Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Big data stream analysis: a systematic literature review

Recently, big data streams have become ubiquitous due to the fact that a number of applications generate a huge amount of data at a great velocity. This made it difficult for existing data mining tools, technologies, methods, and techniques to be applied directly on big data streams due to the inherent dynamic characteristics of big data. In this paper, a systematic review of big data streams analysis which employed a rigorous and methodical approach to look at the trends of big data stream tools and technologies as well as methods and techniques employed in analysing big data streams. It provides a global view of big data stream tools and technologies and its comparisons. Three major databases, Scopus, ScienceDirect and EBSCO, which indexes journals and conferences that are promoted by entities such as IEEE, ACM, SpringerLink, and Elsevier were explored as data sources. Out of the initial 2295 papers that resulted from the first search string, 47 papers were found to be relevant to our research questions after implementing the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The study found that scalability, privacy and load balancing issues as well as empirical analysis of big data streams and technologies are still open for further research efforts. We also found that although, significant research efforts have been directed to real-time analysis of big data stream not much attention has been given to the preprocessing stage of big data streams. Only a few big data streaming tools and technologies can do all of the batch, streaming, and iterative jobs; there seems to be no big data tool and technology that offers all the key features required for now and standard benchmark dataset for big data streaming analytics has not been widely adopted. In conclusion, it was recommended that research efforts should be geared towards developing scalable frameworks and algorithms that will accommodate data stream computing mode, effective resource allocation strategy and parallelization issues to cope with the ever-growing size and complexity of data.
Enhancing Adversarial Example Transferability With an Intermediate Level Attack

Neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, malicious inputs crafted to fool trained models. Adversarial examples often exhibit black-box transfer, meaning that adversarial examples for one model can fool another model. However, adversarial examples are typically overfit to exploit the particular architecture and feature representation of a source model, resulting in sub-optimal black-box transfer attacks to other target models. We introduce the Intermediate Level Attack (ILA), which attempts to fine-tune an existing adversarial example for greater black-box transferability by increasing its perturbation on a pre-specified layer of the source model, improving upon state-of-the-art methods. We show that we can select a layer of the source model to perturb without any knowledge of the target models while achieving high transferability. Additionally, we provide some explanatory insights regarding our method and the effect of optimizing for adversarial examples using intermediate feature maps.
Quantum optimal control in quantum technologies. Strategic report on current status, visions and goals for research in Europe

Quantum optimal control, a toolbox for devising and implementing the shapes of external fields that accomplish given tasks in the operation of a quantum device in the best way possible, has evolved into one of the cornerstones for enabling quantum technologies. The last few years have seen a rapid evolution and expansion of the field. We review here recent progress in our understanding of the controllability of open quantum systems and in the development and application of quantum control techniques to quantum technologies. We also address key challenges and sketch a roadmap for future developments.
Learning by Analogy: Reliable Supervision From Transformations for Unsupervised Optical Flow Estimation

Unsupervised learning of optical flow, which leverages the supervision from view synthesis, has emerged as a promising alternative to supervised methods. However, the objective of unsupervised learning is likely to be unreliable in challenging scenes. In this work, we present a framework to use more reliable supervision from transformations. It simply twists the general unsupervised learning pipeline by running another forward pass with transformed data from augmentation, along with using transformed predictions of original data as the self-supervision signal. Besides, we further introduce a lightweight network with multiple frames by a highly-shared flow decoder. Our method consistently gets a leap of performance on several benchmarks with the best accuracy among deep unsupervised methods. Also, our method achieves competitive results to recent fully supervised methods while with much fewer parameters.
Prior-Aware Neural Network for Partially-Supervised Multi-Organ Segmentation

Accurate multi-organ abdominal CT segmentation is essential to many clinical applications such as computer-aided intervention. As data annotation requires massive human labor from experienced radiologists, it is common that training data is usually partially-labeled. However, these background labels can be misleading in multi-organ segmentation since the ``background'' usually contains some other organs of interest. To address the background ambiguity in these partially-labeled datasets, we propose Prior-aware Neural Network (PaNN) via explicitly incorporating anatomical priors on abdominal organ sizes, guiding the training process with domain-specific knowledge. More specifically, PaNN assumes that the average organ size distributions in the abdomen should approximate their empirical distributions, a prior statistics obtained from the fully-labeled dataset. As our objective is difficult to be directly optimized using stochastic gradient descent, it is reformulated as a min-max form and optimized via the stochastic primal-dual gradient algorithm. PaNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MICCAI2015 challenge ``Multi-Atlas Labeling Beyond the Cranial Vault'', a competition on organ segmentation in the abdomen. We report an average Dice score of 84.97%, surpassing the prior art by a large margin of 3.27%. Code and models will be made publicly available.
Human Physical Activity Recognition Using Smartphone Sensors

