Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
LD-ConGR: A Large RGB-D Video Dataset for Long-Distance Continuous Gesture Recognition

Gesture recognition plays an important role in natural human-computer interaction and sign language recognition. Existing research on gesture recognition is limited to close-range interaction such as vehicle gesture control and face-to-face communication. To apply gesture recognition to long-distance interactive scenes such as meetings and smart homes, a large RGB-D video dataset LD-ConGR is established in this paper. LD-ConGR is distinguished from existing gesture datasets by its long-distance gesture collection, fine-grained annotations, and high video qual-ity. Specifically, 1) the farthest gesture provided by the LD-ConGR is captured 4m away from the camera while existing gesture datasets collect gestures within 1m from the camera; 2) besides the gesture category, the temporal segmentation of gestures and hand location are also anno-tated in LD-ConGR; 3) videos are captured at high reso-lution (1280 x 720 for color streams and 640 x 576 for depth streams) and high frame rate (30 fps). On top of the LD-ConGR, a series of experimental and studies are conducted, and the proposed gesture region estimation and key frame sampling strategies are demonstrated to be effective in dealing with long-distance gesture recognition and the uncertainty of gesture duration. The dataset and experimen-tal results presented in this paper are expected to boost the research of long-distance gesture recognition. The dataset is available at https://github.com/Diananini/LD-ConGR-CVPR2022.
Video Mask Transfiner for High-Quality Video Instance Segmentation

While Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) has seen rapid progress, current approaches struggle to predict high-quality masks with accurate boundary details. Moreover, the predicted segmentations often fluctuate over time, suggesting that temporal consistency cues are neglected or not fully utilized. In this paper, we set out to tackle these issues, with the aim of achieving highly detailed and more temporally stable mask predictions for VIS. We first propose the Video Mask Transfiner (VMT) method, capable of leveraging fine-grained high-resolution features thanks to a highly efficient video transformer structure. Our VMT detects and groups sparse error-prone spatio-temporal regions of each tracklet in the video segment, which are then refined using both local and instance-level cues. Second, we identify that the coarse boundary annotations of the popular YouTube-VIS dataset constitute a major limiting factor. Based on our VMT architecture, we therefore design an automated annotation refinement approach by iterative training and self-correction. To benchmark high-quality mask predictions for VIS, we introduce the HQ-YTVIS dataset, consisting of a manually re-annotated test set and our automatically refined training data. We compare VMT with the most recent state-of-the-art methods on the HQ-YTVIS, as well as the Youtube-VIS, OVIS and BDD100K MOTS benchmarks. Experimental results clearly demonstrate the efficacy and effectiveness of our method on segmenting complex and dynamic objects, by capturing precise details.
Modernization of future teachers' professional training: on the role of immersive technologies

Immersive technologies have shown effectiveness and relevance in the educational space. Global challenges of sociocultural nature have necessitated the use of innovative learning environments that have become an alternative to the traditional educational system. The research aims to analyze the status of immersive technologies in the teacher's professional skills cluster. The article aims to position immersive elements in practical in educational strategies in the short and long term, which specify the teacher's competencies required to organize the educational process using VR/AR/MR/XR. The methodology of the study is associated with the use of general scientific, scientific-pedagogical, and scientific-technological means that allow to analyze of the content and form of virtual reality elements in the process of their use in education. A promising direction of research is the consideration of the professional competencies of a teacher through the prism of the balance between the traditional face-to-face and innovative virtual format of education. Consequently, immersive technologies become a relevant learning environment in the educational space, which leads to modernizing transformations in the preparation of professional competencies of the teacher, who must have appropriate digital skills to be able to organize the learning process in VR-format.
Technological challenges of our time in the digitalization of the education of the future

The purpose of this article is to analyze the features and prospects for the development of the process of using modern technologies in the educational process in the context of the study of the global trend of digitalization, which determines the digital transformation of education in the future. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the determination that digital education is not a substitute for traditional education, but an effective addition to the quality provision of educational services thanks to the introduction of advanced technologies into the educational process in accordance with the technological challenges of the present and future. The practical significance of the obtained results is manifested in the possibility of using them to develop a strategy for solving existing problems of educational digitalization, finding tools for optimizing the process of obtaining online education. Deepening the process of digital transformation of education will make it possible to expand the possibilities of comprehensive use of modern innovative technologies to increase the level of efficiency and accessibility of education, which in turn contributes to the formation of competitive specialists who possess digital competence skills - the key to building a successful career in the future.
Artistic Style Discovery with Independent Components

