Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Blockchain-Based Internet of Things and Industrial IoT: A Comprehensive Survey

Industry 4.0 connects the latest technologies such as cloud computing, Internet of things (IoT), machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI), and blockchain to provide more automation in the industrial process and also bridges the gap between the physical and digital worlds through the cyber-physical system. The inherent feature of IoT devices creates the industry to smart industry (referred to as industrial IoT, i.e., IIoT) through its data-driven decision policies. However, several challenges such as decentralization, security and privacy vulnerability, single point of failure (SPOF), and trust issues exist in the IoT system. Blockchain is one of the promising technologies that can bring about opportunities for addressing the challenges of IoT systems. In this article, we have investigated the integration of IoT with blockchain technology and provided an in-depth study of the blockchain-enabled IoT and IIoT systems. The state-of-the-art research is categorized into data storage and management technique, big data and cloud computing technique (finance and data auditing), and industrial sectors (supply chain, energy, and healthcare sector). The insightful discussion based on the different categories is also presented in the paper. In particular, first, we introduce the IoT and IIoT and then discuss the need for smart contracts in IoT and IIoT systems. Next, we concentrate on the convergence of blockchain and IoT with state-of-the-art research. In addition, this article also provides the open and future research directions towards this era with the highlighted observations.
Emerging quantum computing algorithms for quantum chemistry

Digital quantum computers provide a computational framework for solving the Schr\"{o}dinger equation for a variety of many-particle systems. Quantum computing algorithms for the quantum simulation of these systems have recently witnessed remarkable growth, notwithstanding the limitations of existing quantum hardware, especially as a tool for electronic structure computations in molecules. In this review, we provide a self-contained introduction to emerging algorithms for the simulation of Hamiltonian dynamics and eigenstates, with emphasis on their applications to the electronic structure in molecular systems. Theoretical foundations and implementation details of the method are discussed, and their strengths, limitations, and recent advances are presented.
Feature wise normalization: An effective way of normalizing data

This paper presents a novel Feature Wise Normalization approach for the effective normalization of data. In this approach, each feature is normalized independently with one of the methods from the pool of normalization methods. It is in contrast to the conventional approach which normalizes the data with one method only and as a result, yields suboptimal performance. Additionally, generalization and superiority among normalization methods are also not ensured owing to different machine learning mechanisms for solving classification tasks. The proposed approach benefits from the collective response of multiple methods to normalize the data better as individual features become a normalization unit. The selection of methods is a combinatorial problem that can be solved with optimization algorithms. For this purpose, Antlion optimization is considered that combines the search of methods with the fine-tuning of classifier parameters. Twelve methods are used to create the pool beside the original scale, and the obtained data is evaluated on four learning algorithms. Experiments are performed on 18 benchmark datasets to show the efficacy of the proposed approach in contrast to conventional normalization.
BAPA-Net: Boundary Adaptation and Prototype Alignment for Cross-domain Semantic Segmentation

Existing cross-domain semantic segmentation methods usually focus on the overall segmentation results of whole objects but neglect the importance of object boundaries. In this work, we find that the segmentation performance can be considerably boosted if we treat object boundaries properly. For that, we propose a novel method called BAPA-Net, which is based on a convolutional neural network via Boundary Adaptation and Prototype Alignment, under the unsupervised domain adaptation setting. Specifically, we first construct additional images by pasting objects from source images to target images, and we develop a so-called boundary adaptation module to weigh each pixel based on its distance to the nearest boundary pixel of those pasted source objects. Moreover, we propose another prototype alignment module to reduce the domain mismatch by minimizing distances between the class prototypes of the source and target domains, where boundaries are removed to avoid domain confusion during prototype calculation. By integrating the boundary adaptation and prototype alignment, we are able to train a discriminative and domain-invariant model for cross-domain semantic segmentation. We conduct extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets of urban scenes (i.e., GTA5→Cityscapes and SYNTHIA→Cityscapes). And the promising results clearly show the effectiveness of our BAPA-Net method over existing state-of-the-art for cross-domain semantic segmentation. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/manmanjun/BAPA-Net.
Assessment the potential solar energy with the models for optimum tilt angles of maximum solar irradiance for Iraq

