Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Zero‐shot multi‐label learning via label factorisation

This study considers the zero‐shot learning problem under the multi‐label setting where each test sample is associated with multiple labels that are unseen in training data. The authors propose a novel learning framework based on label factorisation for this problem. Specifically, the authors’ framework takes three key issues into consideration and addresses them in a unified way. The first is knowledge transfer that utilises information from seen classes to build recognition models for unseen classes. The second is label correlation which means that labels which have different semantics may co‐occur frequently. This is an important issue in multi‐label learning. The authors propose to learn a shared latent space by label factorisation and use the label semantics as the decoding function, which can address both issues. The third is the predictability which requires the learned latent space to be strongly related to the visual features. It is guaranteed by incorporating a regression model into the learning framework. The authors derive two specific formulations from the general framework and propose the corresponding learning algorithms. The authors conducted extensive experiments on three multi‐label data sets. The results demonstrated the effectiveness.
A Novel Fuzzy Inspired Bat Algorithm for Multidimensional Function Optimization Problem

This article introduces Fuzzy Inspired Bat Algorithm (FIBA), which is an improved variant of the original Bat algorithm. The novelty of FIBA lies in the integration of a fuzzy controller with the basic Bat algorithm that tries to bring balance between the degree of explorations and exploitations during the mutation operation. Another novelty of FIBA is the introduction of a step size parameter, maintained separately for every candidate solution, to customize and control the mix of explorative and exploitative operations around each candidate solution. FIBA is tested on a standard benchmark set that includes 10 complex, scalable, high dimensional functions. The results on benchmark functions reveal that FIBA can perform sufficiently well, and often better than the original Bat algorithm and another recently proposed improved Bat variant. Such improvements on the experimental results imply that the fuzzy technique adopted by FIBA might be effective on other existing problems as well, and hence demand further research and investigation.
Understanding Information Security Behaviours of Tanzanian Government Employees

This article investigates security behaviours of employees using the Health Belief Model (HBM) as a theoretical lens. Given the fact that previous studies on security behaviours paid much attention to conscious information security behaviours; this article extends the HBM to study both habitual or automatic security behaviours (security habit) and conscious security behaviours of Tanzanian government employees. A structural equation modelling (SEM) technique was used for data analysis. The study found that, the intentions of government employees to practice information security behaviour is influenced by perceived severity, perceived susceptibility, perceived barriers, and cues to action and security habits. Their intentions, however, is not affected by perceived benefits and self-efficacy. Further, an employee's intentions and security habits has a significant effect on actual security practice. Generally, the extended research model enriches the understanding of the role played by both conscious and habitual security behaviours on information security behaviours of employees.
On the existence of O’Nan configurations in ovoidal Buekenhout–Metz unitals in <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline" id="d1e111" altimg="si2.svg"><mml:mtext>PG</mml:mtext><mml:mrow><mml:mo>(</mml:mo><mml:mn>2</mml:mn><mml:mo>,</mml:mo><mml:msup><mml:mrow><mml:mi>q</mml:mi></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mn>2</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:msup><mml:mo>)</mml:mo></mml:mrow></mml:math>

In this paper, we establish the existence of O'Nan configurations in all nonclassical ovoidal Buekenhout-Metz unitals in $\text{PG}(2,q^2)$.
Topographic representation adds robustness to supervised learning

In recent years, machine learning especially deep models have made significant improvements over their performances and thus applicable to many problems that until a decade ago were prohibitively difficult to learn. One of the strengths of the deep models is that they adaptively capture well-struct ured representations of the input in their internal representations that help them to generate desirable outputs. However, while many studies are dedicated for improving the performances of neural networks, less efforts are focused for understanding the formation of the internal representations in hierarchical neural networks and the implications to their performances. Here, we study a network model that incorporates topographical self-organizing maps into a supervised network and show how gradient learning results in a form of a self-organizing learning rule. Topographical self-organizing principles as internal representation is interesting because while topographical self-organizing principles have motivated much of early learning models and relevant to biological learning systems, such principles have rarely been included in supervised learning architectures. In this paper our objectives are explaining the dynamics of the proposed model, visually comparing the internal representation of the proposed model against some deep models and importantly showing that our model is robust in the sense of its application to a variety of areas, which is believed to be a hallmark of biological learning systems.
Time-optimal implementations of quantum algorithms

