Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Chaotic diffusion‐limited aggregation enhanced grey wolf optimizer: Insights, analysis, binarization, and feature selection

Grey wolf optimization (GWO) is a widely used meta-heuristic method. It has limited searching potential when solving the majority of function optimization problems. This paper proposes a new variant of GWO, named SCGWO, which combines GWO with an improved spread strategy and a chaotic local search (CLS) mechanism to overcome these performance limitations. In detail, a spread strategy is introduced into the basic GWO to change the search agent's ability to avoid the local optima, the global exploration capability, and the individual movement's randomness. Then, a CLS mechanism is adopted to accelerate the convergence rate of the evolving agents. This method's effectiveness is illustrated by comparing the proposed SCGWO method with various algorithms, including seven GWO variants and eight well-known state-of-the-art algorithms on a comprehensive set of benchmark functions with the type of unimodal, multimodal, and composition functions. The experimental results confirmed that the established SCGWO algorithm has apparent advantages in processing unimodal, multimodal, and composition functions. Additionally, the proposed algorithm was utilized for finding the approximate optimal feature subset when applied to the feature selection problems on a set of 32 real-world data sets from the UCI machine learning repository. The results show that the binary variant also reveals a very competitive performance in dealing with feature selection. Our findings and analysis suggest that the proposed method can be a very suitable tool for realizing the optimal solutions to global optimization and wrapper-based feature selection tasks.
Semantic Edge Detection with Diverse Deep Supervision

Semantic edge detection (SED), which aims at jointly extracting edges as well as their category information, has far-reaching applications in domains such as semantic segmentation, object proposal generation, and object recognition. SED naturally requires achieving two distinct supervision targets: locating fine detailed edges and identifying high-level semantics. Our motivation comes from the hypothesis that such distinct targets prevent state-of-the-art SED methods from effectively using deep supervision to improve results. To this end, we propose a novel fully convolutional neural network using diverse deep supervision within a multi-task framework where bottom layers aim at generating category-agnostic edges, while top layers are responsible for the detection of category-aware semantic edges. To overcome the hypothesized supervision challenge, a novel information converter unit is introduced, whose effectiveness has been extensively evaluated on SBD and Cityscapes datasets.
Contrastive Cross-domain Recommendation in Matching

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) aims to provide better recommendation results in the target domain with the help of the source domain, which is widely used and explored in real-world systems. However, CDR in the matching (i.e., candidate generation) module struggles with the data sparsity and popularity bias issues in both representation learning and knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose a novel Contrastive Cross-Domain Recommendation (CCDR) framework for CDR in matching. Specifically, we build a huge diversified preference network to capture multiple information reflecting user diverse interests, and design an intra-domain contrastive learning (intra-CL) and three inter-domain contrastive learning (inter-CL) tasks for better representation learning and knowledge transfer. The intra-CL enables more effective and balanced training inside the target domain via a graph augmentation, while the inter-CL builds different types of cross-domain interactions from user, taxonomy, and neighbor aspects. In experiments, CCDR achieves significant improvements on both offline and online evaluations in a real-world system. Currently, we have deployed our CCDR on WeChat Top Stories, affecting plenty of users. The source code is in https://github.com/lqfarmer/CCDR.
Data-centric Engineering: integrating simulation, machine learning and statistics. Challenges and opportunities

Recent advances in machine learning, coupled with low-cost computation, availability of cheap streaming sensors, data storage and cloud technologies, has led to widespread multi-disciplinary research activity with significant interest and investment from commercial stakeholders. Mechanistic models, based on physical equations, and purely data-driven statistical approaches represent two ends of the modelling spectrum. New hybrid, data-centric engineering approaches, leveraging the best of both worlds and integrating both simulations and data, are emerging as a powerful tool with a transformative impact on the physical disciplines. We review the key research trends and application scenarios in the emerging field of integrating simulations, machine learning, and statistics. We highlight the opportunities that such an integrated vision can unlock and outline the key challenges holding back its realisation. We also discuss the bottlenecks in the translational aspects of the field and the long-term upskilling requirements for the existing workforce and future university graduates.
Chinese named entity recognition method based on BERT

The word embedding of traditional named entity recognition (NER) methods can’t represent the polysemy of a word, can’t fully consider contextual information, and the local features in the extraction process are easy to be ignored. To solve this problem, a named entity recognition method based on Bert is proposed, and the BERT-BiLSTM-IDCNN-CRF model is built. Bert is used for pre-training, and then the trained word vectors are input into bidirectional long-term and short-term memory network (BiLSTM) and iterative dilation convolution network (IDCNN) to extract features. Then the output features of the two neural networks are combined, and finally the prediction results are corrected by conditional random field (CRF). The experimental results show that the F1 value of the model on the CLUENER data set reaches 81.18%, which is 4.79% higher than the F1 value of the BiLSTM-CRF bench mark model, which verifies the effectiveness of the method in the NER task.
Trees Social Relations Optimization Algorithm: A new Swarm-Based metaheuristic technique to solve continuous and discrete optimization problems

