Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Integrating Digital Technologies and Public Health to Fight Covid-19 Pandemic: Key Technologies, Applications, Challenges and Outlook of Digital Healthcare

Integration of digital technologies and public health (or digital healthcare) helps us to fight the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, which is the biggest public health crisis humanity has faced since the 1918 Influenza Pandemic. In order to better understand the digital healthcare, this work conducted a systematic and comprehensive review of digital healthcare, with the purpose of helping us combat the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper covers the background information and research overview of digital healthcare, summarizes its applications and challenges in the COVID-19 pandemic, and finally puts forward the prospects of digital healthcare. First, main concepts, key development processes, and common application scenarios of integrating digital technologies and digital healthcare were offered in the part of background information. Second, the bibliometric techniques were used to analyze the research output, geographic distribution, discipline distribution, collaboration network, and hot topics of digital healthcare before and after COVID-19 pandemic. We found that the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly accelerated research on the integration of digital technologies and healthcare. Third, application cases of China, EU and U.S using digital technologies to fight the COVID-19 pandemic were collected and analyzed. Among these digital technologies, big data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, 5G are most effective weapons to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Applications cases show that these technologies play an irreplaceable role in controlling the spread of the COVID-19. By comparing the application cases in these three regions, we contend that the key to China’s success in avoiding the second wave of COVID-19 pandemic is to integrate digital technologies and public health on a large scale without hesitation. Fourth, the application challenges of digital technologies in the public health field are summarized. These challenges mainly come from four aspects: data delays, data fragmentation, privacy security, and data security vulnerabilities. Finally, this study provides the future application prospects of digital healthcare. In addition, we also provide policy recommendations for other countries that use digital technology to combat COVID-19.
Global guidance network for breast lesion segmentation in ultrasound images

Automatic breast lesion segmentation in ultrasound helps to diagnose breast cancer, which is one of the dreadful diseases that affect women globally. Segmenting breast regions accurately from ultrasound image is a challenging task due to the inherent speckle artifacts, blurry breast lesion boundaries, and inhomogeneous intensity distributions inside the breast lesion regions. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated remarkable results in medical image segmentation tasks. However, the convolutional operations in a CNN often focus on local regions, which suffer from limited capabilities in capturing long-range dependencies of the input ultrasound image, resulting in degraded breast lesion segmentation accuracy. In this paper, we develop a deep convolutional neural network equipped with a global guidance block (GGB) and breast lesion boundary detection (BD) modules for boosting the breast ultrasound lesion segmentation. The GGB utilizes the multi-layer integrated feature map as a guidance information to learn the long-range non-local dependencies from both spatial and channel domains. The BD modules learn additional breast lesion boundary map to enhance the boundary quality of a segmentation result refinement. Experimental results on a public dataset and a collected dataset show that our network outperforms other medical image segmentation methods and the recent semantic segmentation methods on breast ultrasound lesion segmentation. Moreover, we also show the application of our network on the ultrasound prostate segmentation, in which our method better identifies prostate regions than state-of-the-art networks.
EXMARaLDA – creating, analysing and sharing spoken language corpora for pragmatic research

This paper presents EXMARaLDA, a system for the computer-assisted creation and analysis of spoken language corpora. The first part contains some general observations about technological and methodological requirements for doing corpus-based pragmatics. The second part explains the system’s architecture and gives an overview of its most important software components – a transcription editor, a corpus management tool and a corpus query tool. The last part presents some corpora which have been or are currently being compiled with the help of EXMARaLDA.
Energy and Migration Cost-Aware Dynamic Virtual Machine Consolidation in Heterogeneous Cloud Datacenters

Energy efficiency has become one of the major concerns for today's cloud datacenters. Dynamic virtual machine (VM) consolidation is a promising approach for improving the resource utilization and energy efficiency of datacenters. However, the live migration technology that VM consolidation relies on is costly in itself, and this migration cost is usually heterogeneous as well as the datacenter. This paper investigates the following bi-objective optimization problem: how to pay limited migration costs to save as much energy as possible via dynamic VM consolidation in a heterogeneous cloud datacenter. To capture these two conflicting objectives, a consolidation score function is designed for an overall evaluation on the basis of a migration cost estimation method and an upper bound estimation method for maximal saved power. To optimize the consolidation score, a greedy heuristic and a swap operation are introduced, and an improved grouping genetic algorithm (IGGA) based on them is proposed. Lastly, empirical studies are performed, and the evaluation results show that IGGA outperforms existing VM consolidation methods.
Color Channel Compensation (3C): A Fundamental Pre-Processing Step for Image Enhancement

