Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Latest trends of security and privacy in recommender systems: A comprehensive review and future perspectives

With the widespread use of Internet of things (IoT), mobile phones, connected devices and artificial intelligence (AI), recommender systems (RSs) have become a booming technology because of their capability to analyze big data and shape users’ habits through well-designed, contextual, and engaging recommendations. Novel generations of RSs have been developed based on the latest AI and machine learning (ML) technologies such as big data RSs, ML-based RSs, explainable RSs, fusion-based RSs, etc. However, the characteristics of modern RSs raise new security and privacy issues because of the sensitivity of users’ data and its vulnerability to being illegally accessed. Moreover, there is a lack of thorough reviews that explain the current privacy and security challenges in RSs and where the actual research is heading. To overcome these issues, this paper sheds light on the existing security and privacy concerns in modern RSs. It provides a comprehensive survey of recent research efforts on security and privacy preservation in RSs. Typically, the security and privacy aspects in advanced RSs and the latest contributions are first discussed based on a well-defined taxonomy. Next, the applications of secure and privacy-preserving RSs are studied. Moving forward, a critical analysis is conducted to (i) highlight the merits and drawbacks of existing frameworks and (ii) draw the essential findings. Lastly, future directions that attract significant research and development attention are explained.
Understanding the impact of explanations on advice-taking: a user study for AI-based clinical Decision Support Systems

The field of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) focuses on providing explanations for AI systems’ decisions. XAI applications to AI-based Clinical Decision Support Systems (DSS) should increase trust in the DSS by allowing clinicians to investigate the reasons behind its suggestions. In this paper, we present the results of a user study on the impact of advice from a clinical DSS on healthcare providers’ judgment in two different cases: the case where the clinical DSS explains its suggestion and the case it does not. We examined the weight of advice, the behavioral intention to use the system, and the perceptions with quantitative and qualitative measures. Our results indicate a more significant impact of advice when an explanation for the DSS decision is provided. Additionally, through the open-ended questions, we provide some insights on how to improve the explanations in the diagnosis forecasts for healthcare assistants, nurses, and doctors.
Nonlinear Transform Source-Channel Coding for Semantic Communications

In this paper, we propose a class of high-efficiency deep joint source-channel coding methods that can closely adapt to the source distribution under the nonlinear transform, it can be collected under the name nonlinear transform source-channel coding (NTSCC). In the considered model, the transmitter first learns a nonlinear analysis transform to map the source data into latent space, then transmits the latent representation to the receiver via deep joint source-channel coding. Our model incorporates the nonlinear transform as a strong prior to effectively extract the source semantic features and provide side information for source-channel coding. Unlike existing conventional deep joint source-channel coding methods, the proposed NTSCC essentially learns both the source latent representation and an entropy model as the prior on the latent representation. Accordingly, novel adaptive rate transmission and hyperprior-aided codec refinement mechanisms are developed to upgrade deep joint source-channel coding. The whole system design is formulated as an optimization problem whose goal is to minimize the end-to-end transmission rate-distortion performance under established perceptual quality metrics. Across test image sources with various resolutions, we find that the proposed NTSCC transmission method generally outperforms both the analog transmission using the standard deep joint source-channel coding and the classical separation-based digital transmission. Notably, the proposed NTSCC method can potentially support future semantic communications due to its content-aware ability and perceptual optimization goal.
Maximum entropy of random permutation set

Recently, a new type of set, called random permutation set (RPS), is proposed by considering all the permutations of elements in a certain set. For measuring the uncertainty of RPS, the entropy of RPS is presented. However, the maximum entropy principle of RPS entropy has not been discussed. To address this issue, this paper presents the maximum entropy of RPS. The analytical solution of maximum RPS entropy and its PMF condition are proven and discussed. Besides, numerical examples are used to illustrate the maximum RPS entropy. The results show that the maximum RPS entropy is compatible with the maximum Deng entropy and the maximum Shannon entropy. Moreover, in order to further apply RPS entropy and maximum RPS entropy in practical fields, a comparative analysis of the choice of using Shannon entropy, Deng entropy, and RPS entropy is also carried out.
GPU-accelerated Faster Mean Shift with euclidean distance metrics