This paper presents a new metaheuristic algorithm called Trees Social Relations Optimization Algorithm (TSR). TSR inspired by the hierarchical and collective life of trees in the jungle. The main priority of the collective consciousness of the trees is the survival of the woods. The trees try to reduce the damage in various ways so that the forest can develop. Organizing trees, protecting young seedlings, and their communication mechanism create a complex structure based on swarm intelligence that is the inspiration for designing an algorithm to solve existing problems. In TSR, each answer considered as a tree and a set of solutions defined as a sub-jungle. Sub-jungles are interconnected and help each other to get the right answer. The use of parallel and synchronized sub-jungles with its dedicated operators will increase the accuracy and shorten the time to reach an acceptable response. The TSR algorithm can use in continuous and discrete problems and, therefore, can use in a wide range of issues. Numerous experiments on standard and various benchmarks, as well as some classic and new issues, show that our proposed algorithm provides appropriate and acceptable answers in both time and accuracy to some similar algorithms.
AutoLog: Anomaly detection by deep autoencoding of system logs

The use of system logs for detecting and troubleshooting anomalies of production systems has been known since the early days of computers. In spite of the advances in the area, the analysis of log files emitted by real-life systems poses many peculiar challenges. Up-to-date tools, such as log management and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) products, capitalize on standard data formats, logging protocols and dictionaries of threat signatures, which hardly fit to logs of industrial and proprietary systems. This paper addresses the analysis of logs emitted by computer systems with a focus on anomaly detection. The proposed approach, named AutoLog, consists in sampling the logs at regular intervals and to compute numeric scores. Scores collected under normative operations are used to train a semi-supervised deep autoencoder, which serves as a baseline to classify future scores. The approach is not constrained by the structure of underlying logs and does not need for anomalies at training time. The results obtained in detecting anomalies of two industrial systems and the public BG/L and Hadoop datasets widely used as benchmarks, indicate that the recall of AutoLog ranges between 0.96 and 0.99, while the precision is within 0.93 and 0.98. A comparative study with isolation forest, one-class SVM, decision tree, vanilla autoencoder and variational autoencoder is conducted to demonstrate the validity of the proposal.
Performance evaluation of outlier detection techniques in production timeseries: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Time-series data have been extensively collected and analyzed in many disciplines, such as stock market, medical diagnosis, meteorology, and oil and gas industry. Numerous data in these disciplines are sequence of observations measured as functions of time, which can be further used for different applications via analytical or data analytics techniques (e.g., to forecast future price, climate change, etc.). However, presence of outliers can cause significant uncertainties to interpretation results; hence, it is essential to remove the outliers accurately and efficiently before conducting any further analysis. A total of 17 techniques that belong to statistical, regression-based, and machine learning (ML) based categories for outlier detection in timeseries are applied to the oil and gas production data analysis. 15 of these methods are utilized for production data analysis for the first time. Two state-of-the-art and high-performance techniques are then selected for data cleaning which require minimum control and time complexity. Moreover, performances of these techniques are evaluated based on several metrics including the accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and Cohen’s Kappa to rank the techniques. Results show that eight unsupervised algorithms outperform the rest of the methods based on the synthetic case study with known outliers. For example, accuracies of the eight shortlisted methods are in the range of 0.83–0.99 with a precision between 0.83 and 0.98, compared to 0.65–0.82 and 0.07–0.77 for the others. In addition, ML-based techniques perform better than statistical techniques. Our experimental results on real field data further indicate that the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) and Fulford-Blasingame methods are superior to other outlier detection frameworks for outlier detection in production data, followed by four others including density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN), and angle-based outlier detection (ABOD). Even though the techniques are examined with oil and gas production data, but the same data cleaning workflow can be used to detect timeseries’ outliers in other disciplines.
Transformer-Based Decoder Designs for Semantic Segmentation on Remotely Sensed Images

