Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Graph Modeling for Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization

Weakly supervised action localization is a challenging task that aims to localize action instances in untrimmed videos given only video-level supervision. Existing methods mostly distinguish action from background via attentive feature fusion with RGB and optical flow modalities. Unfortunately, this strategy fails to retain the distinct characteristics of each modality, leading to inaccurate localization under hard-to-discriminate cases such as action-context interference and in-action stationary period. As an action is typically comprised of multiple stages, an intuitive solution is to model the relation between the finer-grained action segments to obtain a more detailed analysis. In this paper, we propose a dynamic graph-based method, namely DGCNN, to explore the two-stream relation between action segments. To be specific, segments within a video which are likely to be actions are dynamically selected to construct an action graph. For each graph, a triplet adjacency matrix is devised to explore the temporal and contextual correlations between the pseudo action segments, which consists of three components, i.e., mutual importance, feature similarity, and high-level contextual similarity. The two-stream dynamic pseudo graphs, along with the pseudo background segments, are used to derive more detailed video representation. For action localization, a non-local based temporal refinement module is proposed to fully leverage the temporal consistency between consecutive segments. Experimental results on three datasets, i.e., THUMOS14, ActivityNet v1.2 and v1.3, demonstrate that our method is superior to the state-of-the-arts.
Hand Gesture Recognition with Symmetric Pattern under Diverse Illuminated Conditions Using Artificial Neural Network

This paper investigated the effects of variant lighting conditions on the recognition process. A framework is proposed to improve the performance of gesture recognition under variant illumination using the luminosity method. To prove the concept, a workable testbed has been developed in the laboratory by using a Microsoft Kinect sensor to capture the depth images for the purpose of acquiring diverse resolution data. For this, a case study was formulated to achieve an improved accuracy rate in gesture recognition under diverse illuminated conditions. For data preparation, American Sign Language (ASL) was used to create a dataset of all twenty-six signs, evaluated in real-time under diverse lighting conditions. The proposed method uses a set of symmetric patterns as a feature set in order to identify human hands and recognize gestures extracted through hand perimeter feature-extraction methods. A Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) is used in the identification of significant key points of ASL-based images with their relevant features. Finally, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) trained on symmetric patterns under different lighting environments was used to classify hand gestures utilizing selected features for validation. The experimental results showed that the proposed system performed well in diverse lighting effects with multiple pixel sizes. A total aggregate 97.3% recognition accuracy rate is achieved across 26 alphabet datasets with only a 2.7% error rate, which shows the overall efficiency of the ANN architecture in terms of processing time.
A Survey of Augmented Piano Prototypes: Has Augmentation Improved Learning Experiences?

Humans have been developing and playing musical instruments for millennia. With technological advancements, instruments were becoming ever more sophisticated. In recent decades computer-supported innovations have also been introduced in hardware design, usability, and aesthetics. One of the most commonly digitally augmented instruments is the piano. Besides electronic keyboards, several prototypes augmenting pianos with different projections providing various levels of interactivity on and around the keyboard have been implemented in order to support piano players. However, it is still not understood if these solutions are indeed supporting the learning process. In this paper we present a systematic review of augmented piano prototypes focusing on instrument learning, which is based on the four themes derived from interviews of piano experts to better understand the problems of teaching the piano. These themes are: (i) synchronised movement and body posture, (ii) sight-reading, (iii) ensuring motivation, and (iv) encouraging improvisation. We found that prototypes are saturated on the synchronisation themes, and there are opportunities for sight-reading, motivation, and improvisation themes. We conclude by presenting recommendations on augmenting piano systems towards enriching the piano learning experience as well as on possible directions to expand knowledge in the area.
Transformer-based models for multimodal irony detection

Abstract Irony is nowadays a pervasive phenomenon in social networks. The multimodal functionalities of these platforms (i.e., the possibility to attach audio, video, and images to textual information) are increasingly leading their users to employ combinations of information in different formats to express their ironic thoughts. The present work focuses on the study of irony detection in social media posts involving image and text. To this end, a transformer architecture for the fusion of textual and image information is proposed. The model leverages disentangled text attention with visual transformers, improving F1-score up to 9% over previous existing works in the field and current state-of-the-art visio-linguistic transformers. The proposed architecture was evaluated in three different multimodal datasets gathered from Twitter and Tumblr. The results revealed that, in many situations, the text-only version of the architecture was able to capture the ironic nature of the message without using visual information. This phenomenon was further analysed, leading to the identification of linguistic patterns that could provide the context necessary for irony detection without the need for additional visual information.
i-Net: a deep CNN model for white blood cancer segmentation and classification