Style transfer has been well studied in recent years with excellent performance processed. While existing methods usually choose CNNs as the powerful tool to accomplish superb stylization, less attention was paid to the latent style space. Rare exploration of underlying dimensions results in the poor style controllability and the limited practical application. In this work, we rethink the internal meaning of style features, further proposing a novel unsupervised algorithm for style discovery and achieving personalized manip-ulation. In particular, we take a closer look into the mechanism of style transfer and obtain different artistic style components from the latent space consisting of different style features. Then fresh styles can be generated by linear combination according to various style components. Experimental results have shown that our approach is superb in 1) restylizing the original output with the diverse artistic styles discovered from the latent space while keeping the content unchanged, and 2) being generic and compatible for various style transfer methods. Our code is available in this page: https://github.com/Shelsin/ArtIns.
Face emotion recognition based on infrared thermal imagery by applying machine learning and parallelism

Over time for the past few years, facial expression identification has been a promising area. However, darkness, lighting conditions, and other factors make facial emotion identification challenging to detect. As a result, thermal images are suggested as a solution to such problems and for a variety of other benefits. Furthermore, focusing on significant regions of a face rather than the entire face is sufficient for reducing processing and improving accuracy at the same time. This research introduces novel infrared thermal image-based approaches for facial emotion recognition. First, the entire image of the face is separated into four pieces. Then, we accepted only four active regions (ARs) to prepare training and testing datasets. These four ARs are the left eye, right eye, and lips areas. In addition, ten-folded cross-validation is proposed to improve recognition accuracy using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a machine learning technique. Furthermore, we incorporated a parallelism technique to reduce processing-time in testing and training datasets. As a result, we have seen that the processing time reduces to 50%. Finally, a decision-level fusion is applied to improve the recognition accuracy. As a result, the proposed technique achieves a recognition accuracy of 96.87 %. The achieved accuracy ascertains the robustness of our proposed scheme.
Using Squid Game to Teach Game Theory

This paper uses Netflix's dystopian Korean-language drama series Squid Game (2021) to illustrate an active learning technique to support the teaching of game theory in undergraduate courses.The series is chosen because it demonstrates different games with which the characters have to engage as part of the narrative.Geerling, Mateer and Addler (2020) show that using popular films in class is an effective way to introduce and motivate the deeper learning of core game theory concepts.We build on this work by providing instructors with a menu of quick teaching scenes and extended teaching guides, from which they can freely select and adapt to their particular needs.These resources provide summaries of the scenes, links to the clips, key concepts, and assessment questions.This teaching material is suitable for use in both principles-level courses, where game theory is first introduced, and advanced-level courses.
Intraoperative Assessment of Tumor Margins in Tissue Sections with Hyperspectral Imaging and Machine Learning

The intraoperative assessment of tumor margins of head and neck cancer is crucial for complete tumor resection and patient outcome. The current standard is to take tumor biopsies during surgery for frozen section analysis by a pathologist after H&E staining. This evaluation is time-consuming, subjective, methodologically limited and underlies a selection bias. Optical methods such as hyperspectral imaging (HSI) are therefore of high interest to overcome these limitations. We aimed to analyze the feasibility and accuracy of an intraoperative HSI assessment on unstained tissue sections taken from seven patients with oral squamous cell carcinoma. Afterwards, the tissue sections were subjected to standard histopathological processing and evaluation. We trained different machine learning models on the HSI data, including a supervised 3D convolutional neural network to perform tumor detection. The results were congruent with the histopathological annotations. Therefore, this approach enables the delineation of tumor margins with artificial HSI-based histopathological information during surgery with high speed and accuracy on par with traditional intraoperative tumor margin assessment (Accuracy: 0.76, Specificity: 0.89, Sensitivity: 0.48). With this, we introduce HSI in combination with ML hyperspectral imaging as a potential new tool for intraoperative tumor margin assessment.
Authentication and Authorization in Modern Web Apps for Data Security Using Nodejs and Role of Dark Web

