Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Violent Video Event Detection Based on Integrated LBP and GLCM Texture Features

Violent event detection is an interesting research problem and it is a branch of action recognition and computer vision.The detection of violent events is significant for both the public and private sectors.The automatic surveillance system is more attractive and interesting because of its wide range of applications in abnormal event detection.Since many years researchers were worked on violent activity detection and they have proposed different feature descriptors on both vision and acoustic technology.Challenges still exist due to illumination, complex background, scale changes, sudden variation, and slowmotion in videos.Consequently, violent event detection is based on the texture features of the frames in both crowded and uncrowned scenarios.Our proposed method used Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and GLCM (Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix) as feature descriptors for the detection of a violent event.Finally, prominent features are used with five different supervised classifiers.The proposed feature extraction technique used Hockey Fight (HF) and Violent Flows (VF) two standard benchmark datasets for the experimentation.
K-RSA: Secure data storage technique for multimedia in cloud data server

Cloud has become one of the most demanding services for data storage. On another hand, the security of data is one of the challenging tasks for Cloud Service Provider (CSP). Cryptography is one of the ways for securing the storage data. Cryptography is not a new approach instead of the efficient utilization of cryptographical algorithms is greatly needed. In this work, we proposed a Secure Hidden Layer (SHL) and Application Programming Interface (API) for data encryption. The SHL is consisting of two major modules (i) Key Management Server (KMS) and (ii) Share Holder Server (SHS) which is used for storing and sharing of cryptographic key. For this purpose, we proposed a server-side encryption algorithm, which is based on the asymmetric algorithm (RSA and CRT) for providing end-to-end security of multimedia data. The experimental results of text and video are evidence that the size of file is not much affected after the encryption and effectively stored at Cloud Storage Server (CSS). The parameters like ciphertext size, encryption time and throughput are considered for performance evaluation of the proposed encryption technique.
A Three-Step Authentication Model for Mobile Phone User Using Keystroke Dynamics

The use of keystroke dynamics for user authentication has evolved over the years and has found its application in mobile phones. But the primary challenge with mobile phones is that they can be used in any position. Thus, it becomes critical to analyze the use of keystroke dynamics using the data collected in various typing positions. This research proposed a three-step authentication model that could be used to authenticate a user who is using the mobile in sitting, walking, and relaxing position. Furthermore, the mobile orientation (portrait and landscape) was considered while taking input from the user. Apart from using traditional keystroke features, accelerometer data were also combined for classification using Random Forest(RF) and K-Nearest Neighbour(KNN) classifiers. The three-step authentication method was able to authenticate a user with an EER of 2.9% for the relaxing landscape position. Finally, the model was optimized using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to reduce the feature set and make the model more practical for mobile phones. Optimization helped to reduce the number of features from 55 to 17 and improved the EER to 2.2%. The research validated that relaxing and walking positions are the best positions to authenticate a user using keystroke dynamics.
High-Resolution Deep Image Matting

Image matting is a key technique for image and video editing and composition. Conventionally, deep learning approaches take the whole input image and an associated trimap to infer the alpha matte using convolutional neural networks. Such approaches set state-of-the-arts in image matting; however, they may fail in real-world matting applications due to hardware limitations, since real-world input images for matting are mostly of very high resolution. In this paper, we propose HDMatt, a first deep learning based image matting approach for high-resolution inputs. More concretely, HDMatt runs matting in a patch-based crop-and-stitch manner for high-resolution inputs with a novel module design to address the contextual dependency and consistency issues between different patches. Compared with vanilla patch-based inference which computes each patch independently, we explicitly model the cross-patch contextual dependency with a newly-proposed Cross-Patch Contextual module (CPC) guided by the given trimap. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its necessity for high-resolution inputs. Our HDMatt approach also sets new state-of-the-art performance on Adobe Image Matting and AlphaMatting benchmarks and produce impressive visual results on more real-world high-resolution images.
Reform of English interactive teaching mode based on cloud computing artificial intelligence – a practice analysis