The blood, which is the lifeline of humans consists of the plasma, platelets, red blood corpuscles (RBC), and white blood corpuscles (WBC) along with another immunoglobulin.Leukaemia is a kind of blood deficiency that is usually chronic.The prevalence of leukaemia varies based on the type of disease and the demographics of the population [1].The major cause of anaemia is blood cell proliferation, which is hindered by rapid expansion of defective blood cells [2].*Author for correspondence Cancer of the blood primarily leukaemia, myeloma, and lymphoma with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), a variant of blood malignancy that affects the bone marrow [1].The term "acute" and "chronic" refers to the disease's rapid and slower progression, and if untreated at the earliest, has the potential to weaken the immune system in a short span of time.Leukaemia, the most common type of blood cancer is further divided into three, namely: L1, L2, and L3.An important plasma-rich immature teratoma that aids in the removal of infection, and three times more frequent than ALL is the multiple myeloma (MM) [4].A decreased platelet count in the blood, a condition known as Thrombocytopenia, is a symptom of MM [5] which causes bone erosion and may be seen on CT scans as bone lesions.According to the study carried out by Ianniciello and Helgason [6], from 45 countries representing 90% of the world"s
A Novel Model of Thyroid Nodule Segmentation for Ultrasound Images

Ultrasonography is regarded as an effective technique for the detection, diagnosis and monitoring of thyroid nodules. Segmentation of thyroid nodules on ultrasound images is important in clinical practice. However, because in ultrasound images there is an unclear boundary between thyroid nodules and surrounding tissues, the accuracy of segmentation remains a challenge. Although the deep learning model provides an accurate and convenient method for thyroid nodule segmentation, it is unsatisfactory of the existing model in segmenting the margin of thyroid nodules. In this study, we developed boundary attention transformer net (BTNet), a novel segmentation network with a boundary attention mechanism combining the advantages of a convolutional neural network and transformer, which could fuse the features of both long and short ranges. Boundary attention is improved to focus on learning the boundary information, and this module enhances the segmentation ability of the network boundary. For features of different scales, we also incorporate a deep supervision mechanism to blend the outputs of different levels to enhance the segmentation effect. As the BTNet model incorporates the long range-short range connectivity effect and the boundary-regional cooperation capability, our model has excellent segmentation performance in thyroid nodule segmentation. The development of BTNet was based on the data set from Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine Affiliated Sixth People's Hospital and the public data set. BTNet achieved good performance in the segmentation of thyroid nodules with an intersection-over-union of 0.810 and Dice coefficient of 0.892 Moreover, our work revealed great improvement in the boundary metrics; for example, the boundary distance was 7.308, the boundary overlap 0.201 and the boundary Dice 0.194, all with p values <0.05.
COVID-19 Case Investigation and Contact Tracing in New York City, June 1, 2020, to October 31, 2021

Contact tracing is a core strategy for preventing the spread of many infectious diseases of public health concern. Better understanding of the outcomes of contact tracing for COVID-19 as well as the operational opportunities and challenges in establishing a program for a jurisdiction as large as New York City (NYC) is important for the evaluation of this strategy.To describe the establishment, scaling, and maintenance of Trace, NYC's contact tracing program, and share data on outcomes during its first 17 months.This cross-sectional study included people with laboratory test-confirmed and probable COVID-19 and their contacts in NYC between June 1, 2020, and October 31, 2021. Trace launched on June 1, 2020, and had a workforce of 4147 contact tracers, with the majority of the workforce performing their jobs completely remotely. Data were analyzed in March 2022.Number and proportion of persons with COVID-19 and contacts on whom investigations were attempted and completed; timeliness of interviews relative to symptom onset or exposure for symptomatic cases and contacts, respectively.Case investigations were attempted for 941 035 persons. Of those, 840 922 (89.4%) were reached and 711 353 (75.6%) completed an intake interview (women and girls, 358 775 [50.4%]; 60 178 [8.5%] Asian, 110 636 [15.6%] Black, 210 489 [28.3%] Hispanic or Latino, 157 349 [22.1%] White). Interviews were attempted for 1 218 650 contacts. Of those, 904 927 (74.3%) were reached, and 590 333 (48.4%) completed intake (women and girls, 219 261 [37.2%]; 47 403 [8.0%] Asian, 98 916 [16.8%] Black, 177 600 [30.1%] Hispanic or Latino, 116 559 [19.7%] White). Completion rates were consistent over time and resistant to changes related to vaccination as well as isolation and quarantine guidance. Among symptomatic cases, median time from symptom onset to intake completion was 4.7 days; a median 1.4 contacts were identified per case. Median time from contacts' last date of exposure to intake completion was 2.3 days. Among contacts, 30.1% were tested within 14 days of notification. Among cases, 27.8% were known to Trace as contacts. The overall expense for Trace from May 6, 2020, through October 31, 2021, was approximately $600 million.Despite the complexity of developing a contact tracing program in a diverse city with a population of over 8 million people, in this case study we were able to identify 1.4 contacts per case and offer resources to safely isolate and quarantine to over 1 million cases and contacts in this study period.
Rank-Based Ant System with Originality Reinforcement and Pheromone Smoothing

