Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Edge computing-based person detection system for top view surveillance: Using CenterNet with transfer learning

Edge computing significantly expands the range of information technology in smart video surveillance applications in the era of intelligent and connected cities. Edge devices, including Internet of Things-based cameras and sensors, produce a large amount of data and have frequently become prominent components for various public surveillance and monitoring applications. The data generated by these smart devices are in the form of videos and images that need to be processed and analyzed in real-time with substantial computation resources. These developed techniques still require large computation resources for real-time surveillance applications. In this regard, Edge computing plays a promising role in order to provide high computation and low-latency requirements. With these motivations, in this work, a real-time top view-based person detection system is presented. We utilize a one-stage deep learning-based object detection algorithm, i.e., CenterNet, for person detection. The model detects the human as a single point, also referred to as its bounding box’s center point. The model does a key-point calculation to obtain the center point and regresses all other information regarding the target object’s features, size, location, and orientation. Training and testing of the model are performed on a top view data set. The detection results are also compared with conventional detection methods using the same data set. The overall detection accuracy of the model is 95%.
EHRChain: A Blockchain-Based EHR System Using Attribute-Based and Homomorphic Cryptosystem

There is an urgent need to solve the problems of secure storage, reliable sharing, access control and privacy protection in medical industry. In this paper, we propose EHRChain, a blockchain-based EHR system using attribute-based and homomorphic cryptosystem to solve the above problems. First, we design a medical record storage scheme to realize secure high capacity medical data storage and reliable sharing based on blockchain technology and IPFS. Second, we propose an improved cryptographic primitive called SHDPCPC-CP-ABE. Our SHDPCPC-CP-ABE realizes the functions of semi-policy hiding and dynamic permission changing based on partial ciphertext simultaneously. Furthermore, our program achieves the neutrality of the subject of judicial identification in medical disputes and fine-grained access control of medical data. Third, our system applies an additive homomorphic cryptosystem, Paillier cryptosystem with optimized parameters on patients’ privacy protection during the process of the medical insurance claim. After analysis and experiment, we have proved that the SHDPCPC-CP-ABE is indistinguishable under chosen plaintext attack and takes one third of the time of CP-ABE when changing access policy. Our system has higher performance than other EHR systems based on blockchain.
MixSpeech: Data Augmentation for Low-Resource Automatic Speech Recognition

In this paper, we propose MixSpeech, a simple yet effective data augmentation method based on mixup for automatic speech recognition (ASR). MixSpeech trains an ASR model by taking a weighted combination of two different speech features (e.g., mel-spectrograms or MFCC) as the input, and recognizing both text sequences, where the two recognition losses use the same combination weight. We apply MixSpeech on two popular end-to-end speech recognition models including LAS (Listen, Attend and Spell) and Transformer, and conduct experiments on several low-resource datasets including TIMIT, WSJ, and HKUST. Experimental results show that MixSpeech achieves better accuracy than the baseline models without data augmentation, and outperforms a strong data augmentation method SpecAugment on these recognition tasks. Specifically, MixSpeech outperforms SpecAugment with a relative PER improvement of 10.6% on TIMIT dataset, and achieves a strong WER of 4.7% on WSJ dataset.
Bad Breakdowns, Useful Seams, and Face Slapping: Analysis of VR Fails on YouTube

Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly used in complex social and physical settings outside of the lab. However, not much is known about how these settings influence use, nor how to design for them. We analyse 233 YouTube videos of VR Fails to: (1) understand when breakdowns occur, and (2) reveal how the seams between VR use and the social and physical setting emerge. The videos show a variety of fails, including users flailing, colliding with surroundings, and hitting spectators. They also suggest causes of the fails, including fear, sensorimotor mismatches, and spectator participation. We use the videos as inspiration to generate design ideas. For example, we discuss more flexible boundaries between the real and virtual world, ways of involving spectators, and interaction designs to help overcome fear. Based on the findings, we further discuss the ‘moment of breakdown’ as an opportunity for designing engaging and enhanced VR experiences.
An Empirical Study on Software Defect Prediction Using CodeBERT Model

Deep learning-based software defect prediction has been popular these days. Recently, the publishing of the CodeBERT model has made it possible to perform many software engineering tasks. We propose various CodeBERT models targeting software defect prediction, including CodeBERT-NT, CodeBERT-PS, CodeBERT-PK, and CodeBERT-PT. We perform empirical studies using such models in cross-version and cross-project software defect prediction to investigate if using a neural language model like CodeBERT could improve prediction performance. We also investigate the effects of different prediction patterns in software defect prediction using CodeBERT models. The empirical results are further discussed.
Efficient Implementation of PRESENT and GIFT on Quantum Computers

