Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Data augmentation with norm-AE and selective pseudo-labelling for unsupervised domain adaptation

We address the Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) problem in image classification from a new perspective. In contrast to most existing works which either align the data distributions or learn domain-invariant features, we directly learn a unified classifier for both the source and target domains in the high-dimensional homogeneous feature space without explicit domain alignment. To this end, we employ the effective Selective Pseudo-Labelling (SPL) technique to take advantage of the unlabelled samples in the target domain. Surprisingly, data distribution discrepancy across the source and target domains can be well handled by a computationally simple classifier (e.g., a shallow Multi-Layer Perceptron) trained in the original feature space. Besides, we propose a novel generative model norm-AE to generate synthetic features for the target domain as a data augmentation strategy to enhance the classifier training. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the pseudo-labelling strategy itself can lead to comparable performance to many state-of-the-art methods whilst the use of norm-AE for feature augmentation can further improve the performance in most cases. As a result, our proposed methods (i.e. naive-SPL and norm-AE-SPL) can achieve comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods with the average accuracy of 93.4% and 90.4% on Office-Caltech and ImageCLEF-DA datasets, and achieve competitive performance on Digits, Office31 and Office-Home datasets with the average accuracy of 97.2%, 87.6% and 68.6% respectively.
Survivability of industrial internet of things using machine learning and smart contracts

Due to data collection, there is a potential risk concerning security and privacy, so IoT reliability and survivability are of utmost concern. In this paper, we address the concern using two methods. The first method is device identification, which uses an extensive set of machine learning algorithms for identifying IoT devices. The algorithms include Logistic Regression, K- Nearest Neighbour, Support Vector Classifier, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, AdaBoost, Light Gradient Boosting Machine, Extreme Gradient Boosting Convolution Neural Networks, and Long Short Term Memory are used for device identification. The performance of these models has been evaluated using multiple statistical measures, and weobserve that LSTM outperforms all other baseline models. The second method proposed for ensuring the survivability of theIoT environment is a blockchain-based architecture for smart homes to ensuretransparency and data protection.
Towards local visual modeling for image captioning

In this paper, we study the local visual modeling with grid features for image captioning, which is critical for generating accurate and detailed captions. To achieve this target, we propose a Locality-Sensitive Transformer Network (LSTNet) with two novel designs, namely Locality-Sensitive Attention (LSA) and Locality-Sensitive Fusion (LSF). LSA is deployed for the intra-layer interaction in Transformer via modeling the relationship between each grid and its neighbors. It reduces the difficulty of local object recognition during captioning. LSF is used for inter-layer information fusion, which aggregates the information of different encoder layers for cross-layer semantical complementarity. With these two novel designs, the proposed LSTNet can model the local visual information of grid features to improve the captioning quality. To validate LSTNet, we conduct extensive experiments on the competitive MS-COCO benchmark. The experimental results show that LSTNet is not only capable of local visual modeling, but also outperforms a bunch of state-of-the-art captioning models on offline and online testings, i.e., 134.8 CIDEr and 136.3 CIDEr, respectively. Besides, the generalization of LSTNet is also verified on the Flickr8k and Flickr30k datasets. The source code is available on GitHub: https://www.github.com/xmu-xiaoma666/LSTNet.
High-order graph attention network

GCN is a widely-used representation learning method for capturing hidden features in graph data. However, traditional GCNs suffer from the over-smoothing problem, hindering their ability to extract high-order information and obtain robust data representation. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel graph model, the high-order graph attention network. Compared to other existing graph attention networks, our model can adaptively aggregate node features from multi-hop neighbors through an attention mechanism. Moreover, the edges in the original graph may not accurately represent the relationships between nodes. We implement a new approach to update the graph by using the aggregated node representation to adjust the edges with small step sizes. Additionally, we perform a theoretical analysis to demonstrate the relationships between our proposed model and other GCN models. Finally, we evaluate our proposed model against eight variants of GCN models on multiple widely-used benchmark datasets. The experimental results show the superiority of our proposed model over other models.
Advances in device-independent quantum key distribution

Device-independent quantum key distribution (DI-QKD) provides the gold standard for secure key exchange. Not only it allows for information-theoretic security based on quantum mechanics, but it relaxes the need to physically model the devices, hence fundamentally ruling out many quantum hacking threats to which non-DI QKD systems are vulnerable. In practice though, DI-QKD is very challenging. It relies on the loophole-free violation of a Bell inequality, a task that requires high quality entanglement to be distributed between distant parties and close to perfect quantum measurements, which is hardly achievable with current technology. Notwithstanding, recent theoretical and experimental efforts have led to the first proof-of-principle DI-QKD implementations. In this article, we review the state-of-the-art of DI-QKD by highlighting its main theoretical and experimental achievements, discussing the recent proof-of-principle demonstrations, and emphasizing the existing challenges in the field.
A novel distributed forecasting method based on information fusion and incremental learning for streaming time series

