npm and RubyGems. These software packages can be subject to vulnerabilities that may expose dependent packages through explicitly declared dependencies. Using Snyk’s vulnerability database, this article empirically studies vulnerabilities affecting npm and RubyGems packages. We analyse how and when these vulnerabilities are disclosed and fixed, and how their prevalence changes over time. We also analyse how vulnerable packages expose their direct and indirect dependents to vulnerabilities. We distinguish between two types of dependents: packages distributed via the package manager, and external GitHub projects depending on npm packages. We observe that the number of vulnerabilities in npm is increasing and being disclosed faster than vulnerabilities in RubyGems. For both package distributions, the time required to disclose vulnerabilities is increasing over time. Vulnerabilities in npm packages affect a median of 30 package releases, while this is 59 releases in RubyGems packages. A large proportion of external GitHub projects is exposed to vulnerabilities coming from direct or indirect dependencies. 33% and 40% of dependency vulnerabilities to which projects and packages are exposed, respectively, have their fixes in more recent releases within the same major release range of the used dependency. Our findings reveal that more effort is needed to better secure open source package distributions.
Orthogonal Nonnegative Matrix Factorization using a novel deep Autoencoder Network

Orthogonal Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (ONMF) offers an important analytical vehicle for addressing many problems. Encouraged by record-breaking successes attained by neural computing models in solving an assortment of data analytics tasks, a rich collection of neural computing models has been proposed to perform ONMF with compelling performance. Such existing models can be broadly classified into the shallow-layered structure (SLS) based and deep-layered structure (DLS) based models. However, SLS models cannot capture complex relationships and hierarchical information latent in a matrix due to their simple network structures and DLS models rely on an iterative procedure to derive weights, leading to a less efficient solution process and cannot be reused to factorize new matrices. To overcome these shortcomings, this paper proposes a novel deep autoencoder network for ONMF, which is abbreviated as DAutoED-ONMF. Compared with SLS models, the newly proposed model is capable of generating solutions with good interpretability and solution uniqueness like original SLS models, yet the new model attains a superior learning capability thanks to its deep structure employed. In comparison with DLS models, the new model trains a reusable encoder network to directly factorize any given matrix with no need to repeatedly retrain the model for factorizing multiple matrices using a tailor-designed network training procedure. Proof of the procedure’s convergence is presented with an analysis of its computational complexity. The numerical experiments conducted on several publicly data sets convincingly demonstrate that the proposed DAutoED-ONMF model gains promising performance in terms of multiple metrics.
Radar-Based Hand Gesture Recognition Using Spiking Neural Networks

We propose a spiking neural network (SNN) approach for radar-based hand gesture recognition (HGR), using frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) millimeter-wave radar. After pre-processing the range-Doppler or micro-Doppler radar signal, we use a signal-to-spike conversion scheme that encodes radar Doppler maps into spike trains. The spike trains are fed into a spiking recurrent neural network, a liquid state machine (LSM). The readout spike signal from the SNN is then used as input for different classifiers for comparison, including logistic regression, random forest, and support vector machine (SVM). Using liquid state machines of less than 1000 neurons, we achieve better than state-of-the-art results on two publicly available reference datasets, reaching over 98% accuracy on 10-fold cross-validation for both data sets.
Learning Dynamic Network Using a Reuse Gate Function in Semi-supervised Video Object Segmentation

Current state-of-the-art approaches for Semi-supervised Video Object Segmentation (Semi-VOS) propagates information from previous frames to generate segmentation mask for the current frame. This results in high-quality segmentation across challenging scenarios such as changes in appearance and occlusion. But it also leads to unnecessary computations for stationary or slow-moving objects where the change across frames is minimal. In this work, we exploit this observation by using temporal information to quickly identify frames with minimal change and skip the heavyweight mask generation step. To realize this efficiency, we propose a novel dynamic network that estimates change across frames and decides which path – computing a full network or reusing previous frame’s feature – to choose depending on the expected similarity. Experimental results show that our approach significantly improves inference speed without much accuracy degradation on challenging Semi-VOS datasets – DAVIS 16, DAVIS 17, and YouTube-VOS. Furthermore, our approach can be applied to multiple Semi-VOS methods demonstrating its generality. The code is available in https://github.com/HYOJINPARK/ReuseVOS
A bibliometric assessment of software engineering themes, scholars and institutions (2013–2020)

This paper is the updated version (2013–2020) of the series of papers on emerging themes, top scholars and institutes on software engineering (SE), published by the Journal of Systems and Software for almost 25 years. The paper reports the findings of a bibliometric study by applying the systematic mapping technique on top-quality software engineering venues (handling a dataset of 11.668 studies). The design of the study remains the same for the complete decade, so that the results are consistent and comparable: As the ranking metric for institutions, we used the count of papers in which authors affiliated with the corresponding institute have been identified in the obtained dataset. Regarding scholars we computed the corresponding rankings based on the number of published papers and the average number of citations. In this version, the analysis of emerging trends and themes has been promoted compared to the previous years to provide more insights on what a newcomer in the software engineering domain should look at, as well as to recap the state-of-research in terms of themes to more experienced SE researchers.