Grover search algorithm is the most representative quantum attack method that threatens the security of symmetric key cryptography. If the Grover search algorithm is applied to symmetric key cryptography, the security level of target symmetric key cryptography can be lowered from n-bit to n2-bit. When applying Grover’s search algorithm to the block cipher that is the target of potential quantum attacks, the target block cipher must be implemented as quantum circuits. Starting with the AES block cipher, a number of works have been conducted to optimize and implement target block ciphers into quantum circuits. Recently, many studies have been published to implement lightweight block ciphers as quantum circuits. In this paper, we present optimal quantum circuit designs of symmetric key cryptography, including PRESENT and GIFT block ciphers. The proposed method optimized PRESENT and GIFT block ciphers by minimizing qubits, quantum gates, and circuit depth. We compare proposed PRESENT and GIFT quantum circuits with other results of lightweight block cipher implementations in quantum circuits. Finally, quantum resources of PRESENT and GIFT block ciphers required for the oracle of the Grover search algorithm were estimated.
Adopting automated whitelist approach for detecting phishing attacks

Phishing is considered a great scourge in cyberspace. Presently, there are two major challenges known with the existing anti-phishing solutions. Low detection rate and lack of quick access time in a real-time environment. However, it has been established that blacklist solution methods offer quick and immediate access time but with a low detection rate. This research paper presents an automated white-list approach for detecting phishing attacks. The white-list is determined by carrying out a detailed analysis between the visual link and the actual link. The similarities of the known trusted site are calculated by juxtaposing the domain name with the contents of the whitelist and later match it with the IP address before a decision is made and further analyzing the actual link and the visual link by calculating the similarities of the known trusted site. The technique then takes a final decision on the extracted information from the hyperlink, which can also be obtained from the web address provided by the user. The experiments carried out provided a very high level of accuracy, specifically, when the dataset was relatively at the lowest level. Six different datasets were used to perform the experiments. The average accuracy obtained after the six experiments was 96.17% and the approach detects phishing sites with a 95.0% true positive rate. It was observed that the level of accuracy varies from one dataset to another. This result shows that the proposed method performs better than similar approaches benchmarked with. The efficiency of the approach was further established through its computation time, memory, bandwidth as well as other computational resources that were utilized with the minimum requirements when compared with other approaches. This solution has provided immense benefits over the existing solutions by reducing the memory requirements and computational complexity, among other benefits. It has also shown that the proposed method can provide more robust detection performances when compared to other techniques.
Spectral embedding network for attributed graph clustering

Attributed graph clustering aims to discover node groups by utilizing both graph structure and node features. Recent studies mostly adopt graph neural networks to learn node embeddings, then apply traditional clustering methods to obtain clusters. However, they usually suffer from the following issues: (1) they adopt original graph structure which is unfavorable for clustering due to its noise and sparsity problems; (2) they mainly utilize non-clustering driven losses that cannot well capture the global cluster structure, thus the learned embeddings are not sufficient for the downstream clustering task. In this paper, we propose a spectral embedding network for attributed graph clustering (SENet), which improves graph structure by leveraging the information of shared neighbors, and learns node embeddings with the help of a spectral clustering loss. By combining the original graph structure and shared neighbor based similarity, both the first-order and second-order proximities are encoded into the improved graph structure, thus alleviating the noise and sparsity issues. To make the spectral loss well adapt to attributed graphs, we integrate both structure and feature information into kernel matrix via a higher-order graph convolution. Experiments on benchmark attributed graphs show that SENet achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods.
Digital Twin-based Anomaly Detection in Cyber-physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are susceptible to various anomalies during their operations. Thus, it is important to detect such anomalies. Detecting such anomalies is challenging since it is uncertain when and where anomalies can happen. To this end, we present a novel approach called Anomaly deTection with digiTAl twIN (ATTAIN), which continuously and automatically builds a digital twin with live data obtained from a CPS for anomaly detection. ATTAIN builds a Timed Automaton Machine (TAM) as the digital representation of the CPS, and implements a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to detect anomalies. GAN uses a GCN-LSTM-based module as a generator, which can capture temporal and spatial characteristics of the input data and learn to produce realistic unlabeled adversarial samples. TAM labels these adversarial samples, which are then fed into a discriminator along with real labeled samples. After training, the discriminator is capable of distinguishing anomalous data from normal data with a high F1 score. To evaluate our approach, we used three publicly available datasets collected from three CPS testbeds. Evaluation results show that ATTAIN improved the performance of two state-of-art anomaly detection methods by 2.413%, 8.487%, and 5.438% on average on the three datasets, respectively. Moreover, ATTAIN achieved on average 8.39% increase in the anomaly detection capability with digital twins as compared with an approach of not using digital twins.
Trajectory planning of load transportation with multi-quadrotors based on reinforcement learning algorithm