Handling clustering problems are important in data statistics, pattern recognition and image processing. The mean-shift algorithm, a common unsupervised algorithms, is widely used to solve clustering problems. However, the mean-shift algorithm is restricted by its huge computational resource cost. In previous research [1], we proposed a novel GPU-accelerated Faster Mean-shift algorithm, which greatly speed up the cosine-embedding clustering problem. In this study, we extend and improve the previous algorithm to handle Euclidean distance metrics. Different from conventional GPU-based mean-shift algorithms, our algorithm adopts novel Seed Selection & Early Stopping approaches, which greatly increase computing speed and reduce GPU memory consumption. In the simulation testing, when processing a 200K points clustering problem, our algorithm achieved around 3 times speedup compared to the state-of-the-art GPU-based mean-shift algorithms with optimized GPU memory consumption. Moreover, in this study, we implemented a plug-and-play model for faster mean-shift algorithm, which can be easily deployed. (Plug-and-play model is available: https://github.com/masqm/Faster-Mean-Shift-Euc)
The Intelligent Lockdown: Compliance with COVID-19 Mitigation Measures in the Netherlands

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Deep Self-Taught Hashing for Image Retrieval

Hashing algorithm has been widely used to speed up image retrieval due to its compact binary code and fast distance calculation. The combination with deep learning boosts the performance of hashing by learning accurate representations and complicated hashing functions. So far, the most striking success in deep hashing have mostly involved discriminative models, which require labels. To apply deep hashing on datasets without labels, we propose a deep self-taught hashing algorithm (DSTH), which generates a set of pseudo labels by analyzing the data itself, and then learns the hash functions for novel data using discriminative deep models. Furthermore, we generalize DSTH to support both supervised and unsupervised cases by adaptively incorporating label information. We use two different deep learning framework to train the hash functions to deal with out-of-sample problem and reduce the time complexity without loss of accuracy. We have conducted extensive experiments to investigate different settings of DSTH, and compared it with state-of-the-art counterparts in six publicly available datasets. The experimental results show that DSTH outperforms the others in all datasets.
Impacts of digital technologies on education and factors influencing schools' digital capacity and transformation: A literature review

Digital technologies have brought changes to the nature and scope of education and led education systems worldwide to adopt strategies and policies for ICT integration. The latter brought about issues regarding the quality of teaching and learning with ICTs, especially concerning the understanding, adaptation, and design of the education systems in accordance with current technological trends. These issues were emphasized during the recent COVID-19 pandemic that accelerated the use of digital technologies in education, generating questions regarding digitalization in schools. Specifically, many schools demonstrated a lack of experience and low digital capacity, which resulted in widening gaps, inequalities, and learning losses. Such results have engendered the need for schools to learn and build upon the experience to enhance their digital capacity and preparedness, increase their digitalization levels, and achieve a successful digital transformation. Given that the integration of digital technologies is a complex and continuous process that impacts different actors within the school ecosystem, there is a need to show how these impacts are interconnected and identify the factors that can encourage an effective and efficient change in the school environments. For this purpose, we conducted a non-systematic literature review. The results of the literature review were organized thematically based on the evidence presented about the impact of digital technology on education and the factors that affect the schools’ digital capacity and digital transformation. The findings suggest that ICT integration in schools impacts more than just students’ performance; it affects several other school-related aspects and stakeholders, too. Furthermore, various factors affect the impact of digital technologies on education. These factors are interconnected and play a vital role in the digital transformation process. The study results shed light on how ICTs can positively contribute to the digital transformation of schools and which factors should be considered for schools to achieve effective and efficient change.
Facial expression recognition using distance and shape signature features

Distance and Shape signature features in human faces offer formidable significance in recognizing facial expressions. Identifying appropriate landmarks is a crucial as well as challenging issue in the field of expression recognition of human faces. Appearance model has been found useful to detect the salient landmarks on human faces. These salient landmarks induce a grid on the human face along with the formation of possible triangles joining the grid. Normalized distance and shape signatures are determined from the grid. Distance signature as well as shape signature find respective stability indices which play important role to recognize the facial expressions. Statistical measures such as range, moment, skewness, kurtosis and entropy are calculated from normalized distance and shape signature pair to supplement the feature set. This enhanced feature set is fed into a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) to arrive at different expression categories encompassing anger, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise and happy. We investigated our proposed system on Cohn-Kanade (CK+), JAFFE, MMI and MUG databases to conduct and validate our experiment and establish its performance superiority over other existing competitors.
A novel optimally weighted framework of piecewise gamma corrected fractional order masking for satellite image enhancement

