Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Does the NIS implementation strategy effectively address cyber security risks in the UK?

This research explored how cyber security risks are managed across UK Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) sectors following implementation of the 2018 Networks and Information Security (NIS) legislation. Being in its infancy, there has been limited study into the effectiveness of this national framework for cyber risk management. The analysis of data gathered through interviews with key stakeholders against the NIS objectives indicated a collaborative implementation approach to improve cyber-risk management capabilities in CNI sectors. However, more work is required to bridge the gaps in the NIS framework to ensure holistic security across cyber spaces as well as non-cyber elements: cyber-physical security, cross-sector CNI service security measures, outcome-based regulatory assessments and risks due to connected smart technology implementations alongside legacy systems. This paper proposes ten key recommendations to counter the danger of not meeting the NIS key strategic objectives. In particular, it recommends that the approach to NIS implementation needs further alignment with its objectives, such as bringing a step-change in the cyber-security risk management capabilities of the CNI sectors.
NoVA: Learning to See in Novel Viewpoints and Domains

Domain adaptation techniques enable the re-use and transfer of existing labeled datasets from a source to a target domain in which little or no labeled data exists. Recently, image-level domain adaptation approaches have demonstrated impressive results in adapting from synthetic to real-world environments by translating source images to the style of a target domain. However, the domain gap between source and target may not only be caused by a different style but also by a change in viewpoint. This case necessitates a semantically consistent translation of source images and labels to the style and viewpoint of the target domain. In this work, we propose the Novel Viewpoint Adaptation (NoVA) model, which enables unsupervised adaptation to a novel viewpoint in a target domain for which no labeled data is available. NoVA utilizes an explicit representation of the 3D scene geometry to translate source view images and labels to the target view. Experiments on adaptation to synthetic and real-world datasets show the benefit of NoVA compared to state-of-the-art domain adaptation approaches on the task of semantic segmentation.
Visual Analytic Tools and Techniques in Population Health and Health Services Research: Protocol for a Scoping Review

Visual analytics (VA) promotes the understanding of data using visual, interactive techniques and using analytic and visual engines. The analytic engine includes machine learning and other automated techniques, whereas common visual outputs include flow maps and spatiotemporal hotspots for studying service gaps and disease distribution. The principal objective of this scoping review is to examine the state of science on VA and the various tools, strategies, and frameworks used in population health and health services research (HSR).The purpose of this scoping review is to develop an overarching global view of established techniques, frameworks, and methods of VA in population health and HSR. The main objectives are to explore, map, and synthesize the literature related to VA in its application to the two main focus areas of health care.We will use established scoping review methods to meet the study objective. As the use of the term visual analytics is inconsistent, one of the major challenges was operationalizing the concepts for developing the search strategy, based on the three main concepts of population health, HSR, and VA. We included peer reviewed and grey literature sources from 2005 till March 2019 in the search. Independent teams of researchers will screen the titles, abstracts and full text articles, whereas an independent researcher will arbiter conflicts. Data will be abstracted and presented using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews checklist and explanation by two independent researchers.As of late August 2019, the scoping review is in the full-text screening stage. Data synthesis will follow and the first results are expected to be submitted for publication in December 2019. In this protocol, the methods for undertaking this scoping review are detailed. We present how we operationalized the varied concepts of population health, health services, and VA. The main results of the scoping review will synthesize peer reviewed and grey literature sources on the main methods of VA in the interrelated fields of population health and health services research from January 2005 till March 2019.VA is being increasingly used and integrated with emerging technologies to support decision making using large data sets. This scoping review of the VA tools, strategies, and frameworks applied to population health and health services aims to increase awareness of this approach for uptake by decision makers working within and toward developing learning health systems globally.DERR1-10.2196/14019.
Transfer Learning from Partial Annotations for Whole Brain Segmentation

