Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Design of online intelligent English teaching platform based on artificial intelligence techniques

Abstract Artificial intelligence education (AIEd) is defined in the field of education as the utilization of artificial intelligence. There are currently many AIEd‐driven applications in schools and universities. This paper applies an artificial intelligence module combined with the knowledge recommendation to the system and develops an online English teaching system in comparison with the common teaching auxiliary system. The method of English teaching is useful in investigating the potential internal connections between evaluation outcomes and various factors. This article develops deep learning‐assisted online intelligent English teaching system that utilizes to create a modern tool platform to help students improve their English language teaching efficiency in line with their mastery of knowledge and personality. The decision tree algorithm and neural networks have been used and to generate an English teaching assessment implementation model based on decision tree technologies. It provides valuable data from extensive information, summarizes rules and data, and helps teachers to improve their education and the English scores of students. This system reflects the thinking of the artificial intelligence expert system. Test application demonstrates that the system can help students improve their learning efficiency and will make learning content more relevant. Besides, the system provides an example model with similar methods and has a referential definition.
Blockchain-Based Federated Learning for Device Failure Detection in Industrial IoT

Device failure detection is one of most essential problems in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, in conventional IIoT device failure detection, client devices need to upload raw data to the central server for model training, which might lead to disclosure of sensitive business data. Therefore, in this article, to ensure client data privacy, we propose a blockchain-based federated learning approach for device failure detection in IIoT. First, we present a platform architecture of blockchain-based federated learning systems for failure detection in IIoT, which enables verifiable integrity of client data. In the architecture, each client periodically creates a Merkle tree in which each leaf node represents a client data record, and stores the tree root on a blockchain. Furthermore, to address the data heterogeneity issue in IIoT failure detection, we propose a novel centroid distance weighted federated averaging (CDW_FedAvg) algorithm taking into account the distance between positive class and negative class of each client data set. In addition, to motivate clients to participate in federated learning, a smart contact-based incentive mechanism is designed depending on the size and the centroid distance of client data used in local model training. A prototype of the proposed architecture is implemented with our industry partner, and evaluated in terms of feasibility, accuracy, and performance. The results show that the approach is feasible, and has satisfactory accuracy and performance.
ReActNet: Towards Precise Binary Neural Network with Generalized Activation Functions

In this paper, we propose several ideas for enhancing a binary network to close its accuracy gap from real-valued networks without incurring any additional computational cost. We first construct a baseline network by modifying and binarizing a compact real-valued network with parameter-free shortcuts, bypassing all the intermediate convolutional layers including the downsampling layers. This baseline network strikes a good trade-off between accuracy and efficiency, achieving superior performance than most of existing binary networks at approximately half of the computational cost. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we observed that the performance of binary networks is sensitive to activation distribution variations. Based on this important observation, we propose to generalize the traditional Sign and PReLU functions, denoted as RSign and RPReLU for the respective generalized functions, to enable explicit learning of the distribution reshape and shift at near-zero extra cost. Lastly, we adopt a distributional loss to further enforce the binary network to learn similar output distributions as those of a real-valued network. We show that after incorporating all these ideas, the proposed ReActNet outperforms all the state-of-the-arts by a large margin. Specifically, it outperforms Real-to-Binary Net and MeliusNet29 by 4.0% and 3.6% respectively for the top-1 accuracy and also reduces the gap to its real-valued counterpart to within 3.0% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet dataset. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/liuzechun/ReActNet .
BOLA: Near-Optimal Bitrate Adaptation for Online Videos

Modern video players employ complex algorithms to adapt the bitrate of the video that is shown to the user. Bitrate adaptation requires a tradeoff between reducing the probability that the video freezes (rebuffers) and enhancing the quality of the video. A bitrate that is too high leads to frequent rebuffering, while a bitrate that is too low leads to poor video quality. Video providers segment videos into short segments and encode each segment at multiple bitrates. The video player adaptively chooses the bitrate of each segment to download, possibly choosing different bitrates for successive segments. We formulate bitrate adaptation as a utility-maximization problem and devise an online control algorithm called BOLA that uses Lyapunov optimization to minimize rebuffering and maximize video quality. We prove that BOLA achieves a time-average utility that is within an additive term O(1/V) of the optimal value, for a control parameter V related to the video buffer size. Further, unlike prior work, BOLA does not require prediction of available network bandwidth. We empirically validate BOLA in a simulated network environment using a collection of network traces. We show that BOLA achieves near-optimal utility and in many cases significantly higher utility than current state-of-the-art algorithms. Our work has immediate impact on real-world video players and for the evolving DASH standard for video transmission. We also implemented an updated version of BOLA that is now part of the standard reference player dash.js and is used in production by several video providers such as Akamai, BBC, CBS, and Orange.
Double adaptive weights for stabilization of moth flame optimizer: Balance analysis, engineering cases, and medical diagnosis