Because the number of elderly people is predicted to increase quickly in the upcoming years, "aging in place" (which refers to living at home regardless of age and other factors) is becoming an important topic in the area of ambient assisted living. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a human physical activity recognition system based on data collected from smartphone sensors. The proposed approach implies developing a classifier using three sensors available on a smartphone: accelerometer, gyroscope, and gravity sensor. We have chosen to implement our solution on mobile phones because they are ubiquitous and do not require the subjects to carry additional sensors that might impede their activities. For our proposal, we target walking, running, sitting, standing, ascending, and descending stairs. We evaluate the solution against two datasets (an internal one collected by us and an external one) with great effect. Results show good accuracy for recognizing all six activities, with especially good results obtained for walking, running, sitting, and standing. The system is fully implemented on a mobile device as an Android application.
Continual learning with tiny episodic memories

In continual learning (CL), an agent learns from a stream of tasks leveraging prior experience to transfer knowledge to future tasks. It is an ideal framework to decrease the amount of supervision in the existing learning algorithms. But for a successful knowledge transfer, the learner needs to remember how to perform previous tasks. One way to endow the learner the ability to perform tasks seen in the past is to store a small memory, dubbed episodic memory, that stores few examples from previous tasks and then to replay these examples when training for future tasks. In this work, we empirically analyze the effectiveness of a very small episodic memory in a CL setup where each training example is only seen once. Surprisingly, across four rather different supervised learning benchmarks adapted to CL, a very simple baseline, that jointly trains on both examples from the current task as well as examples stored in the episodic memory, significantly outperforms specifically designed CL approaches with and without episodic memory. Interestingly, we find that repetitive training on even tiny memories of past tasks does not harm generalization, on the contrary, it improves it, with gains between 7\% and 17\% when the memory is populated with a single example per class.
Digital Literacy

Information and communication technologies (ICT) along with the internet have fueled advancements and growth in banking, transportation, economics, and most of all in education in the 21st century. The 21st century citizens are provided with new opportunities that have been created with the advancement of ICT. Hence, individuals need a wide range of abilities, competencies, and skills to adapt to the technological era. This paper provides a literature review of the growing importance of ICT, its wide array of usage, and its influence on various facets of people's daily lives. In addition, the emerging concept of digital literacy through ICT developments, contribution of digital literacy towards the achievement of sustainable development goals, contribution of ICT towards the development of various sectors particularly the education sector, and the work done in this area of digital literacy are summarised. The paper concludes with three new models of digital literacy: four gear model, model for flexible learning, and a model showing the impact of ICT on the learning process.
Learning ReLU Networks on Linearly Separable Data: Algorithm, Optimality, and Generalization

Neural networks with rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation functions (a.k.a. ReLU networks) have achieved great empirical success in various domains. Nonetheless, existing results for learning ReLU networks either pose assumptions on the underlying data distribution being, e.g., Gaussian, or require the network size and/or training size to be sufficiently large. In this context, the problem of learning a two-layer ReLU network is approached in a binary classification setting, where the data are linearly separable and a hinge loss criterion is adopted. Leveraging the power of random noise perturbation, this paper presents a novel stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm, which can provably train any single-hidden-layer ReLU network to attain global optimality, despite the presence of infinitely many bad local minima, maxima, and saddle points in general. This result is the first of its kind, requiring no assumptions on the data distribution, training/network size, or initialization. Convergence of the resultant iterative algorithm to a global minimum is analyzed by establishing both an upper bound and a lower bound on the number of non-zero updates to be performed. Moreover, generalization guarantees are developed for ReLU networks trained with the novel SGD leveraging classic compression bounds. These guarantees highlight a key difference (at least in the worst case) between reliably learning a ReLU network as well as a leaky ReLU network in terms of sample complexity. Numerical tests using both synthetic data and real images validate the effectiveness of the algorithm and the practical merits of the theory.
Data Query Mechanism Based on Hash Computing Power of Blockchain in Internet of Things

