Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Correlation analysis and <scp>MLP</scp> / <scp>CMLP</scp> for optimum variables to predict orientation and tilt angles in intelligent solar tracking systems

Different solar tracking variables have been employed to build intelligent solar tracking systems without considering the dominant and optimum ones. Thus, several low performance intelligent solar tracking systems have been designed and implemented due to the inappropriate combination of solar tracking variables and intelligent predictors to drive the solar trackers. This research aims to investigate and evaluate the most effective and dominant variables on dual- and single-axis solar trackers and to find the appropriate combination of solar variables and intelligent predictors. The optimum variables will be found by using correlation results between different variables and both orientation and tilt angles. Then, to use the selected variables to develop different intelligent solar trackers. The results revealed that month, day, and time are the most effective variables for horizontal single-axis and dual-axis solar tracking systems. Using these variables in cascade multilayer perceptron (CMLP) and multilayer perceptron (MLP) produced high performance. These predictors could predict both orientation and tilt angles efficiently. It is found that day variable is very effective to increase the performance of solar trackers although day variable is neither correlated nor significant with both orientation and tilt angles. Linear regression predicted less than 70% of the given data in most cases, whereas nonlinear models could predict the optimum orientation and tilt angles. In single-axis tracker, month, day, and time variables achieved prediction rates of 96.85% and 96.83% for three hidden layers of MLP and CMLP, respectively, whereas the MSE are 0.0025 and 0.0008, respectively. In dual-axis solar tracker, MLP and CMLP predicted 96.68% and 97.98% respectively, with MSE of 0.0007 for both.
How to Cope with Dark Participation: Moderation Practices in German Newsrooms

Comments in designated sections of newspaper websites and on social media platforms are the most prominent form of user participation in journalism, offering the opportunity to connect to the audience. Yet, rising levels of dark participation in the form of hate speech, disinformation, and strategic attempts to influence public opinion, provide new challenges for media organizations and require moderators to ensure a minimum of discursive quality. Newsrooms employ a variety of moderation strategies. Based on computer assisted telephone interviews with German journalists working for online newspapers (N = 274), we identified explanatory factors for the implementation of discursive-interactive and authoritative-interactive moderation practices. The results suggest that left-leaning media tend to engage more in authoritative-interactive as well as discursive-interactive moderation than right-leaning media. If media organizations establish a participative communicative setting, moderators engage more with the audience although the prevalence of dark participation is higher.
Efficient deep discriminant embedding: Application to face beauty prediction and classification

Inspired by deep learning architectures, we introduce a multi-layer local discriminant embedding algorithm that integrates feature selection as a main step to capture the most relevant and discriminant features of an input face image or face descriptor. The proposed framework allows to transform any linear method to a deep variant via a cascaded feature extraction and selection architecture able to convert weak and noisy descriptors to strong ones. As a case study, the local discriminant embedding (LDE) projection is adopted as a linear feature extraction method. The resulting framework can be considered as an efficient deep discriminant embedding technique. To validate this framework, we have considered two different computer vision problems: face beauty prediction which involves both classification and regression tasks, and face recognition which is a classical classification problem. Experiments conducted on different public benchmark databases show that this approach enhances the performance of the LDE algorithm and provides a discriminating strategy to solve the dimensionality reduction problem. For face beauty regression, our proposed framework achieved on average an improvement of about 5% and 7% with respect to two other configurations where only VGG-face and VGG-face followed by LDE have been considered. For face beauty classification, the proposed algorithm outperformed many classical manifold learning techniques reaching in some databases improvements of about 10%.
We need to talk about digital contact tracing

column We need to talk about digital contact tracing Share on Author: Ali Alkhatib University of San Francisco University of San FranciscoView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 27Issue 4July - August 2020 pp 84–89https://doi.org/10.1145/3404205Online:09 July 2020Publication History 8citation1,156DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations8Total Downloads1,156Last 12 Months907Last 6 weeks79 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access
Learning to Reliably Deliver Streaming Data with Apache Kafka