This article introduces a novel solution to improve image enhancement in terms of color appearance. Our approach, called Color Channel Compensation (3C), overcomes artifacts resulting from the severely non-uniform color spectrum distribution encountered in images captured under hazy night-time conditions, underwater, or under non-uniform artificial illumination. Our solution is founded on the observation that, under such adverse conditions, the information contained in at least one color channel is close to completely lost, making the traditional enhancing techniques subject to noise and color shifting. In those cases, our pre-processing method proposes to reconstruct the lost channel based on the opponent color channel. Our algorithm subtracts a local mean from each opponent color pixel. Thereby, it partly recovers the lost color from the two colors (red-green or blue-yellow) involved in the opponent color channel. The proposed approach, whilst simple, is shown to consistently improve the outcome of conventional restoration methods. To prove the utility of our 3C operator, we provide an extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation for white balancing, image dehazing, and underwater enhancement applications.
Blind Universal Bayesian Image Denoising With Gaussian Noise Level Learning

Blind and universal image denoising consists of using a unique model that denoises images with any level of noise.It is especially practical as noise levels do not need to be known when the model is developed or at test time.We propose a theoretically-grounded blind and universal deep learning image denoiser for additive Gaussian noise removal.Our network is based on an optimal denoising solution, which we call fusion denoising.It is derived theoretically with a Gaussian image prior assumption.Synthetic experiments show our network's generalization strength to unseen additive noise levels.We also adapt the fusion denoising network architecture for image denoising on real images.Our approach improves real-world grayscale additive image denoising PSNR results for training noise levels and further on noise levels not seen during training.It also improves state-of-the-art color image denoising performance on every single noise level, by an average of 0.1d B, whether trained on or not.
Boosting Breast Cancer Detection Using Convolutional Neural Network

Breast cancer forms in breast cells and is considered as a very common type of cancer in women. Breast cancer is also a very life-threatening disease of women after lung cancer. A convolutional neural network (CNN) method is proposed in this study to boost the automatic identification of breast cancer by analyzing hostile ductal carcinoma tissue zones in whole-slide images (WSIs). The paper investigates the proposed system that uses various convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures to automatically detect breast cancer, comparing the results with those from machine learning (ML) algorithms. All architectures were guided by a big dataset of about 275,000, 50 × 50-pixel RGB image patches. Validation tests were done for quantitative results using the performance measures for every methodology. The proposed system is found to be successful, achieving results with 87% accuracy, which could reduce human mistakes in the diagnosis process. Moreover, our proposed system achieves accuracy higher than the 78% accuracy of machine learning (ML) algorithms. The proposed system therefore improves accuracy by 9% above results from machine learning (ML) algorithms.
Graph Neural Networks for Recommender System

Recently, graph neural network (GNN) has become the new state-of-the-art approach in many recommendation problems, with its strong ability to handle structured data and to explore high-order information. However, as the recommendation tasks are diverse and various in the real world, it is quite challenging to design proper GNN methods for specific problems. In this tutorial, we focus on the critical challenges of GNN-based recommendation and the potential solutions. Specifically, we start from an extensive background of recommender systems and graph neural networks. Then we fully discuss why GNNs are required in recommender systems and the four parts of challenges, including graph construction, network design, optimization, and computation efficiency. Then, we discuss how to address these challenges by elaborating on the recent advances of GNN-based recommendation models, with a systematic taxonomy from four critical perspectives: stages, scenarios, objectives, and applications. Last, we finalize this tutorial with conclusions and discuss important future directions.
Scale-Free Single Image Deraining Via Visibility-Enhanced Recurrent Wavelet Learning