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are playing more and more vital roles in transportation. In this work, a trajectory planning method based on a value-function approximation algorithm is proposed to address the problem of cable-suspended load transportation using three quadrotors. The purpose of trajectory planning is to reach the target position as soon as possible without the load swinging. In the proposed algorithm, the value function is approximated by parameter vector and problem-specific feature vector. The parameter vector is updated by batch method, and then the greedy strategy is used to generate the desired trajectory. Finally, the desired trajectory is passed to the quad-rotor controller for trajectory tracking. The simulation results show that the trained parameters can fit the value function. The suspended load can be transported smoothly from starting location to the different target locations. The value function in the greedy strategy finally converges to the maximum value, which proves the effectiveness and convergence of the proposed algorithm.
Neural network quantization in federated learning at the edge

The massive amount of data collected in the Internet of Things (IoT) asks for effective, intelligent analytics. A recent trend supporting the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions in IoT domains is to move the computation closer to the data, i.e., from cloud-based services to edge devices. Federated learning (FL) is the primary approach adopted in this scenario to train AI-based solutions. In this work, we investigate the introduction of quantization techniques in FL to improve the efficiency of data exchange between edge servers and a cloud node. We focus on learning recurrent neural network models fed by edge data producers using the most widely adopted neural networks for time-series prediction. Experiments on public datasets show that the proposed quantization techniques in FL reduces up to 19× the volume of data exchanged between each edge server and a cloud node, with a minimal impact of around 5% on the test loss of the final model.
Global2Local: Efficient Structure Search for Video Action Segmentation

Temporal receptive fields of models play an important role in action segmentation. Large receptive fields facilitate the long-term relations among video clips while small receptive fields help capture the local details. Existing methods construct models with hand-designed receptive fields in layers. Can we effectively search for receptive field combinations to replace hand-designed patterns? To answer this question, we propose to find better receptive field combinations through a global-to-local search scheme. Our search scheme exploits both global search to find the coarse combinations and local search to get the refined receptive field combination patterns further. The global search finds possible coarse combinations other than human-designed patterns. On top of the global search, we propose an expectation guided iterative local search scheme to refine combinations effectively. Our global-to-local search can be plugged into existing action segmentation methods to achieve state-of-the-art performance. The source code is publicly available on http://mmcheng.net/g2lsearch.
Anti-aliasing Semantic Reconstruction for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation

Encouraging progress in few-shot semantic segmentation has been made by leveraging features learned upon base classes with sufficient training data to represent novel classes with few-shot examples. However, this feature sharing mechanism inevitably causes semantic aliasing between novel classes when they have similar compositions of semantic concepts. In this paper, we reformulate few-shot segmentation as a semantic reconstruction problem, and convert base class features into a series of basis vectors which span a class-level semantic space for novel class reconstruction. By introducing contrastive loss, we maximize the orthogonality of basis vectors while minimizing semantic aliasing between classes. Within the reconstructed representation space, we further suppress interference from other classes by projecting query features to the support vector for precise semantic activation. Our proposed approach, referred to as anti-aliasing semantic reconstruction (ASR), provides a systematic yet interpretable solution for few-shot learning problems. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets show that ASR achieves strong results compared with the prior works. Code will be released at github.com/Bibkiller/ASR.
Multi-view Depth Estimation using Epipolar Spatio-Temporal Networks

We present a novel method for multi-view depth estimation from a single video, which is a critical task in various applications, such as perception, reconstruction and robot navigation. Although previous learning-based methods have demonstrated compelling results, most works estimate depth maps of individual video frames independently, without taking into consideration the strong geometric and temporal coherence among the frames. Moreover, current state-of-the-art (SOTA) models mostly adopt a fully 3D convolution network for cost regularization and therefore require high computational cost, thus limiting their deployment in real-world applications. Our method achieves temporally coherent depth estimation results by using a novel Epipolar Spatio-Temporal (EST) transformer to explicitly associate geometric and temporal correlation with multiple estimated depth maps. Furthermore, to reduce the computational cost, inspired by recent Mixture-of-Experts models, we design a compact hybrid network consisting of a 2D context-aware network and a 3D matching network which learn 2D context information and 3D disparity cues separately. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves higher accuracy in depth estimation and significant speedup than the SOTA methods.
Group-based privacy preservation techniques for process mining