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) encompasses a family of metaheuristics inspired by the foraging behaviour of ants. Since the introduction of the first ACO algorithm, called Ant System (AS), several ACO variants have been proposed in the literature. Owing to their superior performance over other alternatives, the most popular ACO algorithms are Rank-based Ant System (ASRank), Max-Min Ant System (MMAS) and Ant Colony System (ACS). While ASRank shows a fast convergence to high-quality solutions, its performance is improved by other more widely used ACO variants such as MMAS and ACS, which are currently considered the state-of-the-art ACO algorithms for static combinatorial optimization problems. With the purpose of diversifying the search process and avoiding early convergence to a local optimal, the proposed approach extends ASRank with an originality reinforcement strategy of the top-ranked solutions and a pheromone smoothing mechanism that is triggered before the algorithm reaches stagnation. The approach is tested on several symmetric and asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem and Sequential Ordering Problem instances from TSPLIB benchmark. Our experimental results show that the proposed method achieves fast convergence to high-quality solutions and outperforms the current state-of-the-art ACO algorithms ASRank, MMAS and ACS, for most instances of the benchmark.
Graph Learning for Anomaly Analytics: Algorithms, Applications, and Challenges

Anomaly analytics is a popular and vital task in various research contexts that has been studied for several decades. At the same time, deep learning has shown its capacity in solving many graph-based tasks, like node classification, link prediction, and graph classification. Recently, many studies are extending graph learning models for solving anomaly analytics problems, resulting in beneficial advances in graph-based anomaly analytics techniques. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of graph learning methods for anomaly analytics tasks. We classify them into four categories based on their model architectures, namely graph convolutional network, graph attention network, graph autoencoder, and other graph learning models. The differences between these methods are also compared in a systematic manner. Furthermore, we outline several graph-based anomaly analytics applications across various domains in the real world. Finally, we discuss five potential future research directions in this rapidly growing field.
Strategic model reduction by analysing model sloppiness: A case study in coral calcification

It can be difficult to identify ways to reduce the complexity of large models whilst maintaining predictive power, particularly where there are hidden parameter interdependencies. Here, we demonstrate that the analysis of model sloppiness can be a new invaluable tool for strategically simplifying complex models. Such an analysis identifies parameter combinations which strongly and/or weakly inform model behaviours, yet the approach has not previously been used to inform model reduction. Using a case study on a coral calcification model calibrated to experimental data, we show how the analysis of model sloppiness can strategically inform model simplifications which maintain predictive power. Additionally, when comparing various approaches to analysing sloppiness, we find that Bayesian methods can be advantageous when unambiguous identification of the best-fit model parameters is a challenge for standard optimisation procedures.
Blockchain innovation ecosystems orchestration in construction

Purpose Rapid advancements in blockchain technology transform various sectors, attracting the attention of industrialists, practitioners, policymakers and academics, and profoundly affect construction businesses through smart contracts and crypto-economics. This paper explores the blockchain innovation ecosystem in construction. Design/methodology/approach Through a qualitative study of 23 diverse interviewees, the study explores how open or closed the blockchain innovation ecosystem in construction is and who its emerging orchestrators are. Findings The data showed that construction aims towards an open innovation blockchain ecosystem, although there are elements of hybridisation and closedness, each system pointing out to different orchestrators. Practical implications The study has implications for governments and large companies in construction, showing that open innovation initiatives need to be encouraged by policymakers through rules, regulations and government-sponsored demonstrator projects. Social implications The data showed that there is lack of readiness for business model change to support open innovation blockchain ecosystems in construction. Originality/value This is the first study applying the open innovation theory in the construction industry and sheds light into the phenomenon of blockchain, suggesting routes for further democratisation of the technology for policymakers and practitioners.
A Systematic Literature Review on Applications of GAN-Synthesized Images for Brain MRI

