Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
SemBioNLQA: A semantic biomedical question answering system for retrieving exact and ideal answers to natural language questions

Question answering (QA), the identification of short accurate answers to users questions written in natural language expressions, is a longstanding issue widely studied over the last decades in the open-domain. However, it still remains a real challenge in the biomedical domain as the most of the existing systems support a limited amount of question and answer types as well as still require further efforts in order to improve their performance in terms of precision for the supported questions. Here, we present a semantic biomedical QA system named SemBioNLQA which has the ability to handle the kinds of yes/no, factoid, list, and summary natural language questions. This paper describes the system architecture and an evaluation of the developed end-to-end biomedical QA system named SemBioNLQA, which consists of question classification, document retrieval, passage retrieval and answer extraction modules. It takes natural language questions as input, and outputs both short precise answers and summaries as results. The SemBioNLQA system, dealing with four types of questions, is based on (1) handcrafted lexico-syntactic patterns and a machine learning algorithm for question classification, (2) PubMed search engine and UMLS similarity for document retrieval, (3) the BM25 model, stemmed words and UMLS concepts for passage retrieval, and (4) UMLS metathesaurus, BioPortal synonyms, sentiment analysis and term frequency metric for answer extraction. Compared with the current state-of-the-art biomedical QA systems, SemBioNLQA, a fully automated system, has the potential to deal with a large amount of question and answer types. SemBioNLQA retrieves quickly users’ information needs by returning exact answers (e.g., “yes”, “no”, a biomedical entity name, etc.) and ideal answers (i.e., paragraph-sized summaries of relevant information) for yes/no, factoid and list questions, whereas it provides only the ideal answers for summary questions. Moreover, experimental evaluations performed on biomedical questions and answers provided by the BioASQ challenge especially in 2015, 2016 and 2017 (as part of our participation), show that SemBioNLQA achieves good performances compared with the most current state-of-the-art systems and allows a practical and competitive alternative to help information seekers find exact and ideal answers to their biomedical questions. The SemBioNLQA source code is publicly available at https://github.com/sarrouti/sembionlqa.
A Novel Retinex-Based Fractional-Order Variational Model for Images With Severely Low Light

In this paper, we propose a novel Retinex-based fractional-order variational model for severely low-light images. The proposed method is more flexible in controlling the regularization extent than the existing integer-order regularization methods. Specifically, we decompose directly in the image domain and perform the fractional-order gradient total variation regularization on both the reflectance component and the illumination component to get more appropriate estimated results. The merits of the proposed method are as follows: 1) small-magnitude details are maintained in the estimated reflectance. 2) illumination components are effectively removed from the estimated reflectance. 3) the estimated illumination is more likely piecewise smooth. We compare the proposed method with other closely related Retinex-based methods. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
A novel dark channel prior guided variational framework for underwater image restoration

Image captured underwater often suffers from low contrast, color distortion and noise problems, which is caused by absorbing and scattering before the light reaches the camera when traveling through water. Underwater image enhancement and restoration from a single image is known to be an ill-posed problem. To overcome these limitations, we establish an underwater total variation (UTV) model relying on underwater dark channel prior (UDCP), in which UDCP is used to estimate the transmission map. We design the data item and smooth item of the unified variational model based on the underwater image formation model. We further employ the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to accelerate the solving procedure. Numerical experiential results demonstrate that our underwater variational method obtains a good outcome on dehazing and denoising. Furthermore, compared with several other state-of-the-art algorithms, the proposed approach achieves better visual quality, which is illustrated by examples and statistics.
Cybersecurity compliance behavior: Exploring the influences of individual decision style and other antecedents

Recent information and cybersecurity research have focused on improving individuals’ security compliance behavior. However, improved security performance remains a challenge since individuals often fail to comply with security best practices. In this study, we investigate a new individual cybersecurity compliance behavior model proposed by Donalds and Osei-Bryson (2017). Specifically, we investigate the influence of individual decision styles on their cybersecurity compliance behavior and other antecedents of such behavior. To empirically validate the hypotheses in the Donalds & Osei-Bryson model, we used data collected from 248 individuals and then use multiple regression to examine the assertions of the model. Our findings confirm that individual’s decision styles, specifically, dominant orientation and dominant decision style, influence their individual cybersecurity compliance behavior and other antecedents of such behavior. Our research offers new dimensions for investigating individual cybersecurity compliance behavior and new insights into factors that may influence individual’s cybersecurity compliance behavior.
Convolutional Attention Networks for Scene Text Recognition