Brain MR image segmentation is a key task in neuroimaging studies. It is commonly conducted using standard computational tools, such as FSL, SPM, multi-atlas segmentation etc, which are often registration-based and suffer from expensive computation cost. Recently, there is an increased interest using deep neural networks for brain image segmentation, which have demonstrated advantages in both speed and performance. However, neural networks-based approaches normally require a large amount of manual annotations for optimising the massive amount of network parameters. For 3D networks used in volumetric image segmentation, this has become a particular challenge, as a 3D network consists of many more parameters compared to its 2D counterpart. Manual annotation of 3D brain images is extremely time-consuming and requires extensive involvement of trained experts. To address the challenge with limited manual annotations, here we propose a novel multi-task learning framework for brain image segmentation, which utilises a large amount of automatically generated partial annotations together with a small set of manually created full annotations for network training. Our method yields a high performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods for whole brain segmentation.
Multi-Population Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm Based on Congestion Factor and Co-Evolution Mechanism

To solve large-scale traveling salesmen problem (TSP) with better performance, we propose a multi-population ant colony optimization algorithm based on congestion factor and co-evolution mechanism (CCMACO). First, the congestion factor is introduced to control the number of ants on the path and can improve the adaptability of CCMACO. Then, the sub-populations restructuring strategy is proposed to balance the convergence speed and the diversity of solutions. Besides, the inter-specific competition mechanism can be used to strengthen the optimal solution and to accelerate convergence speed. Finally, the co-evolutionary strategy is used to interchange information among different sub-populations so as to maintain the diversity of populations. For the purpose of verifying the optimization performance of the CCMACO algorithm, CCMACO is compared with several improved multi-population ant colony optimization algorithms in TSP. The experiment results show that the proposed CCMACO algorithm can effectively obtain the best optimization value in solving TSP and it achieves better optimization ability and stability.
HPDL: Towards a General Framework for High-performance Distributed Deep Learning

With growing scale of the data volume and neural network size, we have come into the era of distributed deep learning. High-performance training and inference on distributed computing systems has been attracting increasing research attention in both academia and industry. Meanwhile, diversity of existing machine learning frameworks (e.g. TensorFlow, Pytorch and MXNet) and the explosion of deep learning hardwares (e.g. CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and ASICs) bring more challenges for users to leverage new deep learning technologies and accelerating capability of hardware devices. We firstly search around the state-of-the-art work in the area which open our mind to take a vision upon the future deep learning framework. Then, we propose HPDL, a general framework for high-performance distributed deep learning which is compatible with existing frameworks and adaptive to various hardware architectures. At last, we discuss and foresee the key technologies fulfilling high-performance and large-scale deep learning, including optimization algorithm, hybrid communication mechanism, model parallelization, resource scheduling and single-node execution optimization.
A Block Adaptive Near-Lossless Compression Algorithm for Medical Image Sequences and Diagnostic Quality Assessment

The near-lossless compression technique has better compression ratio than lossless compression technique while maintaining a maximum error limit for each pixel. It takes the advantage of both the lossy and lossless compression methods providing high compression ratio, which can be used for medical images while preserving diagnostic information. The proposed algorithm uses a resolution and modality independent threshold-based predictor, optimal quantization (q) level, and adaptive block size encoding. The proposed method employs resolution independent gradient edge detector (RIGED) for removing inter-pixel redundancy and block adaptive arithmetic encoding (BAAE) is used after quantization to remove coding redundancy. Quantizer with an optimum q level is used to implement the proposed method for high compression efficiency and for the better quality of the recovered images. The proposed method is implemented on volumetric 8-bit and 16-bit standard medical images and also validated on real time 16-bit-depth images collected from government hospitals. The results show the proposed algorithm yields a high coding performance with BPP of 1.37 and produces high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 51.35 dB for 8-bit-depth image dataset as compared with other near-lossless compression. The average BPP values of 3.411 and 2.609 are obtained by the proposed technique for 16-bit standard medical image dataset and real-time medical dataset respectively with maintained image quality. The improved near-lossless predictive coding technique achieves high compression ratio without losing diagnostic information from the image.
SSSER: Spatiotemporal Sequential and Social Embedding Rank for Successive Point-of-Interest Recommendation

Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation is one of the important services of location-based social networks (LBSNs), which has become an important way to help users discover interesting places and increase the potential income of related companies. Although human movement presents a sequential pattern in the LBSN. There still are the following problems: (1) when modeling the sequence data, most of the existing works assume that the check-in time depends on the location transformation in the location sequence. In particular, these works emphasize the equivalent transition probabilities between locations for all users to capture the check-in sequential pattern, whereas they ignore the spatial and temporal information of personalized context in some actual personal check-in scenarios; (2) most of the existing POI recommendation algorithms fail to utilize the social information related to modeling users to improve the final recommendation performance.To tackle the above challenges, we propose a new personalized successive POI recommendation model called Spatiotemporal Sequential and Social Embedding Rank model, named SSSER. First, we use a hybrid deep learning model based on the convolution filter and multilayer perceptron model to mine the sequence pattern among the users' checked-in locations. Then, we use the method of metric learning to model the social relationship among users. Finally, we propose a unified framework to recommend POIs combining the users' personal interests, the check-in sequential influence and social information simultaneously for the successive POI recommendation. And the BPR standard is used to optimize the loss function to fit the user's partial order of POIs. The experimental results on the real datasets show that our proposed POI recommendation algorithm outperforms the other state-of-the-art POI recommendation algorithms.
A Comparative Study of Optical Character Recognition in Health Information System

Most Health Institutes are transitioning between documents in physical format and digital format. It is pertinent and important to develop applications that helps health professionals on this transition. An application that would aid the process of digitalization of documents was developed using a Python library. To help with the decision of which library to use, a study was made regarding the precision and speed of execution of PyOCR, PyTesseract and TesseOCR.
Local to Global Learning: Gradually Adding Classes for Training Deep Neural Networks

We propose a new learning paradigm, Local to Global Learning (LGL), for Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to improve the performance of classification problems. The core of LGL is to learn a DNN model from fewer categories (local) to more categories (global) gradually within the entire training set. LGL is most related to the Self-Paced Learning (SPL) algorithm but its formulation is different from SPL. SPL trains its data from simple to complex, while LGL from local to global. In this paper, we incorporate the idea of LGL into the learning objective of DNNs and explain why LGL works better from an information-theoretic perspective. Experiments on the toy data, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet dataset show that LGL outperforms the baseline and SPL-based algorithms.
A Novel Reconfigurable Hardware Architecture of Neural Network

Neural networks have been commonly used in learning applications. Implementing a neural network on hardware is a complex and challenging task for hardware designers as many hyperparameters and trade-offs need to be considered. This paper presents a reconfigurable feed-forward neural network which can be used for different applications. The proposed method has the flexibility to change the node organization to be suitable for an application. The network is divided into two parts: one part has a fixed node in each layer and the second part includes the reconfigurable nodes. The reconfigurable nodes have the ability to switch from one layer to another to speed up the network. The proposed method is compared with the traditional network, and the result shows the proposed method improves the performance of the network. The learning speed is improved by 35% using 100 neurons within a layer. The hardware implementation of the proposed method is presented using VHDL and Altera Arria10 GX FPGA.
Bone Metastatic Tumor Detection based on AnoGAN Using CT Images

In this paper, we propose a method to detect bone metastatic tumors using computed tomography (CT) images. Bone metastatic tumors spread from primary cancer to other organs, and they can cause severe pain. Therefore, it is important to detect metastatic tumors earlier in addition to primary cancer. However, since metastatic tumors are very small, and they emerge from unpredictable regions in the body, collecting metastatic tumor images is difficult compared to primary cancer. In such a case, it can be considered that the idea of anomaly detection is suitable. The proposed method based on a generative adversarial network model trains with only non-metastatic bone tumor images and detects bone metastatic tumor in an unsupervised manner. Then the anomaly score is defined for each test CT image. Experimental results show the anomaly scores between non-metastatic bone tumor images and metastatic bone tumor images are clearly different. The anomaly detection approach may be effective for the detection of bone metastatic tumors in CT images.
Asymptotic Loss in Privacy due to Dependency in Gaussian Traces

The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) necessitates employing privacy-preserving techniques to protect users' sensitive information. Even when user traces are anonymized, statistical matching can be employed to infer sensitive information. In our previous work, we have established the privacy requirements for the case that the user traces are instantiations of discrete random variables and the adversary knows only the structure of the dependency graph, i.e., whether each pair of users is connected. In this paper, we consider the case where data traces are instantiations of Gaussian random variables and the adversary knows not only the structure of the graph but also the pairwise correlation coefficients. We establish the requirements on anonymization to thwart such statistical matching, which demonstrate the significant degree to which knowledge of the pairwise correlation coefficients further significantly aids the adversary in breaking user anonymity.
A Differential Privacy-Based Protecting Data Preprocessing Method for Big Data Mining