With the advances in brain imaging, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is evolving as a popular radiological tool in clinical diagnosis. Deep learning (DL) methods can detect abnormalities in brain images without an extensive manual feature extraction process. Generative adversarial network (GAN)-synthesized images have many applications in this field besides augmentation, such as image translation, registration, super-resolution, denoising, motion correction, segmentation, reconstruction, and contrast enhancement. The existing literature was reviewed systematically to understand the role of GAN-synthesized dummy images in brain disease diagnosis. Web of Science and Scopus databases were extensively searched to find relevant studies from the last 6 years to write this systematic literature review (SLR). Predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria helped in filtering the search results. Data extraction is based on related research questions (RQ). This SLR identifies various loss functions used in the above applications and software to process brain MRIs. A comparative study of existing evaluation metrics for GAN-synthesized images helps choose the proper metric for an application. GAN-synthesized images will have a crucial role in the clinical sector in the coming years, and this paper gives a baseline for other researchers in the field.
Domain Adaptation Multitask Optimization

Multitask optimization (MTO) is a new optimization paradigm that leverages useful information contained in multiple tasks to help solve each other. It attracts increasing attention in recent years and gains significant performance improvements. However, the solutions of distinct tasks usually obey different distributions. To avoid that individuals after intertask learning are not suitable for the original task due to the distribution differences and even impede overall solution efficiency, we propose a novel multitask evolutionary framework that enables knowledge aggregation and online learning among distinct tasks to solve MTO problems. Our proposal designs a domain adaptation-based mapping strategy to reduce the difference across solution domains and find more genetic traits to improve the effectiveness of information interactions. To further improve the algorithm performance, we propose a smart way to divide initial population into different subpopulations and choose suitable individuals to learn. By ranking individuals in target subpopulation, worse-performing individuals can learn from other tasks. The significant advantage of our proposed paradigm over the state of the art is verified via a series of MTO benchmark studies.
An improved anchor-free SAR ship detection algorithm based on brain-inspired attention mechanism

As a computing platform that can deal with problems independently and adapt to different environments, the brain-inspired function is similar to the human brain, which can effectively make use of visual targets and their surrounding background information to make more efficient and accurate decision results. Currently synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ship target detection has an important role in military and civilian fields, but there are still great challenges in SAR ship target detection due to the problems of large span of ship scales and obvious feature differences. Therefore, this paper proposes an improved anchor-free SAR ship detection algorithm based on brain-inspired attention mechanism, which efficiently focuses on target information ignoring the interference of complex background. First of all, most target detection algorithms are based on the anchor method, which requires a large number of anchors to be defined in advance and has poor generalization capability and performance to be improved in multi-scale ship detection, so this paper adopts an anchor-free detection network to directly enumerate potential target locations to enhance algorithm robustness and improve detection performance. Secondly, in order to improve the SAR ship target feature extraction capability, a dense connection module is proposed for the deep part of the network to promote more adequate deep feature fusion. A visual attention module is proposed for the shallow part of the network to focus on the salient features of the ship target in the local area for the input SAR images and suppress the interference of the surrounding background with similar scattering characteristics. In addition, because the SAR image coherent speckle noise is similar to the edge of the ship target, this paper proposes a novel width height prediction constraint to suppress the noise scattering power effect and improve the SAR ship localization accuracy. Moreover, to prove the effectiveness of this algorithm, experiments are conducted on the SAR ship detection dataset (SSDD) and high resolution SAR images dataset (HRSID). The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves the best detection performance with metrics AP of 68.2% and 62.2% on SSDD and HRSID, respectively.
Analyzing the Prospects of Blockchain in Healthcare Industry

Deployment of secured healthcare information is a major challenge in a web-based environment. eHealth services are subjected to same security threats as other services. The purpose of blockchain is to provide a structure and security to the organization data. Healthcare data deals with confidential information. The medical records can be well organized and empower their propagation in a secured manner through the usage of blockchain technology. The study throws light on providing security of health services through blockchain technology. The authors have analyzed the various aspects of role of blockchain in healthcare through an extensive literature review. The application of blockchain in COVID-19 has also been analyzed and discussed in the study. Further application of blockchain in Indian healthcare has been highlighted in the paper. The study provides suggestions for strengthening the healthcare system by blending machine learning, artificial intelligence, big data, and IoT with blockchain.