In the IoT (Internet of Things) environment, smart homes, smart grids, and telematics constantly generate data with complex attributes. These data have low heterogeneity and poor interoperability, which brings difficulties to data management and value mining. The promising combination of blockchain and the Internet of things as BCoT (blockchain of things) can solve these problems. This paper introduces an innovative method DCOMB (dual combination Bloom filter) to firstly convert the computational power of bitcoin mining into the computational power of query. Furthermore, this article uses the DCOMB method to build blockchain-based IoT data query model. DCOMB can implement queries only through mining hash calculation. This model combines the data stream of the IoT with the timestamp of the blockchain, improving the interoperability of data and the versatility of the IoT database system. The experiment results show that the random reading performance of DCOMB query is higher than that of COMB (combination Bloom filter), and the error rate of DCOMB is lower. Meanwhile, both DCOMB and COMB query performance are better than MySQL (My Structured Query Language).
Nearly-tight VC-dimension and Pseudodimension Bounds for Piecewise Linear Neural Networks

We prove new upper and lower bounds on the VC-dimension of deep neural networks with the ReLU activation function. These bounds are tight for almost the entire range of parameters. Letting $W$ be the number of weights and $L$ be the number of layers, we prove that the VC-dimension is $O(W L \log(W))$, and provide examples with VC-dimension $\Omega( W L \log(W/L) )$. This improves both the previously known upper bounds and lower bounds. In terms of the number $U$ of non-linear units, we prove a tight bound $\Theta(W U)$ on the VC-dimension. All of these bounds generalize to arbitrary piecewise linear activation functions, and also hold for the pseudodimensions of these function classes. Combined with previous results, this gives an intriguing range of dependencies of the VC-dimension on depth for networks with different non-linearities: there is no dependence for piecewise-constant, linear dependence for piecewise-linear, and no more than quadratic dependence for general piecewise-polynomial.
A novel extended approach under hesitant fuzzy sets to design a framework for assessing the key challenges of digital health interventions adoption during the COVID-19 outbreak

In recent years, Digital Technologies (DTs) are becoming an inseparable part of human lives. Thus, many scholars have conducted research to develop new tools and applications. Processing information, usually in the form of binary code, is the main task in DTs, which is happening through many devices, including computers, smartphones, robots, and applications. Surprisingly, the role of DTs has been highlighted in people’s life due to the COVID-19 pandemic. There are several different challenges to implement and intervene in DTs during the COVID-19 outbreak; therefore, the present study extended a new fuzzy approach under Hesitant Fuzzy Set (HFS) approach using Stepwise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) and Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment (WASPAS) method to evaluate and rank the critical challenges of DTs intervention to control the COVID-19 outbreak. In this regard, a comprehensive survey using literature and in-depth interviews have been carried out to identify the challenges under the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) framework. Moreover, the SWARA procedure is applied to analyze and assess the challenges to DTs intervention during the COVID-19 outbreak, and the WASPAS approach is utilized to rank the DTs under hesitant fuzzy sets. Further, to demonstrate the efficacy and practicability of the developed framework, an illustrative case study has been analyzed. The results of this study found that Health Information Systems (HIS) was ranked as the first factor among other factors followed by a lack of digital knowledge, digital stratification, economic interventions, lack of reliable data, and cost inefficiency In conclusion, to confirm the steadiness and strength of the proposed framework, the obtained outputs are compared with other methods.
DeepVOG: Open-source pupil segmentation and gaze estimation in neuroscience using deep learning

A prerequisite for many eye tracking and video-oculography (VOG) methods is an accurate localization of the pupil. Several existing techniques face challenges in images with artifacts and under naturalistic low-light conditions, e.g. with highly dilated pupils. For the first time, we propose to use a fully convolutional neural network (FCNN) for segmentation of the whole pupil area, trained on 3946 VOG images hand-annotated at our institute. We integrate the FCNN into DeepVOG, along with an established method for gaze estimation from elliptical pupil contours, which we improve upon by considering our FCNN's segmentation confidence measure. The FCNN output simultaneously enables us to perform pupil center localization, elliptical contour estimation and blink detection, all with a single network and with an assigned confidence value, at framerates above 130 Hz on commercial workstations with GPU acceleration. Pupil centre coordinates can be estimated with a median accuracy of around 1.0 pixel, and gaze estimation is accurate to within 0.5 degrees. The FCNN is able to robustly segment the pupil in a wide array of datasets that were not used for training. We validate our method against gold standard eye images that were artificially rendered, as well as hand-annotated VOG data from a gold-standard clinical system (EyeSeeCam) at our institute. Our proposed FCNN-based pupil segmentation framework is accurate, robust and generalizes well to new VOG datasets. We provide our code and pre-trained FCNN model open-source and for free under www.github.com/pydsgz/DeepVOG.
Adversarial Training and Robustness for Multiple Perturbations