In this article, we present Convoluitional Attention Networks (CAN) for unconstrained scene text recognition. Recent dominant approaches for scene text recognition are mainly based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), where the CNN encodes images and the RNN generates character sequences. Our CAN is different from these methods; our CAN is completely built on CNN and includes an attention mechanism. The distinctive characteristics of our method include (i) CAN follows encoder-decoder architecture, in which the encoder is a deep two-dimensional CNN and the decoder is a one-dimensional CNN; (ii) the attention mechanism is applied in every convolutional layer of the decoder, and we propose a novel spatial attention method using average pooling; and (iii) position embeddings are equipped in both a spatial encoder and a sequence decoder to give our networks a sense of location. We conduct experiments on standard datasets for scene text recognition, including Street View Text , IIIT5K, and ICDAR datasets. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of different components and show that our convolutional-based method achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance over prior works, even without the use of RNN.
Extractive multi-document text summarization based on graph independent sets

We propose a novel methodology for extractive, generic summarization of text documents. The Maximum Independent Set, which has not been used previously in any summarization study, has been utilized within the context of this study. In addition, a text processing tool, which we named KUSH, is suggested in order to preserve the semantic cohesion between sentences in the representation stage of introductory texts. Our anticipation was that the set of sentences corresponding to the nodes in the independent set should be excluded from the summary. Based on this anticipation, the nodes forming the Independent Set on the graphs are identified and removed from the graph. Thus, prior to quantification of the effect of the nodes on the global graph, a limitation is applied on the documents to be summarized. This limitation prevents repetition of word groups to be included in the summary. Performance of the proposed approach on the Document Understanding Conference (DUC-2002 and DUC-2004) datasets was calculated using ROUGE evaluation metrics. The developed model achieved a 0.38072 ROUGE performance value for 100-word summaries, 0.51954 for 200-word summaries, and 0.59208 for 400-word summaries. The values reported throughout the experimental processes of the study reveal the contribution of this innovative method.
Machine Learning Methods for Computer-Aided Breast Cancer Diagnosis Using Histopathology: A Narrative Review

Histopathology is a method used for breast cancer diagnosis. Machine learning (ML) methods have achieved success for supervised learning tasks in the medical domain. In this article, we investigate the impact of ML for the diagnosis of breast cancer using histopathology images of conventional photomicroscopy. Cancer diagnosis is the identification of images as cancer or noncancer, and this involves image preprocessing, feature extraction, classification, and performance analysis. In this article, different approaches to perform these necessary steps are reviewed. We find that most ML research for breast cancer diagnosis has been focused on deep learning. Based on inferences from the recent research activities, we discuss how ML methods can benefit conventional microscopy-based breast cancer diagnosis. Finally, we discuss the research gaps of ML approaches for the implementation in a real pathology environment and propose future research guidelines.
Electronic Health Record Sharing Scheme With Searchable Attribute-Based Encryption on Blockchain

With the digitization of traditional medical records, medical institutions encounter difficult problems, such as electronic health record storage and sharing. Patients and doctors spend considerable time querying the required data when accessing electronic health records, but the obtained data are not necessarily correct, and access is sometimes restricted. On this basis, this study proposes a medical data sharing scheme based on permissioned blockchains, which use ciphertext-based attribute encryption to ensure data confidentiality and access control of medical data. Under premise of ensuring patient identity privacy, a polynomial equation is used to achieve an arbitrary connection of keywords, and then blockchain technology is combined. In addition, the proposed scheme has keyword-indistinguishability against adaptive chosen keyword attacks under the random oracle model. Analysis shows that the scheme has high retrieval efficiency.
PurifyNet: A Robust Person Re-Identification Model With Noisy Labels

Person re-identification (Re-ID) has been widely studied by learning a discriminative feature representation with a set of well-annotated training data. Existing models usually assume that all the training samples are correctly annotated. However, label noise is unavoidable due to false annotations in large-scale industrial applications. Different from the label noise problem in image classification with abundant samples, the person Re-ID task with label noise usually has very limited annotated samples for each identity. In this paper, we propose a robust deep model, namely PurifyNet, to address this issue. PurifyNet is featured in two aspects: 1) it jointly refines the annotated labels and optimizes the neural networks by progressively adjusting the predicted logits, which reuses the wrong labels rather than simply filtering them; 2) it can simultaneously reduce the negative impact of noisy labels and pay more attention to hard samples with correct labels by developing a hard-aware instance re-weighting strategy. With limited annotated samples for each identity, we demonstrate that hard sample mining is crucial for label corrupted Re-ID task, while it is usually ignored in existing robust deep learning methods. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the robustness of PurifyNet over the competing methods under various settings. Meanwhile, we show that it consistently improves the unsupervised/video-based Re-ID methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/mangye16/ReID-Label-Noise.
Fast hybrid dimensionality reduction method for classification based on feature selection and grouped feature extraction