This work aims to assess the potential solar energy and determine the optimum tilt angles of maximum solar irradance in Iraq. The south-facing optimum tilt angle has been determined for eighteen cities of Iraq for estimation the solar radiation capacity. The optimisation process is performed by using hourly experimental solar radiation data for nineteen years. The results demonstrated that the maximum solar radiation can be collected with the tilt angle from 0° to 64°, where the optimum angle is evaluated/determined by searching for the values of the maximum total hourly-daily irradiance with the 1° resolution. The optimum tilt angle values increased during winter and decreased during summer, marking the highest values in January and December and the lowest values in June and July for all cities. The cities in the north of Iraq have higher optimum tilt angles values than those in the middle and south parts. Furthermore, a three general models are developed and validated for obtaining monthly and yearly optimum tilt angles positioning for estimation maximum irradiance.
R-MSFM: Recurrent Multi-Scale Feature Modulation for Monocular Depth Estimating

In this paper, we propose Recurrent Multi-Scale Feature Modulation (R-MSFM), a new deep network architecture for self-supervised monocular depth estimation. R-MSFM extracts per-pixel features, builds a multi-scale feature modulation module, and iteratively updates an inverse depth through a parameter-shared decoder at the fixed resolution. This architecture enables our R-MSFM to maintain semantically richer while spatially more precise representations and avoid the error propagation caused by the traditional U-Net-like coarse-to-fine architecture widely used in this domain, resulting in strong generalization and efficient parameter count. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed R-MSFM both at model size and inference speed, and show the state-of-the-art results on the KITTI benchmark. Code is available at https://github.com/jsczzzk/R-MSFM
DeepReach: A Deep Learning Approach to High-Dimensional Reachability

Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability analysis is an important formal verification method for guaranteeing performance and safety properties of dynamical control systems. Its advantages include compatibility with general nonlinear system dynamics, formal treatment of bounded disturbances, and the ability to deal with state and input constraints. However, it involves solving a PDE, whose computational and memory complexity scales exponentially with respect to the number of state variables, limiting its direct use to small-scale systems. We propose DeepReach, a method that leverages new developments in sinusoidal networks to develop a neural PDE solver for high-dimensional reachability problems. The computational requirements of DeepReach do not scale directly with the state dimension, but rather with the complexity of the underlying reachable tube. DeepReach achieves comparable results to the state-of-the-art reachability methods, does not require any explicit supervision for the PDE solution, can easily handle external disturbances, adversarial inputs, and system constraints, and also provides a safety controller for the system. We demonstrate DeepReach on a 9D multi-vehicle collision problem, and a 10D narrow passage problem, motivated by autonomous driving applications.
Capacity and Quantum Geometry of Parametrized Quantum Circuits

To harness the potential of noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, it is paramount to find the best type of circuits to run hybrid quantum-classical algorithms. Key candidates are parametrized quantum circuits that can be effectively implemented on current devices. Here, we evaluate the capacity and trainability of these circuits using the geometric structure of the parameter space via the effective quantum dimension, which reveals the expressive power of circuits in general as well as of particular initialization strategies. We assess the expressive power of various popular circuit types and find striking differences depending on the type of entangling gates used. Particular circuits are characterized by scaling laws in their expressiveness. We identify a transition in the quantum geometry of the parameter space, which leads to a decay of the quantum natural gradient for deep circuits. For shallow circuits, the quantum natural gradient can be orders of magnitude larger in value compared to the regular gradient; however, both of them can suffer from vanishing gradients. By tuning a fixed set of circuit parameters to randomized ones, we find a region where the circuit is expressive, but does not suffer from barren plateaus, hinting at a good way to initialize circuits. We show an algorithm that prunes redundant parameters of a circuit without affecting its effective dimension. Our results enhance the understanding of parametrized quantum circuits and can be immediately applied to improve variational quantum algorithms.
TSP: Temporally-Sensitive Pretraining of Video Encoders for Localization Tasks