In this paper, we briefly discuss the methodology for simulating a quantum computer which performs Shor's algorithm on a 7-qubit system to factorise 15. Using this simulation and the overlooked quantum brachistochrone method, we devised a Monte Carlo algorithm to calculate the expected time a theoretical quantum computer could perform this calculation under the same energy conditions as current working quantum computers. We found that, experimentally, a nuclear magnetic resonance quantum computer would take $1.59 \pm 0.04$ s to perform our simulated computation, whereas the expected optimal time under the same energy conditions is $0.955 \pm 0.004$ ms. Moreover, we found that the expected time is inversely proportional to the energy variance of our qubit states (as expected). Finally, we propose this theoretical method for analysing the time-efficiency of future quantum computing experiments.
Virtual and Augmented Reality Mirrors for Mental Health Treatment

Virtual and Augmented Reality are technologies widely used in a variety of areas, including the medical sector. On the other hand, regular mirrors have been traditionally used as tools to aid in mental health treatment for a variety of diseases and disorders. Although it is possible to build Virtual and Augmented Reality experiences based on mirror metaphors, there are very few contributions of this kind in the medical sector. In this chapter, the great benefits that regular mirrors have brought for mental health treatment are addressed. In addition, a review on the state of the art in mirror-based Virtual and Augmented Reality applications is given, highlighting the potential benefits that these enhanced mirrors could bring for the mental health treatment.
Method for designing error-resistant phase-shifting algorithm

We present a method for designing error-resistant phase-shifting algorithms to suppress error sources in phase-shifting interferometry. Firstly, the partial-differential processing is applied to the weighted least squares algorithm to obtain error sensitivity equations. Sequentially, bound equations are obtained to minimize error sensitivity. Finally, the bound equations are solved to determine the weights, and the error-resistant phase-shifting algorithms are developed. Aiming at a self-developed interferometer, the proposed method is used to design phase-shifting algorithms which are resistant to given error sources. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations of the self-designed algorithms compared with a commercial algorithm are completed. Theoretical analysis indicates that the self-designed algorithms meet the desired requirements. Numerical simulations verify the correctness of theoretical analysis. And the comparisons show that the self-designed algorithm is more resistant to error sources that needs to be suppressed. These results verify the proposed method and demonstrate its effectiveness.
Remote sensing evidence for a possible 10 kilometer in diameter impact structure in north-central Niger

Remote sensing investigations of West Africa reveal a roughly 10 km in diameter, circular feature in north-central Niger. The circular feature is located within Early Devonian fluvio-marine sedimentary strata about 100 km to the north of a suite of igneous ring dikes located in the Aïr Massif. Whether the circular feature is related to the ring dikes, structural doming, or an impact crater can be evaluated from earlier geologic mapping (Black, 1967) and image analyses. Previous mapping indicates that the circular feature is defined by outcrops of Devonian Idekel sandstone and the Late Proterozoic, weakly-metamorphosed molasse of the Proche-Ténéré Formation. Absent in published lithologic descriptions of these sedimentary and metasedimentary rocks are diapiric evaporite deposits that could produce the observed circular morphologies. Lithologies that define the circular feature are confirmed by classification techniques using the ENVI software platform and band ratios/math from Landsat 8 and Sentinel 2A data. Spectral profile comparisons between the igneous intrusive rocks exposed in the Aïr Massif, outcrops of sedimentary rock that are proximal to the circular feature, and desert sand confirm that the sedimentary rocks mapped by Black (1967) define the circular feature. The shallow subsurface structure, revealed through Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C data, and 3-D modeling using Sentinel 1A data, is also not consistent with nearby ring dike structures. These data suggest that the circular feature did not likely form as a magmatic intrusion close to the time of sedimentary rock deposition. We propose that the circular feature formed from either a meteorite impact after deposition of the host sedimentary units or by some other, but less likely, geologic process. Confirmation of an impact explanation for the circular feature would require sample analysis and inspection for shock-metamorphosed materials.
Reliable Line Segment Matching for Multispectral Images Guided by Intersection Matches

Accurate and robust feature matching is a critical issue in the preprocessing of multispectral image data sets. Higher order features, such as lines can provide useful matching information but are heavily affected by the unreliable detection of lines. Existing methods typically make the unrealistic assumption that end points of lines can be accurately detected across the reference and test images. To address the unreliable detection of line end points, this paper proposes mapping line intersections and then employing tentatively mapped intersections as “anchor” points to compute line descriptors. The computed line descriptors are utilized to determine whether the two lines forming an intersection are matched with the two lines forming its mapped intersection. This eliminates the reliance on the accurate detection of line end points and results in improved matching accuracy. The proposed method is tested on a large number of multispectral images containing various scenes. Experimental results show that it can effectively deal with the detection inaccuracy of end points for line matching.
State of runtime adaptation in service‐oriented systems: what, where, when, how and right