Process mining techniques help to improve processes using event data. Such data are widely available in information systems. However, they often contain highly sensitive information. For example, healthcare information systems record event data that can be utilized by process mining techniques to improve the treatment process, reduce patient's waiting times, improve resource productivity, etc. However, the recorded event data include highly sensitive information related to treatment activities. Responsible process mining should provide insights about the underlying processes, yet, at the same time, it should not reveal sensitive information. In this paper, we discuss the challenges regarding directly applying existing well-known group-based privacy preservation techniques, e.g., k-anonymity, l-diversity, etc, to event data. We provide formal definitions of attack models and introduce an effective group-based privacy preservation technique for process mining. Our technique covers the main perspectives of process mining including control-flow, time, case, and organizational perspectives. The proposed technique provides interpretable and adjustable parameters to handle different privacy aspects. We employ real-life event data and evaluate both data utility and result utility to show the effectiveness of the privacy preservation technique. We also compare this approach with other group-based approaches for privacy-preserving event data publishing.
Multivariate Uncertainty in Deep Learning

Deep learning has the potential to dramatically impact navigation and tracking state estimation problems critical to autonomous vehicles and robotics. Measurement uncertainties in state estimation systems based on Kalman and other Bayes filters are typically assumed to be a fixed covariance matrix. This assumption is risky, particularly for "black box" deep learning models, in which uncertainty can vary dramatically and unexpectedly. Accurate quantification of multivariate uncertainty will allow for the full potential of deep learning to be used more safely and reliably in these applications. We show how to model multivariate uncertainty for regression problems with neural networks, incorporating both aleatoric and epistemic sources of heteroscedastic uncertainty. We train a deep uncertainty covariance matrix model in two ways: directly using a multivariate Gaussian density loss function and indirectly using end-to-end training through a Kalman filter. We experimentally show in a visual tracking problem the large impact that accurate multivariate uncertainty quantification can have on the Kalman filter performance for both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluation data. We additionally show, in a challenging visual odometry problem, how end-to-end filter training can allow uncertainty predictions to compensate for filter weaknesses.
FedRS

Federated Learning (FL) aims to generate a global shared model via collaborating decentralized clients with privacy considerations. Unlike standard distributed optimization, FL takes multiple optimization steps on local clients and then aggregates the model updates via a parameter server. Although this significantly reduces communication costs, the non-iid property across heterogeneous devices could make the local update diverge a lot, posing a fundamental challenge to aggregation. In this paper, we focus on a special kind of non-iid scene, i.e., label distribution skew, where each client can only access a partial set of the whole class set. Considering top layers of neural networks are more task-specific, we advocate that the last classification layer is more vulnerable to the shift of label distribution. Hence, we in-depth study the classifier layer and point out that the standard softmax will encounter several problems caused by missing classes. As an alternative, we propose "Restricted Softmax" to limit the update of missing classes' weights during the local procedure. Our proposed FedRS is very easy to implement with only a few lines of code. We investigate our methods on both public datasets and a real-world service awareness application. Abundant experimental results verify the superiorities of our methods.
Optimal routing, aborting and hitting strategies of UAVs executing hitting the targets considering the defense range of targets

This paper is an attempt to investigate optimal routing, aborting and hitting strategies of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) executing hitting tasks. Several factors such as time window and a certain circular defense range of each target, the optimal bomb and fuel loads are considered in the UAVs routing plan in order to better assign targets to each UAV and determine the hitting order. It is assumed that UAVs may be attacked by random shocks when they are within the target's defense range, so each UAV can choose to abort its task according to the number of targets that the UAV has hit and the number of shocks that UAV has suffered in order to reduce the probability of UAVs being destroyed. In addition, we try to accomplish two objectives simultaneously with meeting the fuel requirements and increasing the probability of target being destroyed by optimizing the load of fuel and bomb. The tabu search algorithm is adopted in the optimization of UAV routing, aborting and hitting strategies, and numerical experiments are presented to illustrate the performance of the algorithm.