Due to the large memory footprint of untrimmed videos, current state-of-the-art video localization methods operate atop precomputed video clip features. These features are extracted from video encoders typically trained for trimmed action classification tasks, making such features not necessarily suitable for temporal localization. In this work, we propose a novel supervised pretraining paradigm for clip features that not only trains to classify activities but also considers background clips and global video information to improve temporal sensitivity. Extensive experiments show that using features trained with our novel pretraining strategy significantly improves the performance of recent state-of-the-art methods on three tasks: Temporal Action Localization, Action Proposal Generation, and Dense Video Captioning. We also show that our pretraining approach is effective across three encoder architectures and two pretraining datasets. We believe video feature encoding is an important building block for localization algorithms, and extracting temporally-sensitive features should be of paramount importance in building more accurate models. The code and pretrained models are available on our project website.
FASTER: Fast and Safe Trajectory Planner for Navigation in Unknown Environments

Planning high-speed trajectories for UAVs in unknown environments requires algorithmic techniques that enable fast reaction times to guarantee safety as more information about the environment becomes available. The standard approaches that ensure safety by enforcing a &#x201C;stop&#x201D; condition in the free-known space can severely limit the speed of the vehicle, especially in situations where much of the world is unknown. Moreover, the ad-hoc time and interval allocation scheme usually imposed on the trajectory also leads to conservative and slower trajectories. This work proposes FASTER (Fast and Safe Trajectory Planner) to ensure safety without sacrificing speed. FASTER obtains high-speed trajectories by enabling the local planner to optimize in both the free-known and unknown spaces. Safety is ensured by always having a safe back-up trajectory in the free-known space. The MIQP formulation proposed also allows the solver to choose the trajectory interval allocation. FASTER is tested extensively in simulation and in real hardware, showing flights in unknown cluttered environments with velocities up to 7.8 m/s, and experiments at the maximum speed of a skid-steer ground robot (2 m/s).
Are we ready for learned cardinality estimation?

Cardinality estimation is a fundamental but long unresolved problem in query optimization. Recently, multiple papers from different research groups consistently report that learned models have the potential to replace existing cardinality estimators. In this paper, we ask a forward-thinking question: Are we ready to deploy these learned cardinality models in production? Our study consists of three main parts. Firstly, we focus on the static environment (i.e., no data updates) and compare five new learned methods with eight traditional methods on four real-world datasets under a unified workload setting. The results show that learned models are indeed more accurate than traditional methods, but they often suffer from high training and inference costs. Secondly, we explore whether these learned models are ready for dynamic environments (i.e., frequent data updates). We find that they cannot catch up with fast data up-dates and return large errors for different reasons. For less frequent updates, they can perform better but there is no clear winner among themselves. Thirdly, we take a deeper look into learned models and explore when they may go wrong. Our results show that the performance of learned methods can be greatly affected by the changes in correlation, skewness, or domain size. More importantly, their behaviors are much harder to interpret and often unpredictable. Based on these findings, we identify two promising research directions (control the cost of learned models and make learned models trustworthy) and suggest a number of research opportunities. We hope that our study can guide researchers and practitioners to work together to eventually push learned cardinality estimators into real database systems.
MOOCsChain: A blockchain-based secure storage and sharing scheme for MOOCs learning

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become a paramount online learning approach for flexible learning methods and extensive learning courses. Different from the traditional learning method, MOOCs advocate completing the learning process through online devices. Electronic Learning Records (ELRs) are vital for learners as compelling evidence of the learning process, generally are stored in a cloud data center. However, with trustless third-party storage, the security and privacy of ELRs cannot be guaranteed. Due to such, we propose a Blockchain-based secure storage and sharing scheme for ELRs in MOOCs learning systems. Designed to take advantage of blockchain, the proposed solution can support efficient conditional anonymity, secure storage, and sharing without the need for sophisticated cryptographic calculations. The experimental results and the security analysis shows that the proposed scheme achieves legitimate security assurance and outperforms other similar works.
Industry quantum computing applications

Abstract Quantum computing promises to overcome computational limitations with better and faster solutions for optimization, simulation, and machine learning problems. Europe and Germany are in the process of successfully establishing research and funding programs with the objective to advance the technology’s ecosystem and industrialization, thereby ensuring digital sovereignty, security, and competitiveness. Such an ecosystem comprises hardware/software solution providers, system integrators, and users from research institutions, start-ups, and industry. The vision of the Quantum Technology and Application Consortium (QUTAC) is to establish and advance the quantum computing ecosystem, supporting the ambitious goals of the German government and various research programs. QUTAC is comprised of ten members representing different industries, in particular automotive manufacturing, chemical and pharmaceutical production, insurance, and technology. In this paper, we survey the current state of quantum computing in these sectors as well as the aerospace industry and identify the contributions of QUTAC to the ecosystem. We propose an application-centric approach for the industrialization of the technology based on proven business impact. This paper identifies 24 different use cases. By formalizing high-value use cases into well-described reference problems and benchmarks, we will guide technological progress and eventually commercialization. Our results will be beneficial to all ecosystem participants, including suppliers, system integrators, software developers, users, policymakers, funding program managers, and investors.
Artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced medical drones in the healthcare supply chain (HSC) for sustainability development: A case study