Authentication and Authorization are the base of security for all the Technologies present in this world today. Starting from your smartphone where a user authenticates himself before he could access the data inside to Entering into the White House, you must authenticate yourself, and based on that you are authorized. In this digital world where every Business, MNC, Government Body, Companies, Users, etc. needs a website to inform the world about their presence on the internet, provide services online and become a “Brand”, the risk of leaking user's sensitive information increases. It could be dangerous to the users of the hacked website because their sensitive information like a credit card, bank account details, etc. could be sold in the black market of the “dark web”. The role of the dark web is described in the paper and how the data is sold there and what becomes of it. The paper helps to understand how a secure website is developed that promises the user to keep the sensitive information safe, increases the bond of trust between a client and server which results in a long-term relationship. The aim behind developing an authentication system is to keep users’ sensitive information safe so that hackers cannot steal and sell the information on the dark web's back market. To perform this, the developer needs to understand how to implement authentication. NodeJS, with the help of its framework expressJS and some other packages, is used to develop the authentication and authorization system of the website by the research. Previous papers on this field covered the authentication topic in general. This paper overcame that by going deeper into the field and being server-side language specific. The common types of authentication methods used in different types of websites are discussed in detail and the best methods are purposed for the developer to be implemented for a more secure website. This research put light on Artificial Intelligence and blockchain as the future of security of big data.
Short Text Clustering Algorithms, Application and Challenges: A Survey

The number of online documents has rapidly grown, and with the expansion of the Web, document analysis, or text analysis, has become an essential task for preparing, storing, visualizing and mining documents. The texts generated daily on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook are vast and unstructured. Most of these generated texts come in the form of short text and need special analysis because short text suffers from lack of information and sparsity. Thus, this topic has attracted growing attention from researchers in the data storing and processing community for knowledge discovery. Short text clustering (STC) has become a critical task for automatically grouping various unlabelled texts into meaningful clusters. STC is a necessary step in many applications, including Twitter personalization, sentiment analysis, spam filtering, customer reviews and many other social network-related applications. In the last few years, the natural-language-processing research community has concentrated on STC and attempted to overcome the problems of sparseness, dimensionality, and lack of information. We comprehensively review various STC approaches proposed in the literature. Providing insights into the technological component should assist researchers in identifying the possibilities and challenges facing STC. To gain such insights, we review various literature, journals, and academic papers focusing on STC techniques. The contents of this study are prepared by reviewing, analysing and summarizing diverse types of journals and scholarly articles with a focus on the STC techniques from five authoritative databases: IEEE Xplore, Web of Science, Science Direct, Scopus and Google Scholar. This study focuses on STC techniques: text clustering, challenges to short texts, pre-processing, document representation, dimensionality reduction, similarity measurement of short text and evaluation.
Automatic Segmentation of Cervical Cells Based on Star-Convex Polygons in Pap Smear Images

Cervical cancer is one of the most common cancers that threaten women’s lives, and its early screening is of great significance for the prevention and treatment of cervical diseases. Pathologically, the accurate segmentation of cervical cells plays a crucial role in the diagnosis of cervical cancer. However, the frequent presence of adherent or overlapping cervical cells in Pap smear images makes separating them individually a difficult task. Currently, there are few studies on the segmentation of adherent cervical cells, and the existing methods commonly suffer from low segmentation accuracy and complex design processes. To address the above problems, we propose a novel star-convex polygon-based convolutional neural network with an encoder-decoder structure, called SPCNet. The model accomplishes the segmentation of adherent cells relying on three steps: automatic feature extraction, star-convex polygon detection, and non-maximal suppression (NMS). Concretely, a new residual-based attentional embedding (RAE) block is suggested for image feature extraction. It fuses the deep features from the attention-based convolutional layers with the shallow features from the original image through the residual connection, enhancing the network’s ability to extract the abundant image features. And then, a polygon-based adaptive NMS (PA-NMS) algorithm is adopted to screen the generated polygon proposals and further achieve the accurate detection of adherent cells, thus allowing the network to completely segment the cell instances in Pap smear images. Finally, the effectiveness of our method is evaluated on three independent datasets. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the method obtains superior segmentation performance compared to other well-established algorithms.
How Can Small and Medium Enterprises in the Chinese Market Achieve Sustainable Development Goals Through Blockchain?