Based on the cloud computing artificial intelligence model, the English interactive teaching model summarized and analyzed in an in-depth manner, the characteristics of the smart classroom explored, and the interactive teaching model reform practiced. This article has studied and analyzed the classic teaching model. Finally, based on constructivism, the advantages of the constructivism teaching model, cooperative teaching model, and mastering learning model selected to construct the teaching model of artificial intelligence courses. Through the questionnaire survey of the current teaching status of artificial intelligence courses, and the investigation of each link of the constructed model, according to the results of the survey to optimize the construction of artificial intelligence courses teaching model to make it more perfect. Based on the cloud computing technology, the system architecture and function module division of the network open class platform designed based on the overall needs, and developed and implemented on this basis. Through global and local two-level authentication, user information synchronization, and interconnection between homogeneous clouds, the identity management function realized. With the help of the e-schoolbag function, the learning results continuously and accurately evaluated, so that every learner can get a good learning experience.
ÆGIS: Shielding Vulnerable Smart Contracts Against Attacks

In recent years, smart contracts have suffered major exploits, cost- ing millions of dollars. Unlike traditional programs, smart contracts are deployed on a blockchain. As such, they cannot be modified once deployed. Though various tools have been proposed to detect vulnerable smart contracts, the majority fails to protect vulnera- ble contracts that have already been deployed on the blockchain. Only very few solutions have been proposed so far to tackle the issue of post-deployment. However, these solutions suffer from low precision and are not generic enough to prevent any type of attack. In this work, we introduce ÆGIS, a dynamic analysis tool that protects smart contracts from being exploited during runtime. Its capability of detecting new vulnerabilities can easily be extended through so-called attack patterns. These patterns are written in a domain-specific language that is tailored to the execution model of Ethereum smart contracts. The language enables the description of malicious control and data flows. In addition, we propose a novel mechanism to streamline and speed up the process of managing attack patterns. Patterns are voted upon and stored via a smart contract, thus leveraging the benefits of tamper-resistance and transparency provided by the blockchain. We compare ÆGIS to current state-of-the-art tools and demonstrate that our solution achieves higher precision in detecting attacks. Finally, we perform a large-scale analysis on the first 4.5 million blocks of the Ethereum blockchain, thereby confirming the occurrences of well reported and yet unreported attacks in the wild.
MuLViS: Multi-Level Encryption Based Security System for Surveillance Videos

Video Surveillance (VS) systems are commonly deployed for real-time abnormal event detection and autonomous video analytics. Video captured by surveillance cameras in real-time often contains identifiable personal information, which must be privacy protected, sometimes along with the locations of the surveillance and other sensitive information. Within the Surveillance System, these videos are processed and stored on a variety of devices. The processing and storage heterogeneity of those devices, together with their network requirements, make real-time surveillance systems complex and challenging. This paper proposes a surveillance system, named as Multi-Level Video Security (MuLViS) for privacy-protected cameras. Firstly, a Smart Surveillance Security Ontology (SSSO) is integrated within the MuLViS, with the aim of autonomously selecting the privacy level matching the operating device's hardware specifications and network capabilities. Overall, along with its device-specific security, the system leads to relatively fast indexing and retrieval of surveillance video. Secondly, information within the videos are protected at the times of capturing, streaming, and storage by means of differing encryption levels. An extensive evaluation of the system, through visual inspection and statistical analysis of experimental video results, such as by the Encryption Space Ratio (ESR), has demonstrated the aptness of the security level assignments. The system is suitable for surveillance footage protection, which can be made General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant, ensuring that lawful data access respects individuals' privacy rights.
Integrating a Social Robot in Higher Education – A Field Study

The benefits of social robots in educational contexts were mainly investigated with children, but also bear great potential to support learners and teachers in higher education. To further explore the potential of social robots in the context of university teaching, we implemented a robot-supported learning environment as a complementary training to a university course. To learn more about the students' perspective and attitudes towards the integration of robots in their education, we conducted a field study with qualitative interviews as data collection method. Our results show a clear positive perception of the robot-supported learning environment, and indicate a positive impact on the learning outcomes. Most students suppose an additional value in the presence of the robot compared to traditional on-screen scenario or self-study, and perceived the robot to increase their motivation, attention and concentration. We found a clear interest of the students to use the learning environment again in the future. However, more individualized feedback was desired.
Tokenization of Real Estate Using Blockchain Technology

Real estate is by far one of the most trusted investments that people have preferred, being a lucrative investment it provides a steady source of income in the form of lease and rents. Although there are numerous advantages, one of the key downsides of real estate investments is lack of liquidity. Thus, even though global real estate investments amount to about twice the size of investments in stock markets, the number of investors in the real estate market is significantly lower. Blockchain technology has real potential in addressing the issues of liquidity and transparency, opening the market to even retail investors. Owing to the functionality and flexibility of creating Security Tokens, which are backed by real-world assets, real estate can be made liquid with the help of Special Purpose Vehicles. Tokens of ERC 777 standard, which represent fractional ownership of the real estate can be purchased by an investor and these tokens can also be listed on secondary exchanges. The robustness of Smart Contracts can enable the efficient transfer of tokens and seamless distribution of earnings amongst the investors. This work describes Ethereum blockchain-based solutions to make the existing Real Estate investment system much more efficient.
Self-Training for End-to-End Speech Translation