Real-time algorithms have to adapt and adjust to new incoming patterns to provide timely and accurate responses. This paper presents a new distributed forecasting algorithm for streaming time series called StreamWNN. StreamWNN starts with an offline stage in which a forecasting model based on tuples of information fusion is created with historical data. In particular, this model consists of the fusion of patterns composed of past values of the time series with the future values of their k-nearest neighbors. Afterwards, streaming data starts to arrive. The model is incrementally updated in the online stage using a buffer with streaming data that more accurately matches the current model patterns. The model can be updated daily, monthly, quarterly or based on error thresholds. The methodology has been applied to Spanish electricity demand time series providing more accurate results when the model is updated incrementally. The best error results are obtained with the daily update of the model, resulting in an error between 2% and 3.5% depending on the prediction horizon. The model provides better error results than other algorithms.
Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition via Large-kernel Attention Graph Convolutional Network

The skeleton-based human action recognition has broad application prospects in the field of virtual reality, as skeleton data is more resistant to data noise such as background interference and camera angle changes. Notably, recent works treat the human skeleton as a non-grid representation, e.g., skeleton graph, then learns the spatio-temporal pattern via graph convolution operators. Still, the stacked graph convolution plays a marginal role in modeling long-range dependences that may contain crucial action semantic cues. In this work, we introduce a skeleton large kernel attention operator (SLKA), which can enlarge the receptive field and improve channel adaptability without increasing too much computational burden. Then a spatiotemporal SLKA module (ST-SLKA) is integrated, which can aggregate long-range spatial features and learn long-distance temporal correlations. Further, we have designed a novel skeleton-based action recognition network architecture called the spatiotemporal large-kernel attention graph convolution network (LKA-GCN). In addition, large-movement frames may carry significant action information. This work proposes a joint movement modeling strategy (JMM) to focus on valuable temporal interactions. Ultimately, on the NTU-RGBD 60, NTU-RGBD 120 and Kinetics-Skeleton 400 action datasets, the performance of our LKA-GCN has achieved a state-of-the-art level.
NeRFPlayer: A Streamable Dynamic Scene Representation with Decomposed Neural Radiance Fields

Visually exploring in a real-world 4D spatiotemporal space freely in VR has been a long-term quest. The task is especially appealing when only a few or even single RGB cameras are used for capturing the dynamic scene. To this end, we present an efficient framework capable of fast reconstruction, compact modeling, and streamable rendering. First, we propose to decompose the 4D spatiotemporal space according to temporal characteristics. Points in the 4D space are associated with probabilities of belonging to three categories: static, deforming, and new areas. Each area is represented and regularized by a separate neural field. Second, we propose a hybrid representations based feature streaming scheme for efficiently modeling the neural fields. Our approach, coined NeRFPlayer, is evaluated on dynamic scenes captured by single hand-held cameras and multi-camera arrays, achieving comparable or superior rendering performance in terms of quality and speed comparable to recent state-of-the-art methods, achieving reconstruction in 10 seconds per frame and interactive rendering. Project website: https://bit.ly/nerfplayer.
Acceptance of Artificial Intelligence Application in the Post-Covid Era and Its Impact on Faculty Members’ Occupational Well-being and Teaching Self Efficacy: A Path Analysis Using the UTAUT 2 Model

The purpose of the present study was to assess acceptance of Artificial Intelligence Application in the Post-covid Era and its impact of faculty members’ occupational well-being and teaching self efficacy using The UTAUT 2 Model. This study used a quantitative, non-experimental survey design to answer the research questions and study the relationships between the independent variables of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social faculty members’ occupational well-being and teaching self efficacy. Faculty members from Umm AL-Qura University were targeted. An online questionnaire was used to collect data via Facebook and WhatsApp groups. I received a total of 350 questionnaire responses. They were 200 males(57.1%), and 150 females(42.9%). In confirmation of the research results, there is a significant positive relationship (p < .001) between occupational well-being (OWB)and teaching self efficacy(TSE) and performance expectancy (PE), effort expectancy (EE), social influence (SI), facilitating conditions (FC), price value (PV), and habit (HB), indicating that faculty members are influenced by the constructs established in the UTAUT2 model in the adoption of AI.
Epidemiological impacts of the NHS COVID-19 app in England and Wales throughout its first year