Moth flame optimization (MFO) is a swarm-based algorithm with mediocre performance and marginal originality proposed in recent years. It tried to simulate the fantasy navigation mode of moth lateral positioning. The basic MFO has no specific, deep strategies in different periods of the algorithm and a fragile evolutionary basis, which may lead to the problem of falling into local optimum and slow convergence trend. Therefore, this paper introduces a double adaptive weight mechanism into the MFO algorithm, termed as WEMFO, to boost the search capability of the basic MFO and provide a more efficient tool for optimization purposes. The proposed WEMFO adjusts the search strategy adaptively in different periods of the algorithm, making it more flexible between global search (diversification) and local search (intensification). The WEMFO algorithm is compared with some illustrious metaheuristic solvers and advanced metaheuristic methods developed in recent years on thirty benchmark functions. The experimental results expose that the developed WEMFO has apparent compensations in terms of convergence speed and solution accuracy. Moreover, this paper analyzes the diversity and balance of WEMFO and applies the algorithm to several engineering problems. The experimental results show that the WEMFO algorithm has good performance in engineering problems. Additionally, the proposed WEMFO was also applied to train Kernel Extreme Learning Machine (KELM), the resultant optimized WEMFO-KELM model was applied to six clinical disease classification problems. By comparing with MFO-KELM and other five classification models, the experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm had shown better performance in practical problems. An online guide for the algorithm in this research WEMFO and proposed classifier WEMFO-KELM will be publicly available at https://aliasgharheidari.com.
Towards a new era of mass data collection: Assessing pandemic surveillance technologies to preserve user privacy

Controlling the coronavirus pandemic is triggering a cross-border strategy by which national governments attempt to control the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. A response based on sharing facts about millions of private movements and a call to study information behavior during the global health crisis has been advised worldwide. The present study aims to identify the technologies to control the COVID-19 and future pandemics with massive data collection from users' mobile devices. This research undertakes a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of the studies about the currently available methods, strategies, and actions to collect and analyze data from users' mobile devices. In a total of 76 relevant studies, 13 technologies that are classified based on the following aspect of data and data management have been identified: (1) security; (2) destruction; (3) voluntary access; (4) time span; and (5) storage. In addition, in order to understand how these technologies can affect user privacy, 25 data points that these technologies could have access to if installed through mobile applications have been detected. The paper concludes with a discussion of important theoretical and practical implications of preserving user privacy and curbing COVID-19 infections in the global public health emergency situation.
Blockchain for IoT-based smart cities: Recent advances, requirements, and future challenges

A remarkable interest in the Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart cities from both academia and industry has been observed in recent years. Smart cities can offer various smart applications such as intelligent transportation, industry 4.0, smart banking, among others, for boosting the life quality of citizens. Security is one of the key challenges of a smart city. One can enable smart cities with a blockchain to offer enhanced security via storing transactions in a secure, transparent, decentralized, and immutable ledger. However, both blockchain and smart cities are in their infancy and significant research efforts are needed to integrate them. In this paper, we comprehensively review the role of blockchain in enabling IoT-based smart cities. First, we present the evolution of blockchain technology in terms of constituent technologies, consensus algorithms, and blockchain platforms. Second, we discuss and critically evaluate various smart applications enabled by blockchain. Third, we present real-world blockchain implementation in smart cities as case studies. Fourth, we present the key requirements to integrate blockchain with smart cities. Finally, we present open research challenges along with their key causes and possible solutions.
RefineDNet: A Weakly Supervised Refinement Framework for Single Image Dehazing