Dimensionality reduction is one basic and critical technology for data mining, especially in current “big data” era. As two different types of methods, feature selection and feature extraction each have their pros and cons. In this paper, we combine multi-strategy feature selection and grouped feature extraction and propose a novel fast hybrid dimension reduction method, incorporating their advantages of removing irrelevant and redundant information. Firstly, the intrinsic dimensionality of the data set is estimated by the maximum likelihood estimation method. Fisher Score and Information Gain based feature selection are used as multi-strategy methods to remove irrelevant features. With the redundancy among the selected features as clustering criterion, they are grouped into a certain amount of clusters. In every cluster, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based feature extraction is carried out to remove redundant information. Four classical classifiers and representation entropy are used to evaluate the classification performance and information loss of the reduced set. The runtime results of different methods show that the proposed hybrid method is consistently much faster than the other three in almost all of the sets used. Meanwhile, the proposed method shows competitive classification performance, which has no significant difference basically compared with the other methods. The proposed method reduces the dimensionality of the raw data fast and it has excellent efficiency and competitive classification performance compared with the contrastive methods.
Skeleton-based Chinese sign language recognition and generation for bidirectional communication between deaf and hearing people

Chinese sign language (CSL) is one of the most widely used sign language systems in the world. As such, the automatic recognition and generation of CSL is a key technology enabling bidirectional communication between deaf and hearing people. Most previous studies have focused solely on sign language recognition (SLR), which only addresses communication in a single direction. As such, there is a need for sign language generation (SLG) to enable communication in the other direction (i.e., from hearing people to deaf people). To achieve a smoother exchange of ideas between these two groups, we propose a skeleton-based CSL recognition and generation framework based on a recurrent neural network (RNN), to support bidirectional CSL communication. This process can also be extended to other sequence-to-sequence information interactions. The core of the proposed framework is a two-level probability generative model. Compared with previous techniques, this approach offers a more flexible approximate posterior distribution, which can produce skeletal sequences of varying styles that are recognizable to humans. In addition, the proposed generation method compensated for a lack of training data. A series of experiments in bidirectional communication were conducted on the large 500 CSL dataset. The proposed algorithm achieved high recognition accuracy for both real and synthetic data, with a reduced runtime. Furthermore, the generated data improved the performance of the discriminator. These results suggest the proposed bidirectional communication framework and generation algorithm to be an effective new approach to CSL recognition.
Institutions and the financial development–economic growth nexus in sub‐Saharan Africa

Abstract Using a sample splitting approach that does not impose an exogenous quadratic term, we examine the effect of financial development on economic growth in sub‐Saharan Africa by allowing the link to be mediated by the level of institutions. Our findings reveal a disproportionate growth‐enhancing effect of finance, given countries’ distinct level of institutional quality. More specifically, when the International Country Risk Guide‐based measure of institutions is used as the threshold variable, below the optimal level of institutional quality, financial development does not significantly promote economic growth. For countries with institutional quality above the threshold, higher finance is associated with growth. However, when institutions are measured by World Governance Indicators proxy, we find a significant effect of financial development, irrespective of whether a country is below or above the threshold. Interestingly, the growth‐enhancing effect of finance is greater for low‐institution countries relative to high‐institution countries. Thus, through its ability to provide some crucial roles, the well‐developed financial sector may also perform the function of sound institutions in influencing economic growth.
Robust visual tracking with correlation filters and metric learning

Discriminative correlation filters (DCFs) have been widely used in the visual tracking community in recent years. The DCFs-based trackers determine the target location through a response map generated by the correlation filters and determine the target scale by a fixed scale factor. However, the response map is vulnerable to noise interference and the fixed scale factor also cannot reflect the real scale change of the target, which can obviously reduce the tracking performance. In this paper, to solve the aforementioned drawbacks, we propose to learn a metric learning model in correlation filters framework for visual tracking (called CFML). This model can use a metric learning function to solve the target scale problem. In particular, we adopt a hard negative mining strategy to alleviate the influence of the noise on the response map, which can effectively improve the tracking accuracy. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CFML tracker achieves competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art trackers.
Light-OPU