The NHS COVID-19 app was launched in England and Wales in September 2020, with a Bluetooth-based contact tracing functionality designed to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2. We show that user engagement and the app's epidemiological impacts varied according to changing social and epidemic characteristics throughout the app's first year. We describe the interaction and complementarity of manual and digital contact tracing approaches. Results of our statistical analyses of anonymised, aggregated app data include that app users who were recently notified were more likely to test positive than app users who were not recently notified, by a factor that varied considerably over time. We estimate that the app's contact tracing function alone averted about 1 million cases (sensitivity analysis 450,000-1,400,000) during its first year, corresponding to 44,000 hospital cases (SA 20,000-60,000) and 9,600 deaths (SA 4600-13,000).
UAV-Enabled Covert Federated Learning

Integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with federated learning (FL) has been seen as a promising paradigm for dealing with the massive amounts of data generated by intelligent devices. Nevertheless, although FL has natural advantages in data security protection, eavesdroppers can also deduce the raw data according to the shared parameters. Existing works mainly focused on encrypting the content of uploaded parameters, but we believe that it can improve security further by hiding the presence of parameter updating. Therefore, in this paper, we conceive a UAV-enabled covert federated learning architecture, where the UAV is not only responsible for orchestrating the operation of FL but also for emitting artificial noise (AN) to interfere with the eavesdropping of unintended users. To strike a balance between the security level and the training cost (including time overhead and energy consumption), we propose a distributed proximal policy optimization-based strategy for the sake of jointly optimizing the trajectory and AN transmitting power of the UAV, the CPU frequency, the transmitting power and the bandwidth allocation of the participated devices, as well as the needed accuracy of the local model. Furthermore, a series of experiments have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.
Underwater Object Detection Using TC-YOLO with Attention Mechanisms

Underwater object detection is a key technology in the development of intelligent underwater vehicles. Object detection faces unique challenges in underwater applications: blurry underwater images; small and dense targets; and limited computational capacity available on the deployed platforms. To improve the performance of underwater object detection, we proposed a new object detection approach that combines a new detection neural network called TC-YOLO, an image enhancement technique using an adaptive histogram equalization algorithm, and the optimal transport scheme for label assignment. The proposed TC-YOLO network was developed based on YOLOv5s. Transformer self-attention and coordinate attention were adopted in the backbone and neck of the new network, respectively, to enhance feature extraction for underwater objects. The application of optimal transport label assignment enables a significant reduction in the number of fuzzy boxes and improves the utilization of training data. Our tests using the RUIE2020 dataset and ablation experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach performs better than the original YOLOv5s and other similar networks for underwater object detection tasks; moreover, the size and computational cost of the proposed model remain small for underwater mobile applications.
Accuracy Enhancement in Machine Learning During Blockchain Based Transaction Classification

Blockchain is a new distributed ledger system that enables for safe online transactions without need for a trusted third party. As blockchain technology continues to advance at a dizzying pace, the question of smart contracts and how they should evolve has risen to the forefront of academic and business discussions. With this paper, we want to shed light on how smart contracts built on the blockchain really function. To better grasp the whole picture, researchers are taking into account scholarly works that have been vetted for their quality and are presenting a comprehensive overview of the relevant literature. Future work on decentralized apps might benefit from this. The first part provides a high-level introduction of smart contracts, covering topics such as their rationale, structure, and use cases. In addition, a thorough analysis of other smart contract development platforms reveals that the blockchain used in research is the most effective platform for improving QoS. In other words, it is developing low-cost smart contracts for distributed applications. Further, we give simulation work that uses the Blockchain transaction as a data set to educate an AI model that can help forecast whether or not the transaction will be successful. Finally, this paper also emphasizes key difficulties and future research implications in the decentralized uses of Blockchain smart contracts.
Evaluating neural network models in site-specific solar PV forecasting using numerical weather prediction data and weather observations

The effective use of solar photovoltaic (PV) installations implies the integration of solar PV output into overall energy consumption planning, optimization, and control. Moreover, day-ahead trading of electricity in Europe makes day-ahead solar PV forecasting utterly important, and thus its accuracy becomes of particular interest. Data-driven PV forecasting models are typically trained using numerical weather prediction (NWP) data, the availability of which represents one of the main obstacles in modeling. In this study, we investigate an alternative scenario, in which an artificial neural network (ANN) is trained on weather observations and then tested on NWP data to simulate the model's use in operational PV forecasting. In the experiments, solar PV output data, historical weather observations, and historical NWP data were collected from three sites in eastern Finland. The results showed that, although training ANN on observational data leads to a slight decrease in its performance compared to ANN trained on NWP data, it still outperforms a physical model. In practice, this alternative scenario means that if historical NWP data are not available for model training, observational data allow effective model selection and parameter tuning, and then generalization error estimates are gradually updated using online NWP data.
Robust Quantum Memory in a Trapped-Ion Quantum Network Node