A novel image quality enhancement framework is proposed here through a collective inspiration of the exponential, differential and linear operational behavior of pixel intensities. Here, a new mask framing strategy (based on uniformity principle) is presented for harvesting the benefits of optimally ordered fractional differential (FD) unsharp masking, which is consequently counter-corrected by piecewise gamma correction (PGC) through a robustly framed weighted summation framework. PGC is imparted by the constructive involvement of reciprocal gamma values (γ1=γandγ2=1/γ,∀γ>1), which leads to interim compressed as well as interim expanded images. Golden-ratio rule inspired gradient-free, modified Cuckoo Search (MCS) optimization model, utilizing a newly framed Grey-Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) features based objective-function is proposed here. Experimentation highlights the outperformance of the proposed approach by desired increment in contrast, entropy, colorfulness and sharpness along with least values of correlation, energy and homogeneity, for parallel texture enhancement along with dark image enhancement.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: A Study of Security Decisions in a Cyber-Physical Systems Game

Stakeholders' security decisions play a fundamental role in determining security requirements, yet, little is currently understood about how different stakeholder groups within an organisation approach security and the drivers and tacit biases underpinning their decisions.We studied and contrasted the security decisions of three demographics-security experts, computer scientists and managers-when playing a tabletop game that we designed and developed.The game tasks players with managing the security of a cyber-physical environment while facing various threats.Analysis of 12 groups of players (4 groups in each of our demographics) reveals strategies that repeat in particular demographics, e.g., managers and security experts generally favoring technological solutions over personnel training, which computer scientists preferred.Surprisingly, security experts were not ipso facto better players-in some cases, they made very questionable decisions-yet they showed a higher level of confidence in themselves.We classified players' decision-making processes, i.e., procedure-, experience-, scenario-or intuition-driven.We identified decision patterns, both good practices and typical errors and pitfalls.Our game provides a requirements sandbox in which players can experiment with security risks, learn about decision-making and its consequences, and reflect on their own perception of security.
An Empirical Study on API Usages

API libraries provide thousands of APIs, and are essential in daily programming tasks. To understand their usages, it has long been a hot research topic to mine specifications that formally define legal usages for APIs. Furthermore, researchers are working on many other research topics on APIs. Although the research on APIs is intensively studied, many fundamental questions on APIs are still open. For example, the answers to open questions, such as which format can naturally define API usages and in which case, are still largely unknown. We notice that many such open questions are not concerned with concrete usages of specific APIs, but usages that describe how to use different types of APIs. To explore these questions, in this paper, we conduct an empirical study on API usages, with an emphasis on how different types of APIs are used. Our empirical results lead to nine findings on API usages. For example, we find that single-type usages are mostly strict orders, but multi-type usages are more complicated since they include both strict orders and partial orders. Based on these findings, for the research on APIs, we provide our suggestions on the four key aspects such as the challenges, the importance of different API elements, usage patterns, and pitfalls in designing evaluations. Furthermore, we interpret our findings, and present our insights on data sources, extraction techniques, mining techniques, and formats of specifications for the research of mining specifications.
Change Detection by Training a Triplet Network for Motion Feature Extraction

Change/motion detection is a challenging problem in video analysis and surveillance system. Recently, the state-of-the-art methods using the sample-based background model have demonstrated astonishing results with this problem. However, they are ineffective in the dynamic scenes that contain complex motion patterns. In this paper, we introduce a novel data-driven approach that combines the sample-based background model with a feature extractor obtained by training a triplet network. We construct the network by three identical convolutional neural networks, each of which is called a motion feature network. Our network can automatically learn motion patterns from small image patches and transform input images of any size into feature embeddings for high-level representations. The sample-based background model of each pixel is then employed by using the color information and the extracted feature embeddings. We also propose an approach to generate triplet examples from CDNet 2014 for training our network model from scratch. The offline trained network can be used on the fly without re-training on any video sequence before each execution. Therefore, it is feasible for real-time surveillance systems. In this paper, we show that our method outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods on CDNet 2014 and other benchmarks (BMC and Wallflower).
Discriminative Spatio-Temporal Pattern Discovery for 3D Action Recognition