One of the main challenges for end-to-end speech translation is data scarcity. We leverage pseudo-labels generated from unlabeled audio by a cascade and an end-to-end speech translation model. This provides 8.3 and 5.7 BLEU gains over a strong semi-supervised baseline on the MuST-C English-French and English-German datasets, reaching state-of-the art performance. The effect of the quality of the pseudo-labels is investigated. Our approach is shown to be more effective than simply pre-training the encoder on the speech recognition task. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of self-training by directly generating pseudo-labels with an end-to-end model instead of a cascade model.
New Approaches for Quantum Copy-Protection

Quantum copy-protection uses the unclonability of quantum states to construct quantum software that provably cannot be pirated. copy-protection would be immensely useful, but unfortunately, little is known about achieving it in general. In this work, we make progress on this goal, by giving the following results:
Receptive Multi-Granularity Representation for Person Re-Identification

A key for person re-identification is achieving consistent local details for discriminative representation across variable environments. Current stripe-based feature learning approaches have delivered impressive accuracy, but do not make a proper trade-off between diversity, locality, and robustness, which easily suffers from part semantic inconsistency for the conflict between rigid partition and misalignment. This paper proposes a receptive multi-granularity learning approach to facilitate stripe-based feature learning. This approach performs local partition on the intermediate representations to operate receptive region ranges, rather than current approaches on input images or output features, thus can enhance the representation of locality while remaining proper local association. Toward this end, the local partitions are adaptively pooled by using significance-balanced activations for uniform stripes. Random shifting augmentation is further introduced for a higher variance of person appearing regions within bounding boxes to ease misalignment. By two-branch network architecture, different scales of discriminative identity representation can be learned. In this way, our model can provide a more comprehensive and efficient feature representation without larger model storage costs. Extensive experiments on intra-dataset and cross-dataset evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Especially, our approach achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy of 96.2%@Rank-1 or 90.0%@mAP on the challenging Market-1501 benchmark.
Novel method for component separation of extended sources in X-ray astronomy

In high-energy astronomy, spectro-imaging instruments such as X-ray detectors allow investigation of the spatial and spectral properties of extended sources including galaxy clusters, galaxies, diffuse interstellar medium, supernova remnants and pulsar wind nebulae. In these sources, each physical component possesses a different spatial and spectral signature, but the components are entangled. Extracting the intrinsic spatial and spectral information of the individual components from this data is a challenging task. Current analysis methods do not fully exploit the 2D-1D (x,y,E) nature of the data, as the spatial and spectral information are considered separately. Here we investigate the application of a Blind Source Separation algorithm that jointly exploits the spectral and spatial signatures of each component in order to disentangle them. We explore the capabilities of a new BSS method (General Morphological Component Analysis; GMCA), initially developed to extract an image of the Cosmic Microwave Background from Planck data, in an X-ray context. The performance of GMCA on X-ray data is tested using Monte-Carlo simulations of supernova remnant toy models, designed to represent typical science cases. We find that GMCA is able to separate highly entangled components in X-ray data even in high contrast scenarios, and can extract with high accuracy the spectrum and map of each physical component. A modification is proposed to improve the spectral fidelity in the case of strongly overlapping spatial components, and we investigate a resampling method to derive realistic uncertainties associated to the results of the algorithm. Applying the modified algorithm to the deep Chandra observations of Cassiopeia A, we are able to produce detailed maps of the synchrotron emission at low energies (0.6-2.2 keV), and of the red/blue shifted distributions of a number of elements including Si and Fe K.
“I’d rather just go to bed”: Understanding Indirect Answers