Lightweight convolutional neural networks (LW-CNNs) such as MobileNet, ShuffleNet, SqueezeNet, etc., have emerged in the past few years for fast inference on embedded and mobile system. However, lightweight operations limit acceleration potential by GPU due to their memory bounded nature and their parallel mechanisms that are not friendly to SIMD. This calls for more specific accelerators. In this paper, we propose an FPGA-based overlay processor with a corresponding compilation flow for general LW-CNN accelerations, called Light-OPU. Software-hardware co-designed Light-OPU reformulates and decomposes lightweight operations for efficient acceleration. Moreover, our instruction architecture considers sharing of major computation engine between LW operations and conventional convolution operations. This improves the run-time resource efficiency and overall power efficiency. Finally, Light-OPU is software programmable, since loading of compiled codes and kernel weights completes switch of targeted network without FPGA reconfiguration. Our experiments on seven major LW-CNNs show that Light-OPU achieves 5.5x better latency and 3.0x higher power efficiency on average compared with edge GPU NVIDIA Jetson TX2. Furthermore, Light-OPU has 1.3x to 8.4x better power efficiency compared with previous customized FPGA accelerators. To the best of our knowledge, Light-OPU is the first in-depth study on FPGA-based general processor for LW-CNNs acceleration with high performance and power efficiency, which is evaluated using all major LW-CNNs including the newly released MobileNetV3.
Reciprocal Multi-Layer Subspace Learning for Multi-View Clustering

Multi-view clustering is a long-standing important research topic, however, remains challenging when handling high-dimensional data and simultaneously exploring the consistency and complementarity of different views. In this work, we present a novel Reciprocal Multi-layer Subspace Learning (RMSL) algorithm for multi-view clustering, which is composed of two main components: Hierarchical Self-Representative Layers (HSRL), and Backward Encoding Networks (BEN). Specifically, HSRL constructs reciprocal multi-layer subspace representations linked with a latent representation to hierarchically recover the underlying low-dimensional subspaces in which the high-dimensional data lie; BEN explores complex relationships among different views and implicitly enforces the subspaces of all views to be consistent with each other and more separable. The latent representation flexibly encodes complementary information from multiple views and depicts data more comprehensively. Our model can be efficiently optimized by an alternating optimization scheme. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show the superiority of RMSL over other state-of-the-art clustering methods.
An energy‐efficient task‐scheduling algorithm based on a multi‐criteria decision‐making method in cloud computing

Summary The massive growth of cloud computing has led to huge amounts of energy consumption and carbon emissions by a large number of servers. One of the major aspects of cloud computing is its scheduling of many task requests submitted by users. Minimizing energy consumption while ensuring the user's QoS preferences is very important to achieving profit maximization for the cloud service providers and ensuring the user's service level agreement (SLA). Therefore, in addition to implementing user's tasks, cloud data centers should meet the different criteria in applying the cloud resources by considering the multiple requirements of different users. Mapping of user requests to cloud resources for processing in a distributed environment is a well‐known NP‐hard problem. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes an energy‐efficient task‐scheduling algorithm based on best‐worst (BWM) and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methodology. The main objective of this paper is to determine which cloud scheduling solution is more important to select. First, a decision‐making group identify the evaluation criteria. After that, a BWM process is applied to assign the importance weights for each criterion, because the selected criteria have varied importance. Then, TOPSIS uses these weighted criteria as inputs to evaluate and measure the performance of each alternative. The performance of the proposed and existing algorithms is evaluated using several benchmarks in the CloudSim toolkit and statistical testing through ANOVA, where the evaluation metrics include the makespan, energy consumption, and resource utilization.
CNN-DMRI: A Convolutional Neural Network for Denoising of Magnetic Resonance Images

Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) are often contaminated by rician noise at the acquisition time. This type of noise typically deteriorates the performance of disease diagnosis by a human observer or an automated system. Thus, it is necessary to remove the rician noise from MRI scans as a preprocessing step. In this letter, we propose a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), viz. CNN-DMRI, for denoising of MRI scans. The network uses a set of convolutions to separate the image features from the noise. The network also employs encoder-decoder structure for preserving the prominent features of the image while ignoring unnecessary ones. The training of the network is carried out in an end-to-end way by utilizing residual learning scheme. The performance of the proposed CNN has been tested qualitatively and quantitatively on one simulated and four real MRI datasets. Extensive experimental findings suggest that the proposed network can denoise MRI images effectively without losing crucial image details.