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable accomplishments in several natural language processing (NLP) tasks as well as image processing tasks. Herein, we present a deep-learning (DL) model that is capable of improving the semantic segmentation network in two ways. First, utilizing the pre-training Swin Transformer (SwinTF) under Vision Transformer (ViT) as a backbone, the model weights downstream tasks by joining task layers upon the pretrained encoder. Secondly, decoder designs are applied to our DL network with three decoder designs, U-Net, pyramid scene parsing (PSP) network, and feature pyramid network (FPN), to perform pixel-level segmentation. The results are compared with other image labeling state of the art (SOTA) methods, such as global convolutional network (GCN) and ViT. Extensive experiments show that our Swin Transformer (SwinTF) with decoder designs reached a new state of the art on the Thailand Isan Landsat-8 corpus (89.8% F1 score), Thailand North Landsat-8 corpus (63.12% F1 score), and competitive results on ISPRS Vaihingen. Moreover, both our best-proposed methods (SwinTF-PSP and SwinTF-FPN) even outperformed SwinTF with supervised pre-training ViT on the ImageNet-1K in the Thailand, Landsat-8, and ISPRS Vaihingen corpora.
Smiling AI agents: How anthropomorphism and broad smiles increase charitable giving

Anthropomorphism and construal level theories provide the bases for two studies showing that when nonprofit charity marketers design artificial intelligence (AI) agents to resemble humans and to smile like humans, potential donors feel greater psychological closeness to the agents and are motivated to increase charitable giving. Study 1 demonstrates that participants feel greater psychological closeness and willingness to donate in response to appeals from smiling AI agents that look like humans rather than like robots. Study 2 demonstrates that participants tend to donate more in reaction to appeals from humanlike (vs. machinelike) AI agents that smile broadly rather than slightly or not at all. The article concludes with a discussion of theoretical insights and practical implications for using AI representatives in nonprofit charity appeals.
A cost-sensitive temporal-spatial three-way recommendation with multi-granularity decision

In considering of the dynamic variations of user’s preference and item’s popularity, sequential recommender system (RS) has attracted much attention in recent years. In general, the sequential interactions between users and items will lead to both multilevel recommendation information (RI) in the space dimension and multi-step recommendation in the time dimension. To better capture the dynamic variations of user’s preference and reduce the recommendation cost, this paper proposes a novel sequential recommendation strategy from the temporal-spatial perspective. Firstly, in view of the temporality of user-item interactions, we design a granulation method based on recurrent neural network (RNN) to construct the multilevel RI. Then, in the light of the temporality of user’s preference and item’s popularity, we present a temporal-spatial three-way recommendation strategy (TS3WR) to realize the multi-step recommendation. Finally, by integrating the time factor with space factor, a temporal-spatial three-way recommendation based on recurrent neural network (RNN-TS3WR) is proposed to realize the recommendation with lower decision cost. Extensive experiments on three Movielens datasets verify the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed methods, and demonstrate the advantage of our recommendation strategy in both recommendation cost and recommendation quality.
A Systematic Review of Wearable Sensors for Monitoring Physical Activity

This article reviews the use of wearable sensors for the monitoring of physical activity (PA) for different purposes, including assessment of gait and balance, prevention and/or detection of falls, recognition of various PAs, conduction and assessment of rehabilitation exercises and monitoring of neurological disease progression. The article provides in-depth information on the retrieved articles and discusses study shortcomings related to demographic factors, i.e., age, gender, healthy participants vs patients, and study conditions. It is well known that motion patterns change with age and the onset of illnesses, and that the risk of falling increases with age. Yet, studies including older persons are rare. Gender distribution was not even provided in several studies, and others included only, or a majority of, men. Another shortcoming is that none of the studies were conducted in real-life conditions. Hence, there is still important work to be done in order to increase the usefulness of wearable sensors in these areas. The article highlights flaws in how studies based on previously collected datasets report on study samples and the data collected, which makes the validity and generalizability of those studies low. Exceptions exist, such as the promising recently reported open dataset FallAllD, wherein a longitudinal study with older adults is ongoing.
MTT: Multi-Scale Temporal Transformer for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

In the task of skeleton-based action recognition, long-term temporal dependencies are significant cues for sequential skeleton data. State-of-the-art methods rarely have access to long-term temporal information, due to the limitations of their receptive fields. Meanwhile, most of the recent multiple branches methods only consider different input modalities but ignore the information in various temporal scales. To address the above issues, we propose a multi-scale temporal transformer (MTT) in this letter, for skeleton-based action recognition. Firstly, the raw skeleton data are embedded by graph convolutional network (GCN) blocks and multi-scale temporal embedding modules (MT-EMs), which are designed as multiple branches to extract features in various temporal scales. Secondly, we introduce transformer encoders (TE) to integrate embeddings and model the long-term temporal pattern. Moreover, we propose a task-oriented lateral connection (LaC) aiming to align semantical hierarchies. LaC distributes input embeddings to the downstream transformer encoders (TE), according to semantical levels. The classification headers aggregate results from TE and predict the action categories at last. The proposed method is shown efficiency and universality during experiments and achieves the state-of-the-art on three large datasets, NTU-RGBD 60, NTU-RGBD 120 and Kinetics-Skeleton 400.
Layered neural atlases for consistent video editing