The rise of streaming data processing is driven by mass deployment of sensors, the increasing popularity of mobile devices, and the rapid growth of online financial trading. Apache Kafka is often used as a real-time messaging system for many stream processors. However, efficiently running Kafka as a reliable data source is challenging, especially in the case of real-time processing with unstable network connection. We find that changing configuration parameters can significantly impact the guarantee of message delivery in Kafka. Therefore the key to solving the above problem is to predict the reliability of Kafka given various configurations and network conditions. We define two reliability metrics to be predicted, the probability of message loss and the probability of message duplication. Artificial neural networks (ANN) are applied in our prediction model and we select some key parameters, as well as network metrics as the features. To collect sufficient training data for our model we build a Kafka testbed based on Docker containers. With the neural network model we can predict Kafka's reliability for different application scenarios given various network environments. Combining with other metrics that a streaming application user may care for, a weighted key performance indicator (KPI) of Kafka is proposed for selecting proper configuration parameters. In the experiments we propose a rough dynamic configuration scheme, which significantly improves the reliability while guaranteeing message timeliness.
AdaDB: An adaptive gradient method with data-dependent bound

Adaptive gradient learning methods such as Adam, RMSProp, and AdaGrad play an essential role in training a very deep neural network. The learning rates of these optimizers are adaptively changed to accelerate the training process. And the convergence speed is much faster than SGD in many deep learning tasks such as classification and NLP tasks. However, recent works have pointed out that adaptive learning methods can not converge to a critical point under some situations and suffer poor generalization in many deep learning tasks. In our study, we propose AdaDB, an adaptive learning optimizer with data-dependent bound on the learning rate. Every element in the learning rate vector is constrained between a dynamic upper bound and a constant lower bound. And the upper bound is dependent on the data. We also give a theoretical proof of the convergence of AdaDB in the non-convex setting. Our experiments show that AdaDB is capable of eliminating the generalization gap between Adam and SGD. Experiments also reveal the convergence speed of AdaDB is much faster than Adam.
Efficient Mining of Outlying Sequence Patterns for Analyzing Outlierness of Sequence Data

Recently, a lot of research work has been proposed in different domains to detect outliers and analyze the outlierness of outliers for relational data. However, while sequence data is ubiquitous in real life, analyzing the outlierness for sequence data has not received enough attention. In this article, we study the problem of mining outlying sequence patterns in sequence data addressing the question: given a query sequence s in a sequence dataset D , the objective is to discover sequence patterns that will indicate the most unusualness (i.e., outlierness) of s compared against other sequences. Technically, we use the rank defined by the average probabilistic strength ( aps ) of a sequence pattern in a sequence to measure the outlierness of the sequence. Then a minimal sequence pattern where the query sequence is ranked the highest is defined as an outlying sequence pattern. To address the above problem, we present OSPMiner, a heuristic method that computes aps by incorporating several pruning techniques. Our empirical study using both real and synthetic data demonstrates that OSPMiner is effective and efficient.
Hyperbox-based machine learning algorithms: a comprehensive survey

With the rapid development of digital information, the data volume generated by humans and machines is growing exponentially. Along with this trend, machine learning algorithms have been formed and evolved continuously to discover new information and knowledge from different data sources. Learning algorithms using hyperboxes as fundamental representational and building blocks are a branch of machine learning methods. These algorithms have enormous potential for high scalability and online adaptation of predictors built using hyperbox data representations to the dynamically changing environments and streaming data. This paper aims to give a comprehensive survey of the literature on hyperbox-based machine learning models. In general, according to the architecture and characteristic features of the resulting models, the existing hyperbox-based learning algorithms may be grouped into three major categories: fuzzy min–max neural networks, hyperbox-based hybrid models and other algorithms based on hyperbox representations. Within each of these groups, this paper shows a brief description of the structure of models, associated learning algorithms and an analysis of their advantages and drawbacks. Main applications of these hyperbox-based models to the real-world problems are also described in this paper. Finally, we discuss some open problems and identify potential future research directions in this field.
On Diversity in Image Captioning: Metrics and Methods

Diversity is one of the most important properties in image captioning, as it reflects various expressions of important concepts presented in an image. However, the most popular metrics cannot well evaluate the diversity of multiple captions. In this paper, we first propose a metric to measure the diversity of a set of captions, which is derived from latent semantic analysis (LSA), and then kernelize LSA using CIDEr (R. Vedantam et al., 2015) similarity. Compared with mBLEU (R. Shetty et al., 2017), our proposed diversity metrics show a relatively strong correlation to human evaluation. We conduct extensive experiments, finding there is a large gap between the performance of the current state-of-the-art models and human annotations considering both diversity and accuracy; the models that aim to generate captions with higher CIDEr scores normally obtain lower diversity scores, which generally learn to describe images using common words. To bridge this "diversity" gap, we consider several methods for training caption models to generate diverse captions. First, we show that balancing the cross-entropy loss and CIDEr reward in reinforcement learning during training can effectively control the tradeoff between diversity and accuracy of the generated captions. Second, we develop approaches that directly optimize our diversity metric and CIDEr score using reinforcement learning. These proposed approaches using reinforcement learning (RL) can be unified into a self-critical (S. J. Rennie et al., 2017) framework with new RL baselines. Third, we combine accuracy and diversity into a single measure using an ensemble matrix, and then maximize the determinant of the ensemble matrix via reinforcement learning to boost diversity and accuracy, which outperforms its counterparts on the oracle test. Finally, inspired by determinantal point processes (DPP), we develop a DPP selection algorithm to select a subset of captions from a large number of candidate captions. The experimental results show that maximizing the determinant of the ensemble matrix outperforms other methods considerably improving diversity and accuracy.
PERM: Neural Adaptive Video Streaming with Multi-path Transmission