Haze-free images are the prerequisites of many vision systems and algorithms, and thus single image dehazing is of paramount importance in computer vision. In this field, prior-based methods have achieved initial success. However, they often introduce annoying artifacts to outputs because their priors can hardly fit all situations. By contrast, learning-based methods can generate more natural results. Nonetheless, due to the lack of paired foggy and clear outdoor images of the same scenes as training samples, their haze removal abilities are limited. In this work, we attempt to merge the merits of prior-based and learning-based approaches by dividing the dehazing task into two sub-tasks, i.e., visibility restoration and realness improvement. Specifically, we propose a two-stage weakly supervised dehazing framework, RefineDNet. In the first stage, RefineDNet adopts the dark channel prior to restore visibility. Then, in the second stage, it refines preliminary dehazing results of the first stage to improve realness via adversarial learning with unpaired foggy and clear images. To get more qualified results, we also propose an effective perceptual fusion strategy to blend different dehazing outputs. Extensive experiments corroborate that RefineDNet with the perceptual fusion has an outstanding haze removal capability and can also produce visually pleasing results. Even implemented with basic backbone networks, RefineDNet can outperform supervised dehazing approaches as well as other state-of-the-art methods on indoor and outdoor datasets. To make our results reproducible, relevant code and data are available at https://github.com/xiaofeng94/RefineDNet-for-dehazing.
Bayesian retinex underwater image enhancement

This paper develops a Bayesian retinex algorithm for enhancing single underwater image with multiorder gradient priors of reflectance and illumination. First, a simple yet effective color correction approach is adopted to remove color casts and recover naturalness. Then a maximum a posteriori formulation for underwater image enhancement is established on the color-corrected image by imposing multiorder gradient priors on reflectance and illumination. The l1 norm is appropriately used to model piecewise and piecewise linear approximations on the reflectance, and the l2 norm is used to enforce spatial smoothness and spatial linear smoothness on the illumination. Meanwhile, a complex underwater image enhancement issue is turned into two simple denoising subproblems where their convergence analyses are mathematically provided, and their solutions can be derived by an efficient optimization algorithm. Besides, the proposed model is fast implemented on pixelwise operations while not requiring additional prior knowledge about underwater imaging conditions. Final experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in color correction, naturalness preservation, structures and details promotion, artifacts or noise suppression. Compared with several traditional and leading enhancement approaches, the proposed method yields better results on qualitative and quantitative assessments. The superiority of the proposed method can be extended to several challenging applications.
Unsupervised Degradation Representation Learning for Blind Super-Resolution

Most existing CNN-based super-resolution (SR) methods are developed based on an assumption that the degradation is fixed and known (e.g., bicubic downsampling). However, these methods suffer a severe performance drop when the real degradation is different from their assumption. To handle various unknown degradations in real-world applications, previous methods rely on degradation estimation to reconstruct the SR image. Nevertheless, degradation estimation methods are usually time-consuming and may lead to SR failure due to large estimation errors. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised degradation representation learning scheme for blind SR without explicit degradation estimation. Specifically, we learn abstract representations to distinguish various degradations in the representation space rather than explicit estimation in the pixel space. Moreover, we introduce a Degradation-Aware SR (DASR) network with flexible adaption to various degradations based on the learned representations. It is demonstrated that our degradation representation learning scheme can extract discriminative representations to obtain accurate degradation information. Experiments on both synthetic and real images show that our network achieves state-of-the-art performance for the blind SR task. Code is available at: https://github.com/LongguangWang/DASR.
Deep learning models for solar irradiance forecasting: A comprehensive review

The growing human population in this modern society hugely depends on the energy to fulfill their day-to-day needs and activities. Renewable energy sources, especially solar energy, can satisfy the global power demand while reducing global warming caused by conventional sources. Solar irradiance is an essential component in solar power applications. The availability of solar irradiance is influenced by several factors, such as forecasting horizon, weather classification, and performance evaluation metrics, which also need consideration. The accurate forecasting of solar irradiance is of utmost importance for the power system designers and grid operators for efficient management of solar energy systems. The intermittent and non-stationary nature of solar irradiance makes many existing statistical and machine learning approaches less competent in providing accurate predictions. In this context, deep learning models have been proposed by several researchers to reduce the limitations of existing machine learning models and improve prediction accuracy. In this work, an extensive and comprehensive review of deep learning-based solar irradiance forecasting models is presented. The effectiveness and efficacy of several deep learning models, including long short-term memory, deep belief network, echo state network, convolution neural network, etc. have been reviewed. The results obtained in the reported studies proved the superiority of deep learning models in solar forecasting applications. Few researchers have proposed deep hybrid models to improve the prediction performance further. A study reported that the hybrid of CNN-LSTM can enhance the prediction accuracy by 3.62%, 25.29%, 34.66%, 37.37% and 26.20% over CNN, LSTM, GRU, RNN and DNN, respectively. Overall, this paper offers preliminary guidelines for a detailed view of deep learning techniques that researchers and engineers can use to improve the solar photovoltaic plant’s modeling and planning.
Robust Reversible Audio Watermarking Scheme for Telemedicine and Privacy Protection