Blockchain is one of the most important innovative technologies developed in recent years. It has great potential and capacity to help SMEs prosper due to its decentralized public ledger, which provides a secure infrastructure for transactions between unfamiliar parties without any major influence from a central authority. The use of a decentralized public ledger also makes it possible for SMEs to get credit more easily, thus assisting them in achieving sustainable development. This chapter gives an overview of the functions and applications of blockchain, the situation of SMEs in the Chinese market, and sheds some light on how the Chinese policies on blockchain may affect SMEs. The chapter uses the case of WeBank to show how blockchain technology can accelerate the development of SMEs.
DFA-UNet: Efficient Railroad Image Segmentation

In computer vision technology, image segmentation is a significant technological advancement for the current problems of high-speed railroad image scene changes, low segmentation accuracy, and serious information loss. We propose a segmentation algorithm, DFA-UNet, based on an improved U-Net network architecture. The model uses the same encoder–decoder structure as U-Net. To be able to extract image features efficiently and further integrate the weights of each channel feature, we propose to embed the DFA attention module in the encoder part of the model for the adaptive adjustment of feature map weights. We evaluated the performance of the model on the RailSem19 dataset. The results showed that our model showed improvements of 2.48%, 0.22%, 3.31%, 0.97%, and 2.2% in mIoU, F1-score, Accuracy, Precision, and Recall, respectively, compared with U-Net. The model can effectively achieve the segmentation of railroad images.
Sharing Health Information Using a Blockchain

Data sharing in the health sector represents a big problem due to privacy and security issues. Health data have tremendous value for organisations and criminals. The European Commission has classified health data as a unique resource owing to their ability to enable both retrospective and prospective research at a low cost. Similarly, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) encourages member nations to create and implement health data governance systems that protect individual privacy while allowing data sharing. This paper proposes adopting a blockchain framework to enable the transparent sharing of medical information among health entities in a secure environment. We develop a laboratory-based prototype using a design science research methodology (DSRM). This approach has its roots in the sciences of engineering and artificial intelligence, and its primary goal is to create relevant artefacts that add value to the fields in which they are used. We adopt a patient-centric approach, according to which a patient is the owner of their data and may allow hospitals and health professionals access to their data.
Deep learning-based user experience evaluation in distance learning

The Covid-19 pandemic caused uncertainties in many different organizations, institutions gained experience in remote working and showed that high-quality distance education is a crucial component in higher education. The main concern in higher education is the impact of distance education on the quality of learning during such a pandemic. Although this type of education may be considered effective and beneficial at first glance, its effectiveness highly depends on a variety of factors such as the availability of online resources and individuals' financial situations. In this study, the effectiveness of e-learning during the Covid-19 pandemic is evaluated using posted tweets, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling techniques. More than 160,000 tweets, addressing conditions related to the major change in the education system, were gathered from Twitter social network and deep learning-based sentiment analysis models and topic models based on latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) algorithm were developed and analyzed. Long short term memory-based sentiment analysis model using word2vec embedding was used to evaluate the opinions of Twitter users during distance education and also, a topic model using the LDA algorithm was built to identify the discussed topics in Twitter. The conducted experiments demonstrate the proposed model achieved an overall accuracy of 76%. Our findings also reveal that the Covid-19 pandemic has negative effects on individuals 54.5% of tweets were associated with negative emotions whereas this was relatively low on emotion reports in the YouGov survey and gender-rescaled emotion scores on Twitter. In parallel, we discuss the impact of the pandemic on education and how users' emotions altered due to the catastrophic changes allied to the education system based on the proposed machine learning-based models.
Notational Variants and Cognition: The Case of Dependency Grammar

Abstract In recent years, dependency grammars have established themselves as valuable tools in theoretical and computational linguistics. To many linguists, dependency grammars and the more standard constituency-based formalisms are notational variants. We argue that, beyond considerations of formal equivalence, cognition may also serve as a background for a genuine comparison between these different views of syntax. In this paper, we review and evaluate some of the most common arguments and evidence employed to advocate for the cognitive or neural reality of dependency grammars in linguistics, psycholinguistics, or neurolinguistics. We then raise the possibility that the abilities to represent and track, alternatively or in parallel, constituency and dependency structures co-exist in human cognition and are constitutive of syntactic competence.
Evolutionary Multitask Optimization in Real-World Applications: A Survey

Due to its good ability to solve problems, evolutionary multitask optimization (EMTO) algorithm has been widely studied recently. Evolutionary algorithm has the advantage of fast searching for the optimal solution, but it is easy to fall into local optimum and difficult to generalize. To solve these problems, it is an effective method to combine with multitask optimization algorithm. Through the implicit parallelism of tasks themselves and the knowledge transfer between tasks, more promising individuals can be generated in the evolution process, which can jump out of the local optimum. How to better combine the two has also been studied more and more. This paper will explore the existing evolutionary multitasking theory and improvement scheme in detail. Then it summarizes the application of evolutionary multitask optimization in different scenarios. Finally, according to the existing research, the future research trends and potential exploration directions are revealed.