We integrate a long-lived memory qubit into a mixed-species trapped-ion quantum network node. Ion-photon entanglement first generated with a network qubit in ^{88}Sr^{+} is transferred to ^{43}Ca^{+} with 0.977(7) fidelity, and mapped to a robust memory qubit. We then entangle the network qubit with a second photon, without affecting the memory qubit. We perform quantum state tomography to show that the fidelity of ion-photon entanglement decays ∼70 times slower on the memory qubit. Dynamical decoupling further extends the storage duration; we measure an ion-photon entanglement fidelity of 0.81(4) after 10 s.
A New Deep-Learning Method for Human Activity Recognition

Currently, three-dimensional convolutional neural networks (3DCNNs) are a popular approach in the field of human activity recognition. However, due to the variety of methods used for human activity recognition, we propose a new deep-learning model in this paper. The main objective of our work is to optimize the traditional 3DCNN and propose a new model that combines 3DCNN with Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM) layers. Our experimental results, which were obtained using the LoDVP Abnormal Activities dataset, UCF50 dataset, and MOD20 dataset, demonstrate the superiority of the 3DCNN + ConvLSTM combination for recognizing human activities. Furthermore, our proposed model is well-suited for real-time human activity recognition applications and can be further enhanced by incorporating additional sensor data. To provide a comprehensive comparison of our proposed 3DCNN + ConvLSTM architecture, we compared our experimental results on these datasets. We achieved a precision of 89.12% when using the LoDVP Abnormal Activities dataset. Meanwhile, the precision we obtained using the modified UCF50 dataset (UCF50mini) and MOD20 dataset was 83.89% and 87.76%, respectively. Overall, our work demonstrates that the combination of 3DCNN and ConvLSTM layers can improve the accuracy of human activity recognition tasks, and our proposed model shows promise for real-time applications.
CHAOTIC IMAGE ENCRYPTION WITH HOPFIELD NEURAL NETWORK

With modern cryptography evolves, some sensitive information needs to be protected with secure and efficient algorithms. In this context, we found that Hopfield neural network (HNN) has stronger memory and can generate luxuriant kinetic behavior, especially with the introduction of fractional-order operators. Therefore, we propose a chaotic image encryption based on the fractional-order HNN (FO-HNN), where FO-HNN appears as a key generator. To de-correlate the correlation between pixels, a spatial permutation strategy is designed first, and then a new diffusion technique based on a Three-input logic valve is adopted to guide the diffusion process. Simulation results and security analysis show that the HNN-based image cryptosystem has superior security performance.
Incentive Mechanism Design for Joint Resource Allocation in Blockchain-Based Federated Learning

Blockchain-based federated learning (BCFL) has recently gained tremendous attention because of its advantages, such as decentralization and privacy protection of raw data. However, there has been few studies focusing on the allocation of resources for the participated devices (i.e., clients) in the BCFL system. Especially, in the BCFL framework where the FL clients are also the blockchain miners, clients have to train the local models, broadcast the trained model updates to the blockchain network, and then perform mining to generate new blocks. Since each client has a limited amount of computing resources, the problem of allocating computing resources to training and mining needs to be carefully addressed. In this paper, we design an incentive mechanism to help the model owner (MO) (i.e., the BCFL task publisher) assign each client appropriate rewards for training and mining, and then the client will determine the amount of computing power to allocate for each subtask based on these rewards using the two-stage Stackelberg game. After analyzing the utilities of the MO and clients, we transform the game model into two optimization problems, which are sequentially solved to derive the optimal strategies for both the MO and clients. Further, considering the fact that local training related information of each client may not be known by others, we extend the game model with analytical solutions to the incomplete information scenario. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the validity of our proposed schemes.
Metaverse: Requirements, Architecture, Standards, Status, Challenges, and Perspectives

The Metaverse is driving the next wave of innovation for new opportunities by replacing the digital world (Internet) with the virtual world through a single, shared, immersive, persistent 3D virtual space. In this article, we present requirements, architecture, standards, challenges, and solutions for Metaverse. Specifically, we provide Metaverse architecture and requirements, and different standards for Metaverse which serve as the basis for the development and deployment. Moreover, we present recent status, challenges such as integration of AI and Metaverse, security and privacy in Metaverse, etc., and perspectives and solutions.