The leakage of medical audio data in telemedicine seriously violates the privacy of patients. In order to avoid the leakage of patient information in telemedicine, a two-stage reversible robust audio watermarking algorithm is proposed to protect medical audio data. The scheme decomposes the medical audio into two independent embedding domains, embeds the robust watermark and the reversible watermark into the two domains respectively. In order to ensure the audio quality, the Hurst exponent is used to find a suitable position for watermark embedding. Due to the independence of the two embedding domains, the embedding of the second-stage reversible watermark will not affect the first-stage watermark, so the robustness of the first-stage watermark can be well maintained. In the second stage, the correlation between the sampling points in the medical audio is used to modify the hidden bits of the histogram to reduce the modification of the medical audio and reduce the distortion caused by reversible embedding. Simulation experiments show that this scheme has strong robustness against signal processing operations such as MP3 compression of 48 db, additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) of 20 db, low-pass filtering, resampling, re-quantization and other attacks, and has good imperceptibility.
Salient Object Detection with Recurrent Fully Convolutional Networks

Deep networks have been proved to encode high-level features with semantic meaning and delivered superior performance in salient object detection. In this paper, we take one step further by developing a new saliency detection method based on recurrent fully convolutional networks (RFCNs). Compared with existing deep network based methods, the proposed network is able to incorpor- ate saliency prior knowledge for more accurate inference. In addition, the recurrent architecture enables our method to automatically learn to refine the saliency map by iteratively correcting its previous errors, yielding more reliable final predictions. To train such a netw- ork with numerous parameters, we propose a pre-training strategy using semantic segmentation data, which simultaneously leverages the strong supervision of segmentation tasks for effective training and enables the network to capture generic representations to chara- cterize category-agnostic objects for saliency detection. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method compares favorably against state-of-the-art saliency detection approaches. Additional validations are also performed to study the impact of the recurrent architecture and pre-training strategy on both saliency detection and semantic segmentation, which provides important knowledge for network design and training in the future research.
Multi-strategy boosted mutative whale-inspired optimization approaches

This paper presents an improved Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) for global optimization. WOA is a recently introduced meta-heuristic algorithm mimicking the hunting behavior of humpback whales. Owing to its simplicity in exploratory and exploitative operators and the satisfactory efficacy, this algorithm has found its place among the well-established population-based approach utilized in many engineering and science areas. However, this method is easy to fall into local optimum when dealing with some optimization cases. In order to further enhance its exploratory and exploitative performance, three strategies are incorporated into the original method to keep a better balance between exploitation and exploration tendencies. First, the chaotic initialization phase is introduced into the optimizer to initiate the swarm of chaos-triggered whales. Then, Gaussian mutation is employed to intensify the diversity level of the evolving population. At last, a chaotic local search with a 'shrinking' strategy is used to enhance the exploitative leanings of the basic optimizer. In order to verify the effectiveness of the improved WOA, it is compared to four meta-heuristic and state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms on representative benchmark functions. Trial results and simulations reveal that not only the proposed improved WOA is significantly better than those basic algorithms including original WOA but also it is superior to compared state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is successfully applied to realize three constrained engineering test cases, which the results suggest that the improved WOA can effectively deal with the constrained functions as well.
Dynamic Harris Hawks Optimization with Mutation Mechanism for Satellite Image Segmentation

In this paper, a novel satellite image segmentation technique based on dynamic Harris hawks optimization with a mutation mechanism (DHHO/M) is proposed. Compared with the original Harris hawks optimization (HHO), the dynamic control parameter strategy and mutation operator used in DHHO/M can avoid falling into the local optimum and efficiently enhance the search capability. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, a series of experiments are carried out on various satellite images. Eight advanced thresholding approaches are selected for comparison. Three criteria are adopted to determine the segmentation thresholds, namely Kapur’s entropy, Tsallis entropy, and Otsu between-class variance. Furthermore, four oil pollution images are used to further assess the practicality and feasibility of the proposed method on real engineering problem. The experimental results illustrate that the DHHO/M based thresholding technique is superior to others in the following three aspects: fitness function evaluation, image segmentation effect, and statistical tests.