Software as a Service reflects a ‘service-oriented’ approach to software development that is based on the notion of composing applications by discovering and invoking network-available services to accomplish some task. However, as more business organisations adopt service-oriented solutions and the demands on them grow, the problem of ensuring that the software systems can adapt fast and effectively to changing business needs, changes in their runtime environment and failures in provided services has become an increasingly important research problem. Dynamic adaptation has been proposed as a way to address the problem. However, for adaptation to be effective several other factors need to be considered. This study identifies the key factors that influence runtime adaptation in service-oriented systems (SOSs) and examines how well they are addressed in 29 adaptation approaches intended to support SOSs.
Semidefinite programming bounds for Lee codes

For $q,n,d \in \mathbb{N}$, let $A_q^L(n,d)$ denote the maximum cardinality of a code $C \subseteq \mathbb{Z}_q^n$ with minimum Lee distance at least $d$, where $\mathbb{Z}_q$ denotes the cyclic group of order $q$. We consider a semidefinite programming bound based on triples of codewords, which bound can be computed efficiently using symmetry reductions, resulting in several new upper bounds on $A_q^L(n,d)$. The technique also yields an upper bound on the independent set number of the $n$-th strong product power of the circular graph $C_{d,q}$, which number is related to the Shannon capacity of $C_{d,q}$. Here $C_{d,q}$ is the graph with vertex set $\mathbb{Z}_q$, in which two vertices are adjacent if and only if their distance (mod $q$) is strictly less than $d$. The new bound does not seem to improve significantly over the bound obtained from Lov\'asz theta-function, except for very small $n$.
Sifter: A Service Isolation Strategy for Internet Applications

Service oriented architecture (SOA) provides a flexible platform to build collaborative Internet applications by composing existing self-contained and autonomous services. However, the implicit interactions among the concurrently provisioned services may introduce interference to Internet applications and cause them behave abnormally. It is thus desirable to isolate services to safeguard their application consistency. Existing approaches mostly address this problem by restricting concurrent execution of services to avoid all the implicit interactions. These approaches, however, compromise the performance and flexibility of Internet applications due to the long running nature of services. This paper presents Sifter, a new service isolation strategy for Internet applications. We devise in this strategy a novel static approach to analyze the potential implicit interactions among the services and their impacts on the consistency of the associated Internet applications. By locating only those afflicted implicit interactions that may violate the application consistency, a novel approach based on exception handling and behavior constraints is customized to involved services to eliminate their impacts. We show that this approach exempts the consistency property of Internet applications from being interfered at runtime. The experimental results show that our approach has a better performance than existing solutions.
Clock Auction Inspired Privacy Preserving Emergency Demand Response in Colocation Data Centers

Data centers are key participants in emergency demand response (EDR), where the grid coordinates large electricity consumers for reducing their consumption during emergency situations to prevent major economic losses. While existing literature concentrates on owner-operated data centers (e.g., Google), this work studies EDR in multi-tenant colocation data centers (e.g., Equinix) where servers are owned and managed by individual tenants and which are better targets of EDR. Existing EDR mechanisms incentivize tenants energy reduction. Such designs can either be gamed by strategic tenants or untrustworthy colocation operators for illegal gains. These serious privacy concerns stand as barrier preventing the tenants' participation in EDR. This paper addresses such concerns by proposing a privacy-preserving and strategy-proof mechanism using the descending clock auction. Privacy is protected by implementing homomorphic encryption for aggregation through the clock auction, where operator can only know the aggregate of the tenants' values or bids but not their individual private values or confidential information submitted to meet the EDR. We evaluate the privacy and performance of this scheme by formulating descending clock auction, in which the amount of energy/price the tenants are willing to reduce for a given price/energy to meet EDR is protected.
Generalized wreath products of table algebras determined by their character tables and applications to association schemes

Structures of table algebras whose character tables have a zero submatrix were studied in Blau and Xu (2014) and Chen and Xu (2018). In this paper we continue the research in this direction, and investigate the conditions under which the character table with a zero submatrix yields a generalized wreath product of table algebras. Applications to association schemes are also discussed.
Password typographical error resilience in honey encryption

Honey encryption (HE) is a novel password-based encryption scheme that is secure against brute-force attacks even if users’ passwords have min-entropy. However, in HE, decryption with an incorrect key produces fake messages that appear valid. Hence, password typographical errors may confuse even legitimate users. This has been one of the most challenging problems in HE. To tackle this challenge, we propose three types of protocols that enable legitimate users to detect password typographical errors in HE. We conducted a theoretical analysis and performed an IRB-approved user study with 150 participants to compare the performance of each scheme. We also analyzed the security of the proposed schemes against online and offline brute-force attacks. The results from the user study and theoretical analysis show that the proposed schemes can effectively solve the typographical error problem of HE, which can detect typographical errors with 99% accuracy.
Real-time record sensitive background classifier (RSBC)