Defenses against adversarial examples, such as adversarial training, are typically tailored to a single perturbation type (e.g., small $\ell_\infty$-noise). For other perturbations, these defenses offer no guarantees and, at times, even increase the model's vulnerability. Our aim is to understand the reasons underlying this robustness trade-off, and to train models that are simultaneously robust to multiple perturbation types. We prove that a trade-off in robustness to different types of $\ell_p$-bounded and spatial perturbations must exist in a natural and simple statistical setting. We corroborate our formal analysis by demonstrating similar robustness trade-offs on MNIST and CIFAR10. We propose new multi-perturbation adversarial training schemes, as well as an efficient attack for the $\ell_1$-norm, and use these to show that models trained against multiple attacks fail to achieve robustness competitive with that of models trained on each attack individually. In particular, we find that adversarial training with first-order $\ell_\infty, \ell_1$ and $\ell_2$ attacks on MNIST achieves merely $50\%$ robust accuracy, partly because of gradient-masking. Finally, we propose affine attacks that linearly interpolate between perturbation types and further degrade the accuracy of adversarially trained models.
CorefQA: Coreference Resolution as Query-based Span Prediction

In this paper, we present CorefQA, an accurate and extensible approach for the coreference resolution task.We formulate the problem as a span prediction task, like in question answering: A query is generated for each candidate mention using its surrounding context, and a span prediction module is employed to extract the text spans of the coreferences within the document using the generated query.This formulation comes with the following key advantages: (1) The span prediction strategy provides the flexibility of retrieving mentions left out at the mention proposal stage; (2) In the question answering framework, encoding the mention and its context explicitly in a query makes it possible to have a deep and thorough examination of cues embedded in the context of coreferent mentions; and (3) A plethora of existing question answering datasets can be used for data augmentation to improve the model's generalization capability.Experiments demonstrate significant performance boost over previous models, with 83.1 (+3.5)F1 score on the CoNLL-2012 benchmark and 87.5 (+2.5)F1 score on the GAP benchmark. 1
Experience Grounds Language

Yonatan Bisk, Ari Holtzman, Jesse Thomason, Jacob Andreas, Yoshua Bengio, Joyce Chai, Mirella Lapata, Angeliki Lazaridou, Jonathan May, Aleksandr Nisnevich, Nicolas Pinto, Joseph Turian. Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). 2020.
Virtual reality in K‐12 and higher education: A systematic review of the literature from 2000 to 2019

Abstract This study is a systematic review of 20 years of research on the usage of virtual reality (VR) in K‐12 and higher education settings, which aims to consolidate, evaluate, and communicate evidence that can inform both the theory and practice of VR‐based instruction. A total of 149 articles were selected from three major academic databases using search strings and manual screening protocols. The literature analysis emphasized four interrelated aspects of VR‐based instruction: instructional context, instructional design, technological affordances, and research findings. The results revealed evolving trends in the VR literature in terms of publication patterns, pedagogical assumptions, equipment usage, and research methodologies, as well as the contextual factors behind VR adoption in education. Additionally, a meta‐analysis was conducted to examine the efficacy of VR‐based instruction, with results indicating an overall medium effect and several moderating factors. Finally, practical implications and a future research agenda for VR‐based instruction are discussed.
Memristor networks for real-time neural activity analysis

Abstract The ability to efficiently analyze the activities of biological neural networks can significantly promote our understanding of neural communications and functionalities. However, conventional neural signal analysis approaches need to transmit and store large amounts of raw recording data, followed by extensive processing offline, posing significant challenges to the hardware and preventing real-time analysis and feedback. Here, we demonstrate a memristor-based reservoir computing (RC) system that can potentially analyze neural signals in real-time. We show that the perovskite halide-based memristor can be directly driven by emulated neural spikes, where the memristor state reflects temporal features in the neural spike train. The RC system is successfully used to recognize neural firing patterns, monitor the transition of the firing patterns, and identify neural synchronization states among different neurons. Advanced neuroelectronic systems with such memristor networks can enable efficient neural signal analysis with high spatiotemporal precision, and possibly closed-loop feedback control.