We present a method that decomposes, and "unwraps", an input video into a set of layered 2D atlases , each providing a unified representation of the appearance of an object (or background) over the video. For each pixel in the video, our method estimates its corresponding 2D coordinate in each of the atlases, giving us a consistent parameterization of the video, along with an associated alpha (opacity) value. Importantly, we design our atlases to be interpretable and semantic, which facilitates easy and intuitive editing in the atlas domain, with minimal manual work required. Edits applied to a single 2D atlas (or input video frame) are automatically and consistently mapped back to the original video frames, while preserving occlusions, deformation, and other complex scene effects such as shadows and reflections. Our method employs a coordinate-based Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) representation for mappings, atlases, and alphas, which are jointly optimized on a per-video basis, using a combination of video reconstruction and regularization losses. By operating purely in 2D, our method does not require any prior 3D knowledge about scene geometry or camera poses, and can handle complex dynamic real world videos. We demonstrate various video editing applications, including texture mapping, video style transfer, image-to-video texture transfer, and segmentation/labeling propagation, all automatically produced by editing a single 2D atlas image.
On Distributed Computing Continuum Systems

This article presents our vision on the need of developing new managing technologies to harness distributed “computing continuum” systems. These systems are concurrently executed in multiple computing tiers: Cloud, Fog, Edge and IoT. This simple idea develops manifold challenges due to the inherent complexity inherited from the underlying infrastructures of these systems. This makes inappropriate the use of current methodologies for managing Internet distributed systems, which are based on the early systems that were based on client/server architectures and were completely specified by the application software. We present a new methodology to manage distributed “computing continuum” systems. This is based on a mathematical artifact called Markov Blanket, which sets these systems in a Markovian space, more suitable to cope with their complex characteristics. Furthermore, we develop the concept of equilibrium for these systems, providing a more flexible management framework compared with the one based on thresholds, currently in use for Internet-based distributed systems. Finally, we also link the equilibrium with the development of adaptive mechanisms. However, we are aware that developing the entire methodology requires a big effort and the use of learning techniques, therefore, we finish this article with an overview of the techniques required to develop this methodology.
Artificial Intelligence for Reducing Workload in Breast Cancer Screening with Digital Breast Tomosynthesis

Background Digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) has higher diagnostic accuracy than digital mammography, but interpretation time is substantially longer. Artificial intelligence (AI) could improve reading efficiency. Purpose To evaluate the use of AI to reduce workload by filtering out normal DBT screens. Materials and Methods The retrospective study included 13 306 DBT examinations from 9919 women performed between June 2013 and November 2018 from two health care networks. The cohort was split into training, validation, and test sets (3948, 1661, and 4310 women, respectively). A workflow was simulated in which the AI model classified cancer-free examinations that could be dismissed from the screening worklist and used the original radiologists' interpretations on the rest of the worklist examinations. The AI system was also evaluated with a reader study of five breast radiologists reading the DBT mammograms of 205 women. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), sensitivity, specificity, and recall rate were evaluated in both studies. Statistics were computed across 10 000 bootstrap samples to assess 95% CIs, noninferiority, and superiority tests. Results The model was tested on 4310 screened women (mean age, 60 years ± 11 [standard deviation]; 5182 DBT examinations). Compared with the radiologists' performance (417 of 459 detected cancers [90.8%], 477 recalls in 5182 examinations [9.2%]), the use of AI to automatically filter out cases would result in 39.6% less workload, noninferior sensitivity (413 of 459 detected cancers; 90.0%; P = .002), and 25% lower recall rate (358 recalls in 5182 examinations; 6.9%; P = .002). In the reader study, AUC was higher in the standalone AI compared with the mean reader (0.84 vs 0.81; P = .002). Conclusion The artificial intelligence model was able to identify normal digital breast tomosynthesis screening examinations, which decreased the number of examinations that required radiologist interpretation in a simulated clinical workflow. Published under a CC BY 4.0 license. Online supplemental material is available for this article. See also the editorial by Philpotts in this issue.
Bitcoin: A Natural Oligopoly

We argue that the concentrated production and ownership of Bitcoin mining hardware arise naturally from the economic incentives of Bitcoin mining. We model Bitcoin mining as a two-stage competition; miners compete in prices to sell hardware while competing in quantities for mining rewards. We characterize equilibria in our model and show that small asymmetries in operational costs result in highly concentrated ownership of mining equipment. We further show that production of mining equipment will be dominated by the miner with the most efficient hardware, who will sell hardware to competitors while possibly also using it to mine. This paper was accepted by Kay Giesecke, finance.