In computer vision, one of the ways to identify moving objects or foregrounds from a complex video scene is background subtraction. Two problems that usually arise in background subtraction are that of dynamic background and ghost effect. In this article, an efficient, adaptive, real-time, novel background subtraction method is proposed to handle these two problems by utilizing the classification history of previous frames to detect changes in a video scene. The proposed method, coined as Record Sensitive Background Classifier (RSBC) is an amalgamation of two models, the Adaptive Background Model (ABM) and the Neighbourhood Background Model (NBM), which make use of the foreground and background classification information of the previous frames. The novel design of the ABM considers the temporal history of transitions between foreground and background of a given pixel, while the novelty in NBM lies in considering the binary classification results of the local neighbourhood in the preceding frame. Several state-of-the-art methods are compared with the proposed RSBC method, over which the proposed method shows significant improvement. Because of its good performance at fast processing speeds the proposed method can also be used as a preliminary prioritization step for slower but high accuracy methods in an object tracking system.
Fast inter-frame prediction in multi-view video coding based on perceptual distortion threshold model

Multi-view video coding (MVC) utilizes hierarchical B picture prediction structure and adopts many coding techniques to remove spatiotemporal and inter-view redundancies at the cost of high computational complexity. In this paper, a novel perceptual distortion threshold model (PDTM) is proposed to reveal the relationship between the mode selection of inter-frame prediction and coding distortion threshold. Based on the proposed PDTM, a new fast inter-frame prediction algorithm in MVC is developed aimed at minimizing computational complexity for dependent view coding. Then the fast MVC algorithm is incorporated into the multi-view High Efficiency Video Coding (MV-HEVC) software to improve MVC coding efficiency. In practical coding, the mode selection for inter-frame prediction of dependent views may be early terminated based on the thresholds derived from the PDTM, thereby reducing the coding time complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can reduce the computational complexity of the dependent views by 52.9% compared with the HTM14.1 algorithm under the coding structure of hierarchical B pictures. Moreover, the bitrate is increased by 0.9% under the same subjective quality and only increased by 1.0% under the same objective quality peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Compared with the state-of-the-art fast algorithm, the proposed algorithm can save more coding time, while the bitrate under the same PSNR increases slightly.
On Bayesian Tracking and Prediction of Radar Cross Section

We consider the problem of Bayesian tracking of radar cross section. The adopted observation model employs the gamma family, which covers all Swerling cases in a unified framework. State dynamics are modeled using a nonstationary autoregressive gamma process. The principal component of the proposed solution is a nontrivial gamma approximation, applied during the time update recursion. The superior performance of the proposed approach is confirmed using simulations and a real-world dataset.
Joint Scheduling of Overlapping MapReduce Phases: Pair Jobs for Optimization

MapReduce includes three phases of map, shuffle, and reduce. Since the map phase is CPU-intensive and the shuffle phase is I/O-intensive, these phases can be conducted in parallel. This paper studies a joint scheduling optimization of overlapping map and shuffle phases to minimize the average job makespan. New concepts of the strong pair and the weak pair are introduced. Two jobs are defined as a strong pair if the shuffle and map workloads of one job equal the map and shuffle workloads of the other job, respectively. Two jobs are defined as a weak pair if their total map workloads equal their total shuffle workloads. We prove that if the entire set of jobs can be decomposed to strong pairs of jobs, then the optimal schedule can pairwisely execute jobs that can form a strong pair. Following the above intuition, several offline and online scheduling policies are proposed. Extensions are made based on weak pairs. Real data-driven experiments validate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed policies.
Tighter monogamy and polygamy relations using Rényi- $$\alpha $$ α entropy

We investigate monogamy relations related to the Rényi- $$\alpha $$ entanglement and polygamy relations related to the Rényi- $$\alpha $$ entanglement of assistance. We present new entanglement monogamy relations satisfied by the $$\mu $$ th power of Rényi- $$\alpha $$ entanglement with $$\alpha \in [(\sqrt{7}-1)/2,(\sqrt{13}-1)/2]$$ for $$\mu \ge 2$$ , and polygamy relations satisfied by the $$\mu $$ th power of Rényi- $$\alpha $$ entanglement of assistance with $$\alpha \in [(\sqrt{7}-1)/2,(\sqrt{13}-1)/2]$$ for $$0\le \mu \le 1$$ . These relations are shown to be tighter than the existing ones.