We revisit a pragmatic inference problem in dialog: Understanding indirect responses to questions. Humans can interpret ‘I’m starving.’ in response to ‘Hungry?’, even without direct cue words such as ‘yes’ and ‘no’. In dialog systems, allowing natural responses rather than closed vocabularies would be similarly beneficial. However, today’s systems are only as sensitive to these pragmatic moves as their language model allows. We create and release the first large-scale English language corpus ‘Circa’ with 34,268 (polar question, indirect answer) pairs to enable progress on this task. The data was collected via elaborate crowdsourcing, and contains utterances with yes/no meaning, as well as uncertain, middle-ground, and conditional responses. We also present BERT-based neural models to predict such categories for a question-answer pair. We find that while transfer learning from entailment works reasonably, performance is not yet sufficient for robust dialog. Our models reach 82-88% accuracy for a 4-class distinction, and 74-85% for 6 classes.
Tell Me How to Ask Again: Question Data Augmentation with Controllable Rewriting in Continuous Space

In this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation method, referred to as Controllable Rewriting based Question Data Augmentation (CRQDA), for machine reading comprehension (MRC), question generation, and question-answering natural language inference tasks.We treat the question data augmentation task as a constrained question rewriting problem to generate context-relevant, high-quality, and diverse question data samples.CRQDA utilizes a Transformer autoencoder to map the original discrete question into a continuous embedding space.It then uses a pre-trained MRC model to revise the question representation iteratively with gradientbased optimization.Finally, the revised question representations are mapped back into the discrete space, which serve as additional question data.Comprehensive experiments on SQuAD 2.0, SQuAD 1.1 question generation, and QNLI tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of CRQDA 1 .
Discovering New Intents with Deep Aligned Clustering

Discovering new intents is a crucial task in dialogue systems. Most existing methods are limited in transferring the prior knowledge from known intents to new intents. These methods also have difficulties in providing high-quality supervised signals to learn clustering-friendly features for grouping unlabeled intents. In this work, we propose an effective method (Deep Aligned Clustering) to discover new intents with the aid of limited known intent data. Firstly, we leverage a few labeled known intent samples as prior knowledge to pre-train the model. Then, we perform k-means to produce cluster assignments as pseudo-labels. Moreover, we propose an alignment strategy to tackle the label inconsistency problem during clustering assignments. Finally, we learn the intent representations under the supervision of the aligned pseudo-labels. With an unknown number of new intents, we predict the number of intent categories by eliminating low-confidence intent-wise clusters. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our method is more robust and achieves substantial improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.
ExchNet: A Unified Hashing Network for Large-Scale Fine-Grained Image Retrieval

Retrieving content relevant images from a large-scale fine-grained dataset could suffer from intolerably slow query speed and highly redundant storage cost, due to high-dimensional real-valued embeddings which aim to distinguish subtle visual differences of fine-grained objects. In this paper, we study the novel fine-grained hashing topic to generate compact binary codes for fine-grained images, leveraging the search and storage efficiency of hash learning to alleviate the aforementioned problems. Specifically, we propose a unified end-to-end trainable network, termed as ExchNet. Based on attention mechanisms and proposed attention constraints, ExchNet can firstly obtain both local and global features to represent object parts and the whole fine-grained objects, respectively. Furthermore, to ensure the discriminative ability and semantic meaning’s consistency of these part-level features across images, we design a local feature alignment approach by performing a feature exchanging operation. Later, an alternating learning algorithm is employed to optimize the whole ExchNet and then generate the final binary hash codes. Validated by extensive experiments, our ExchNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art generic hashing methods on five fine-grained datasets. Moreover, compared with other approximate nearest neighbor methods, ExchNet achieves the best speed-up and storage reduction, revealing its efficiency and practicality.
RELINE: point-of-interest recommendations using multiple network embeddings

The rapid growth of users’ involvement in Location-Based Social Networks has led to the expeditious growth of the data on a global scale. The need of accessing and retrieving relevant information close to users’ preferences is an open problem which continuously raises new challenges for recommendation systems. The exploitation of points-of-interest (POIs) recommendation by existing models is inadequate due to the sparsity and the cold start problems. To overcome these problems many models were proposed in the literature; however, most of them ignore important factors, such as: geographical proximity, social influence, or temporal and preference dynamics, which tackle their accuracy while personalize their recommendations. In this work, we investigate these problems and present a unified model that jointly learns user’s and POI dynamics. Our proposal is termed RELINE (REcommendations with muLtIple Network Embeddings). More specifically, RELINE captures: (i) the social, (ii) the geographical, (iii) the temporal influence, and (iv) the users’ preference dynamics, by embedding eight relational graphs into one shared latent space. We have evaluated our approach against state-of-the-art methods with three large real-world datasets in terms of accuracy. Additionally, we have examined the effectiveness of our approach against the cold-start problem. Performance evaluation results demonstrate that significant performance improvement is achieved in comparison to existing state-of-the-art methods.