The multi-path transmission techniques enable multiple paths to maximize resource usage and increase throughput in transmission, which have been installed over mobile devices in recent years. For video streaming applications, compared to the single-path transmission, the multi-path techniques can establish multiple subflows simultaneously to extend the available bandwidth for streaming high-quality videos in mobile devices. Existing adaptive video streaming systems have difficulty in harnessing multi-path scheduling and balancing the tradeoff between the quality of experience (QoE) and quality of service (QoS) concerns. In this paper, we propose an actor-critic network based on Periodical Experience Replay for Multi-path video streaming (PERM). Specifically, PERM employs two actor modules and a critic module: the two actor modules respectively assign the path usage of each subflow and select bitrates for the next chunk of the video, while the critic module predicts the overall objectives. We conduct trace-driven emulation and real-world testbed experiment to examine the performance of PERM, and results show that PERM outperforms state-of-the-art multi-path and single path streaming systems, with an improvement of 10%- 15% on the QoE and QoS metrics.
Decentralising Finance using Decentralised Blockchain Oracles

The recent spread of COVID-19, stressed economies and government pumping money into the market has once again ignited the discussion on the need to have decentralised economies, the role of regulatory authorities and if bitcoin represents a true store of value. In this paper, we identify the need to alternate financial structure, discuss how blockchain and cryptocurrencies play a very important role in achieving it. Blockchain applications are heavily dependent on oracles for their interaction with outside world, we have discussed here the functioning of oracles and then finally presented a broad architecture that can be used to implement a majority of financial instruments on blockchain.
Sequence Mining and Prediction-Based Healthcare Fraud Detection Methodology

This article presents a novel methodology to detect insurance claim related frauds in the healthcare system using concepts of sequence mining and sequence prediction. Fraud detection in healthcare is a non-trivial task due to the heterogeneous nature of healthcare records. Fraudsters behave as normal patients and with the passage of time keep on changing their way of planting frauds; hence, there is a need to develop fraud detection models. The sequence generation is not the part of previous researches which mostly focus on amount based analysis or medication versus diseases sequential analysis. The proposed methodology is able to generate sequences of services availed or prescribed by each specialty and analyse via two cascaded checks for the detection of insurance claim related frauds. The methodology addresses these challenges and self learns from historical medical records. It is based on two modules namely “Sequence rule engine and Prediction based engine”. The sequence rule engine generates frequent sequences and probabilities of rare sequences for each specialty of the hospital. The comparison of such sequences with the actual patient sequences leads to the identification of anomalies as both sequences are not compliant to the sequences of the rule engine. The system performs further in detail analysis on all non-compliant sequences in the prediction based engine. The proposed methodology is validated by generating patient sequences from last five years transactional data of a local hospital and identifies patterns of service procedures administered to patients using Prefixspan algorithm and Compact prediction tree. Various experiments have been performed to validate the applicability of the developed methodology and the results demonstrate that the methodology is pertinent to detect healthcare frauds and provides on average 85% of accuracy. Thus can help in preventing fraudulent claims and provides better insight into how to improve patient management and treatment procedures.
Incremental frequent itemsets mining based on frequent pattern tree and multi-scale