In this paper, we address a rain removal problem from a single image, even in the presence of large rain streaks and rain streak accumulation (where individual streaks cannot be seen and thus are visually similar to mist or fog). For rain streak removal, the mismatch problem between different streak sizes in training and testing phases leads to poor performance, especially when there are large streaks. To mitigate this problem, we embed a hierarchical representation of wavelet transform into a recurrent rain removal process: 1) rain removal on the low-frequency component and 2) recurrent detail recovery on high-frequency components under the guidance of the recovered low-frequency component. Benefiting from the recurrent multi-scale modeling of wavelet transform-like design, the proposed network trained on streaks with one size can adapt to those with larger sizes, which significantly favors real rain streak removal. The dilated residual dense network is used as the basic model of the recurrent recovery process. The network includes multiple paths with different receptive fields, thus it can make full use of multi-scale redundancy and utilize context information in large regions. Furthermore, to handle heavy rain cases where rain streak accumulation is presented, we construct a detail appearing rain accumulation removal to not only improve the visibility but also enhance the details in dark regions. The evaluation of both synthetic and real images, particularly on those containing large rain streaks and heavy accumulation, shows the effectiveness of our novel models, which significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Leakage reduction in fast superconducting qubit gates via optimal control

Reaching high speed, high fidelity qubit operations requires precise control over the shape of the underlying pulses. For weakly anharmonic systems, such as superconducting transmon qubits, short gates lead to leakage to states outside of the computational subspace. Control pulses designed with open-loop optimal control may reduce such leakage. However, model inaccuracies can severely limit the usability of such pulses. We implemented a closed-loop optimization that simultaneously adapts all control parameters based on measurements of a cost function built from Clifford gates. By parameterizing pulses with a piecewise-constant representation that matches the capabilities of the control hardware we create a $4.16~\rm{ns}$ single-qubit pulse with $99.76\,\%$ fidelity and $0.044\,\%$ leakage. This is a seven-fold reduction of the leakage rate of the best DRAG pulse we have calibrated at such short durations on the same system.
Deep learning for source camera identification on mobile devices

In the present paper, we propose a source camera identification (SCI) method for mobile devices based on deep learning. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown a remarkable performance on several tasks such as image recognition, video analysis or natural language processing. A CNN consists on a set of layers where each layer is composed by a set of high pass filters which are applied all over the input image. This convolution process provides the unique ability to extract features automatically from data and to learn from those features. Our proposal describes a CNN architecture which is able to infer the noise pattern of mobile camera sensors (also known as camera fingerprint) with the aim at detecting and identifying not only the mobile device used to capture an image (with a 98% of accuracy), but also from which embedded camera the image was captured. More specifically, we provide an extensive analysis on the proposed architecture considering different configurations. The experiment has been carried out using the images captured from different mobile device cameras (MICHE-I Dataset) and the obtained results have proved the robustness of the proposed method.
Infeasibility and structural bias in differential evolution

Structural bias is a recently identified property of optimisation algorithms, causing them to favour certain regions of the search space over others, independently of the objective function. Since structural bias can adversely affect the progress of optimisation, a better understanding of it is needed in order to inform the theory and practice of algorithm design. For example, it is generally accepted that larger populations are favoured when solution quality is paramount and time constraints are permissive. However, common variants of both Genetic Algorithms and Particle Swarm Optimisation have been found to exhibit structural bias that increases with population size. Herein we investigate structural bias in popular variants of Differential Evolution (DE), and attempt to identify which algorithm features trigger its emergence. In particular, we focus on the (often overlooked) constraint handling mechanism. Our results suggest that DE is generally robust to structural bias. Only one of the variants studied – DE/current-to-best/1/bin – shows clear signs of bias, however this is mitigated by a judicious choice of constraint handling technique. These findings contribute towards explaining the widespread success of DE in algorithm comparison studies; its robustness to structural bias represents the absence of a factor that may confound other algorithms.
Quantum reservoir processing

Abstract The concurrent rise of artificial intelligence and quantum information poses an opportunity for creating interdisciplinary technologies like quantum neural networks. Quantum reservoir processing, introduced here, is a platform for quantum information processing developed on the principle of reservoir computing that is a form of an artificial neural network. A quantum reservoir processor can perform qualitative tasks like recognizing quantum states that are entangled as well as quantitative tasks like estimating a nonlinear function of an input quantum state (e.g., entropy, purity, or logarithmic negativity). In this way, experimental schemes that require measurements of multiple observables can be simplified to measurement of one observable on a trained quantum reservoir processor.
Layer-Wise Training Convolutional Neural Networks With Smaller Filters for Human Activity Recognition Using Wearable Sensors

Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have set latest state-of-the-art on various human activity recognition (HAR) datasets.However, deep CNNs often require more computing resources, which limits their applications in embedded HAR.Although many successful methods have been proposed to reduce memory and FLOPs of CNNs, they often involve special network architectures designed for visual tasks, which are not suitable for deep HAR tasks with time series sensor signals, due to remarkable discrepancy.Therefore, it is necessary to develop lightweight deep models to perform HAR.As filter is the basic unit in constructing CNNs, it deserves further research whether re-designing smaller filters is applicable for deep HAR.In the paper, inspired by the idea, we proposed a lightweight CNN using Lego filters for HAR.A set of lower-dimensional filters is used as Lego bricks to be stacked for conventional filters, which does not rely on any special network structure.The local loss function is used to train model.To our knowledge, this is the first paper that proposes lightweight CNN for HAR in ubiquitous and wearable computing arena.The experiment results on five public HAR datasets, UCI-HAR dataset, OPPORTUNITY dataset, UNIMIB-SHAR dataset, PAMAP2 dataset, and WISDM dataset collected from either smartphones or multiple sensor nodes, indicate that our novel Lego CNN with local loss can greatly reduce memory and computation cost over CNN, while achieving higher accuracy.That is to say, the proposed model is smaller, faster and more accurate.Finally, we evaluate the actual performance on an Android smartphone.
Combining Graph Neural Networks with Expert Knowledge for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection

Smart contract vulnerability detection draws extensive attention in recent years due to the substantial losses caused by hacker-attacks. Existing efforts for contract security analysis heavily rely on rigid rules defined by experts, which is labor-intensive and non-scalable. More importantly, expert-defined rules tend to be error-prone and suffer the inherent risk of being cheated by crafty attackers. Recent researches focus on the symbolic execution and formal analysis of smart contract for vulnerability detection, yet to achieve a precise and scalable solution. Although several methods have been proposed to detect vulnerabilities in smart contracts, there is still a lack of effort that considers combining expert-defined security patterns with deep neural networks. In this paper, we explore using graph neural networks and expert knowledge for smart contract vulnerability detection. Specifically, we cast the rich control- and data- flow semantics of the source code into a contract graph. Then, we propose a novel temporal message propagation network to extract graph feature from the normalized graph, and combine the graph feature with expert patterns to yield a final detection system. Extensive experiments are conducted on all the smart contracts that have source code in two platforms. Empirical results show significant accuracy improvements over state-of-the-art methods.
Virtual Machine Consolidation with Multiple Usage Prediction for Energy-Efficient Cloud Data Centers

Virtual machine consolidation aims at reducing the number of active physical servers in a data center so as to decrease the total power consumption. In this context, most of the existing solutions rely on aggressive virtual machine migration, thus resulting in unnecessary overhead and energy wastage. Besides, virtual machine consolidation should take into account multiple resource types at the same time, since CPU is not the only critical resource in cloud data centers. In fact, also memory and network bandwidth can become a bottleneck, possibly causing violations in the service level agreement. This article presents a virtual machine consolidation algorithm with multiple usage prediction (VMCUP-M) to improve the energy efficiency of cloud data centers. In this context, multiple usage refers to both resource types and the horizon employed to predict future utilization. Our algorithm is executed during the virtual machine consolidation process to estimate the long-term utilization of multiple resource types based on the local history of the considered servers. The joint use of current and predicted resource utilization allows for a reliable characterization of overloaded and underloaded servers, thereby reducing both the load and the power consumption after consolidation. We evaluate our solution through simulations on both synthetic and real-world workloads. The obtained results show that consolidation with multiple usage prediction reduces the number of migrations and the power consumption of the servers while complying with the service level agreement.
CT-image of rock samples super resolution using 3D convolutional neural network

Computed Tomography (CT) imaging technique is widely used in geological exploration, medical diagnosis and other fields. However, the resolution of CT images is usually limited by scanning devices and cost. Super-resolution (SR) methods based on deep learning provide remarkable performance for two-dimensional (2D) images. Unfortunately, few effective SR algorithms are available for three-dimensional (3D) images. This study proposes a novel network named as three-dimensional super-resolution convolutional neural network (3DSRCNN) to realize voxel SR imaging of rock samples. To solve the practical problems faced in the training process, such as slow convergence of network training and insufficient memory, we utilized adjustable learning rate, residual-learning, gradient clipping, momentum stochastic gradient descent (SGD) strategy to optimize training procedure. In addition, we have explored the empirical guidelines to set an appropriate number of network layers. Previous learning-based algorithms need to separately train samples for different scale factors; by contrast, our single model can perform the multi-scale SR. Further, our proposed method provides better performance in terms of PSNR, SSIM and efficiency compared with conventional methods.