Despite the recent success of 3D action recognition using depth sensor, most existing works target how to improve the action recognition performance, rather than understanding how different types of actions are performed. In this paper, we propose to discover discriminative spatio-temporal patterns for 3D action recognition. Discovering these patterns can not only help to improve the action recognition performance but also help us to understand and differentiate between the action category. Our proposed method takes the spatio-temporal structure of 3D action into consideration and can discover essential spatio-temporal patterns that play key roles in action recognition. Instead of relying on an end-to-end network to learn the 3D action representation and perform classification, we simply present each 3D action as a series of temporal stages composed by 3D poses. Then, we rely on nearest neighbor matching and bilinear classifiers to simultaneously identify both critical temporal stages and spatial joints for each action class. Despite using raw action representation and a linear classifier, experiments on five benchmark data sets show that the proposed spatio-temporal naïve Bayes mutual information maximization can achieve a competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods that use sophisticated end-to-end learning, and has the advantage of finding discriminative spatio-temporal action patterns.
Social information discovery enhanced by sentiment analysis techniques

In recent years, the massive diffusion of social networks has made available a large amount of user-generated content, for the most part in the form of textual data that contain people's thoughts and emotions about a great variety of topics. In order to exploit these publicly available information, in this work we introduce a social information discovery system which elaborates simultaneously over more-than-one social network in an integrated scenario. The system is designed to ensure flexibility and scalability, thus enabling for (near-)real-time analysis even in case of high rates of content's creation and large amounts of heterogeneous data. Furthermore, a noise detection technique ensures a high relevance of analyzed posts/tweets to the domain of interest. We also propose a lexicon-based sentiment analysis algorithm to extract and measure users' opinion, in order to support collaboration and open innovation. Polysemous words and negations are typically challenging for lexicon-based approaches: for this reason, we introduce both a word sense disambiguation algorithm and a negation handling technique. Experiments on several datasets have proven that the combined use of both techniques improves the classification accuracy on 3-class sentiment analysis.
Read, Watch, Listen, and Summarize: Multi-Modal Summarization for Asynchronous Text, Image, Audio and Video

Automatic text summarization is a fundamental natural language processing (NLP) application that aims to condense a source text into a shorter version. The rapid increase in multimedia data transmission over the Internet necessitates multi-modal summarization (MMS) from asynchronous collections of text, image, audio, and video. In this work, we propose an extractive MMS method that unites the techniques of NLP, speech processing, and computer vision to explore the rich information contained in multi-modal data and to improve the quality of multimedia news summarization. The key idea is to bridge the semantic gaps between multi-modal content. Audio and visual are main modalities in the video. For audio information, we design an approach to selectively use its transcription and to infer the salience of the transcription with audio signals. For visual information, we learn the joint representations of text and images using a neural network. Then, we capture the coverage of the generated summary for important visual information through text-image matching or multi-modal topic modeling. Finally, all the multi-modal aspects are considered to generate a textual summary by maximizing the salience, non-redundancy, readability, and coverage through the budgeted optimization of submodular functions. We further introduce a publicly available MMS corpus in English and Chinese.1 The experimental results obtained on our dataset demonstrate that our methods based on image matching and image topic framework outperform other competitive baseline methods.
Semi-supervised multi-view maximum entropy discrimination with expectation Laplacian regularization

Semi-supervised multi-view learning has attracted considerable attention and achieved great success in the machine learning field. This paper proposes a semi-supervised multi-view maximum entropy discrimination approach (SMVMED) with expectation Laplacian regularization for data classification. It takes advantage of the geometric information of the marginal distribution embedded in unlabeled data to construct a semi-supervised classifier. Different from existing methods using Laplacian regularization, we propose to use expectation Laplacian regularization for semi-supervised learning in probabilistic models. We give two implementations of SMVMED and provide their kernel variants. One of them can be relaxed and formulated as a quadratic programming problem that is solved easily. Therefore, for this implementation, we provided two versions which are approximate and exact ones. The experiments on one synthetic and multiple real-world data sets show that SMVMED demonstrates superior performance over semi-supervised single-view maximum entropy discrimination, MVMED and other state-of-the-art semi-supervised multi-view learning methods.