Multi-scale can reveal the structure and hierarchical characteristics of the data objects to reflect their essence from different perspectives and levels. An incremental frequent itemsets mining algorithm based on frequent pattern tree is proposed by incorporating multi-scale theory(simplified to FP-tree and Multi-Scale based Incremental Mining, FPMSIM). FPMSIM uses the classic FP-Growth to construct a pattern tree and generate frequent itemsets for more fine-grained dataset which is called benchmark scale dataset. The newly added dataset is also independently mined as a benchmark scale dataset. The ultimate frequent itemsets for the target scales are derived by means of the scale-up process. In which, some unknown itemsets counts need to be estimated by comparing the similarity among benchmark scale datasets. In this way, severe dataset rescanning and tree structure adjustment overhead are avoided during the maintenance process. The experimental results show that although the support estimation error will lead to incomplete frequent itemsets mining, it can be offset by the performance gains in the mining efficiency and I/O cost, especially in the field of big data.
Earthquake Probability Assessment for the Indian Subcontinent Using Deep Learning

Earthquake prediction is a popular topic among earth scientists; however, this task is challenging and exhibits uncertainty therefore, probability assessment is indispensable in the current period. During the last decades, the volume of seismic data has increased exponentially, adding scalability issues to probability assessment models. Several machine learning methods, such as deep learning, have been applied to large-scale images, video, and text processing; however, they have been rarely utilized in earthquake probability assessment. Therefore, the present research leveraged advances in deep learning techniques to generate scalable earthquake probability mapping. To achieve this objective, this research used a convolutional neural network (CNN). Nine indicators, namely, proximity to faults, fault density, lithology with an amplification factor value, slope angle, elevation, magnitude density, epicenter density, distance from the epicenter, and peak ground acceleration (PGA) density, served as inputs. Meanwhile, 0 and 1 were used as outputs corresponding to non-earthquake and earthquake parameters, respectively. The proposed classification model was tested at the country level on datasets gathered to update the probability map for the Indian subcontinent using statistical measures, such as overall accuracy (OA), F1 score, recall, and precision. The OA values of the model based on the training and testing datasets were 96% and 92%, respectively. The proposed model also achieved precision, recall, and F1 score values of 0.88, 0.99, and 0.93, respectively, for the positive (earthquake) class based on the testing dataset. The model predicted two classes and observed very-high (712,375 km2) and high probability (591,240.5 km2) areas consisting of 19.8% and 16.43% of the abovementioned zones, respectively. Results indicated that the proposed model is superior to the traditional methods for earthquake probability assessment in terms of accuracy. Aside from facilitating the prediction of the pixel values for probability assessment, the proposed model can also help urban-planners and disaster managers make appropriate decisions regarding future plans and earthquake management.
Data-Driven Bandwidth Prediction Models and Automated Model Selection for Low Latency

Today's HTTP adaptive streaming solutions use a variety of algorithms to measure the available network bandwidth and predict its future values. Bandwidth prediction, which is already a difficult task, must be more accurate when lower latency is desired due to the shorter time available to react to bandwidth changes, and when mobile networks are involved due to their inherently more frequent and potentially larger bandwidth fluctuations. Any inaccuracy in bandwidth prediction results in flawed adaptation decisions, which will in turn translate into a diminished viewer experience. We propose an Automated Model for Prediction (AMP) that encompasses techniques for bandwidth prediction and model auto-selection specifically designed for low-latency live steaming with chunked transfer encoding. We first study statistical and computational intelligence techniques to implement a suite of bandwidth prediction models that can work accurately under a broad range of network conditions, and second, we introduce an automated prediction model selection method. We confirm the effectiveness of our solution through trace-driven live streaming experiments.
How effective are social engineering interventions? A meta-analysis

Purpose Social engineering is a prominent aspect of online crime. Various interventions have been developed to reduce the success of this type of attacks. This paper aims to investigate if interventions can help to decrease the vulnerability to social engineering attacks. If they help, the authors investigate which forms of interventions and specific elements constitute success. Design/methodology/approach The authors selected studies which had an experimental design and rigorously tested at least one intervention that aimed to reduce the vulnerability to social engineering. The studies were primarily identified from querying the Scopus database. The authors identified 19 studies which lead to the identification of 37 effect sizes, based on a total sample of N = 23,146 subjects. The available training, intervention materials and effect sizes were analysed. The authors collected information on the context of the intervention, the characteristics of the intervention and the characteristics of the research methodology. All analyses were performed using random-effects models, and heterogeneity was quantified. Findings The authors find substantial differences in effect size for the different interventions. Some interventions are highly effective; others have no effect at all. Highly intensive interventions are more effective than those that are low on intensity. Furthermore, interventions with a narrow focus are more effective than those with a broad focus. Practical implications The results of this study show differences in effect for different elements of interventions. This allows practitioners to review their awareness campaigns and tailor them to increase their success. Originality/value The authors believe that this is the first study that compares the impact of social engineering interventions systematically.