Analyzing clustering results may lead to the privacy disclosure issue in big data mining. In this paper, we put forward a differential privacy-based protecting data preprocessing method for distance-based clustering. Firstly, the data distortion technique differential privacy is used to prevent the distances in distance-based clustering from disclosing the relationships. Differential privacy may affect the clustering results while protecting privacy. Then an adaptive privacy budget parameter adjustment mechanism is applied for keeping the balance between the privacy protection and the clustering results. By solving the maximum and minimum problems, the differential privacy budget parameter can be obtained for different clustering algorithms. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of our proposed method. The results demonstrate that our method can provide privacy protection with precise clustering results.
Comprehensive Time-Offset Estimation for Multisensor Target Tracking

Temporal registration of sensors is an essential preprocessing step in multisensor target tracking systems. A new approach for multisensor time-offset estimation is proposed in this article. First, the time offset pseudomeasurement equation is derived and calculated in both centralized and decentralized scenarios, where measurements and local tracks are available at the fusion center, respectively. The observability of time offset is analyzed theoretically, which shows that only relative time offsets between sensors are observable. Second, a two-sensor two-stage filtering method is developed with four different formulations corresponding to different time-offset statistical models and target dynamic models to obtain a relative time-offset estimate. A multisensor two-stage filter is also proposed to obtain a minimum-bias time-offset estimate. Furthermore, the interacting multiple model estimator is used to deal with temporal registration in the presence of target maneuvers. Finally, the posterior Cramér-Rao lower bound (PCRLB) is derived for relative time-offset estimation. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm with two sensors yields an empirically unbiased estimate of the relative time offset, and that the root-mean-square errors (RMSEs) match the corresponding PCRLB. Simulation results for multisensor target tracking are also presented to demonstrate the validity of the proposed algorithms.
Efficient Outdoor Video Semantic Segmentation Using Feedback-Based Fully Convolution Neural Network

In this article, we focus on efficient semantic segmentation problem from sequential two-dimensional images, in which all pixels are classified into certain classes for scene understanding. Such problem is challenging because it involves constraints of both spatial and temporal consistencies, which have large difficulties in explicitly determining such structural constraints. Traditionally, such a problem is tackled using structured prediction method, such as conditional random field (CRF). However, pure CRF method suffers from very high complexity in computing high-order potentials and slow performance during inference step, which is unsuitable for efficient video segmentation in real scenario. In this article, a novel feedback-based deep fully convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed to inherently incorporate spatial context through appending output feedback mechanism. The proposed method has the following contributions: 1) spatial context in images are easily captured through iterative feedback refinement, without the expensive postprocess step such as CRF refinement; 2) easily integrated with generic deep CNN structure; and 3) the inference time is greatly reduced for efficient image segmentation. Compared to current state-of-the-art methods, our proposed method was shown to provide up to 14% better accuracy on semantic segmentation task in challenging Camvid and Cityscapes datasets, while taking up to relatively 980% shorter inference time. The proposed method also shows its effectiveness for real-time road detection task of autonomous driving.
Drift Calibration Using Constrained Extreme Learning Machine and Kalman Filter in Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been increasingly applied for environmental monitoring in recent years. However, the sensor data drift is a serious issue affecting the reliability of monitoring system. Based on the assumption that the neighboring nodes have correlated measurements, this paper presents a novel algorithm using constrained extreme learning machine and Kalman filter (CELM-KF) for tracking and calibrating drift of sensor data. CELM-KF has two phases: training phase and calibrating phase. In the training phase, the wavelet denoising method is used for data preprocessing. Then the cluster head trains the model of the constrained extreme learning machine (CELM) using the measurements of its neighbors to obtain the prediction data of the target sensor. In the calibrating phase, we track and correct the data drift of target sensor using Kalman filter. To evaluate the performance of CELM-KF, simulation experiments on different datasets are conducted, and two parameters including decision coefficient and mean square error (MSE) of CELM-KF are compared with those of existing algorithms. The simulation results show that CELM-KF can successfully calibrate the sensor data drifts.