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has attracted extant literature devoted to different subjects, including healthcare. AI studies within healthcare, however, have focused extensively on medical diagnosis, operations, and prescription, to the neglect of supply chain management (SCM). To bridge this research gap, we draw on corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a theoretical lens to explore how an AI-enhanced medical drone application in Ghana's healthcare supply chain (HSC) improves the HSC system and contributes to sustainable development. The data for this study is collated through documentary and an in-depth semi-structured interviews from the world's largest medical drone programme in Ghana. Findings indicate that an AI-enhanced medical drone application in HSC contributes significantly to the host country's HSC and sustainable development goals (SDGs) with particular emphasis on climate (SDGs 3, 8 & 13). The SDGs are achieved through the reduction of carbon emission with carbon and noise-free drones in the delivery of emergency medical products to healthcare centres. Furthermore, by adopting the use of medical drones in the HSC system, society's socio-economic situations are improved through the reduction of mortality rates and may lead to the provision of better social and economic lives for the citizenry. Moreover, the medical drones contribute to the long-term corporate sustainability of the implementing firm.
Understanding Security Issues in the NFT Ecosystem

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have emerged as a way to collect digital art as well as an investment vehicle. Despite having been popularized only recently, NFT markets have witnessed several high-profile (and high-value) asset sales and a tremendous growth in trading volumes over the last year. Unfortunately, these marketplaces have not yet received much security scrutiny. Instead, most academic research has focused on attacks against decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and automated techniques to detect smart-contract vulnerabilities. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study the market dynamics and security issues of the multi-billion dollar NFT ecosystem.
OpenPifPaf: Composite Fields for Semantic Keypoint Detection and Spatio-Temporal Association

Many image-based perception tasks can be formulated as detecting, associating and tracking semantic keypoints, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">e.g.</i> , human body pose estimation and tracking. In this work, we present a general framework that jointly detects and forms spatio-temporal keypoint associations in a single stage, making this the first real-time pose detection and tracking algorithm. We present a generic neural network architecture that uses Composite Fields to detect and construct a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">spatio-temporal pose</i> which is a single, connected graph whose nodes are the semantic keypoints ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">e.g</i> ., a person’s body joints) in multiple frames. For the temporal associations, we introduce the Temporal Composite Association Field (TCAF) which requires an extended network architecture and training method beyond previous Composite Fields. Our experiments show competitive accuracy while being an order of magnitude faster on multiple publicly available datasets such as COCO, CrowdPose and the PoseTrack 2017 and 2018 datasets. We also show that our method generalizes to any class of semantic keypoints such as car and animal parts to provide a holistic perception framework that is well suited for urban mobility such as self-driving cars and delivery robots.
Exploring Explainability: A Definition, a Model, and a Knowledge Catalogue

The growing complexity of software systems and the influence of software-supported decisions in our society awoke the need for software that is transparent, accountable, and trust-worthy. Explainability has been identified as a means to achieve these qualities. It is recognized as an emerging non-functional requirement (NFR) that has a significant impact on system quality. However, in order to incorporate this NFR into systems, we need to understand what explainability means from a software engineering perspective and how it impacts other quality aspects in a system. This allows for an early analysis of the benefits and possible design issues that arise from interrelationships between different quality aspects. Nevertheless, explainability is currently under-researched in the domain of requirements engineering and there is a lack of conceptual models and knowledge catalogues that support the requirements engineering process and system design. In this work, we bridge this gap by proposing a definition, a model, and a catalogue for explainability. They illustrate how explainability interacts with other quality aspects and how it may impact various quality dimensions of a system. To this end, we conducted an interdisciplinary Systematic Literature Review and validated our findings with experts in workshops.