Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
DisCoVQA: Temporal Distortion-Content Transformers for Video Quality Assessment

Compared with spatial counterparts, temporal relationships between frames and their influences on video quality assessment (VQA) are still relatively under-studied in existing works. These relationships lead to two important types of effects for video quality. Firstly, some meaningless temporal variations (such as shaking, flicker, and unsmooth scene transitions) cause temporal distortions that degrade quality of videos. Secondly, the human visual system often has different attention to frames with different contents, resulting in their different importance to the overall video quality. Based on prominent time-series modeling ability of transformers, we propose a novel and effective transformer-based VQA method to tackle these two issues. To better differentiate temporal variations and thus capture the temporal distortions, we design the Spatial-Temporal Distortion Extraction (STDE) module that extracts multi-level spatial-temporal features with a video swin transformer tiny (Swin-T) backbone and uses temporal difference layer to further capture these distortions. To tackle with temporal quality attention, we propose the encoder-decoder-like temporal content transformer (TCT). We also introduce the temporal sampling on features to reduce the input length for the TCT, so as to improve the learning effectiveness and efficiency of this module. Consisting of the STDE and the TCT, the proposed Temporal Distortion-Content Transformers for Video Quality Assessment (DisCoVQA) reaches state-of-the-art performance on several VQA benchmarks without any extra pre-training datasets and up to 10% better generalization ability than existing methods. We also conduct extensive ablation experiments to prove the effectiveness of each part in our proposed model, and provide visualizations to prove that the proposed modules achieve our intention on modeling these temporal issues. Our code is published at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/QualityAssessment/DisCoVQA</uri> .
TransRVNet: LiDAR Semantic Segmentation With Transformer

Effective and efficient 3D semantic segmentation from large-scale LiDAR point cloud is a fundamental problem in the field of autonomous driving. In this paper, we present Transformer-Range-View Network (TransRVNet), a novel and powerful projection-based CNN-Transformer architecture to infer point-wise semantics. First, a Multi Residual Channel Interaction Attention Module (MRCIAM) is introduced to capture channel-level multi-scale feature and model intra-channel, inter-channel correlations based on attention mechanism. Then, in the encoder stage, we use a well-designed Residual Context Aggregation Module (RCAM), including a residual dilated convolution structure and a context aggregation module, to fuse information from different receptive fields while reducing the impact of missing points. Finally, a Balanced Non-square-Transformer Module (BNTM) is employed as fundamental component of decoder to achieve locally feature dependencies for more discriminative feature learning by introducing the non-square shifted window strategy. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments conducted on challenging SemanticKITTI and SemanticPOSS benchmarks have verified the effectiveness of our proposed technique. Our TransRVNet presents superior performance over most existing state-of-the-art approaches. The source code and trained model are available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/huixiancheng/TransRVNet</uri> .
Safeguarding Cloud Computing Infrastructure: A Security Analysis

Cloud computing is the provision of hosted resources, comprising software, hardware and processing over the World Wide Web.The advantages of rapid deployment, versatility, low expenses and scalability have led to the widespread use of cloud computing across organizations of all sizes, mostly as a component of the combination/multi-cloud infrastructure structure.While cloud storage offers significant benefits as well as cost-effective alternatives for IT management and expansion, new opportunities and challenges in the context of security vulnerabilities are emerging in this domain.Cloud security, also recognized as cloud computing security, refers to a collection of policies, regulations, systematic processes that function together to secure cloud infrastructure systems.These security procedures are designed to safeguard cloud data, to facilitate regulatory enforcement and to preserve the confidentiality of consumers, as well as to lay down encryption rules for specific devices and applications.This study presents an overview of the innovative cloud computing and security challenges that exist at different levels of cloud infrastructure.In this league, the present research work would be a significant contribution in reducing the security attacks on cloud computing so as to provide sustainable and secure services.
Constructions of near MDS codes which are optimal locally recoverable codes

A linear code with length n, dimension k and minimum distance n−k is said to be almost maximum distance separable (AMDS for short). An AMDS code whose dual is also AMDS is referred to as a near maximum distance separable (NMDS for short) code. NMDS codes have nice applications in finite geometry, combinatorics, cryptography and data storage. In this paper, we first present several constructions of NMDS codes and determine their weight enumerators. In particular, some constructions produce NMDS codes with the same parameters but different weight enumerators. Then we determine the locality of the NMDS codes and obtain many families of distance-optimal and dimension-optimal locally recoverable codes.
Chatbot-Based Services: A Study on Customers’ Reuse Intention

The main objective of this article is to investigate the factors that influence customers’ intention to reuse chatbot-based services. The study employs a combination of the technology acceptance model (TAM) with other contributions in the literature to develop a theoretical model that predicts and explains customers’ intention to reuse chatbots. The research uses structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the proposed hypotheses. Data collected from 201 chatbot users among Portuguese consumers were analyzed, and the results showed that user satisfaction, perceived usefulness, and subjective norm are significant predictors of chatbot reuse intentions. Additionally, the findings indicated that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and trust have a positive impact on attitudes toward using chatbots. Trust was found to have a significant impact on perceived usefulness, user satisfaction, and attitudes toward using chatbots. However, there was no significant effect of attitude toward using chatbots, perceived ease of use, trust, and perceived social presence on reuse intentions. The article concludes with theoretical contributions and recommendations for managers.
Multi-view clustering guided by unconstrained non-negative matrix factorization

Multi-view clustering based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMFMvC) is a well-known method for handling high-dimensional multi-view data. To satisfy the non-negativity constraint of the matrix, NMFMvC is usually solved using the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) conditions. However, this optimization method is poorly scalable. To this end, we propose an unconstrained non-negative matrix factorization multi-view clustering (uNMFMvC) model. First, the objective function was constructed by decoupling the elements of the matrix and combining the elements with a non-linear mapping function in a non-negative value domain. The objective function was then optimized using the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm. Subsequently, three uNMFMvC methods were constructed based on different mapping functions and detailed reasoning was provided. Finally, experiments were conducted on eight public datasets and compared with cutting-edge multi-view clustering methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model has significant advantages.
Duo: A High-Throughput Reconfigurable Datacenter Network Using Local Routing and Control

The performance of many cloud-based applications critically depends on the capacity of the underlying datacenter network. A particularly innovative approach to improve the throughput in datacenters is enabled by emerging optical technologies, which allow to dynamically adjust the physical network topology, both in an oblivious or demand-aware manner. However, such topology engineering, i.e., the operation and control of dynamic datacenter networks, is considered complex and currently comes with restrictions and overheads. We present Duo, a novel demand-aware reconfigurable rack-to-rack datacenter network design realized with a simple and efficient control plane. Duo is based on the well-known de Bruijn topology (implemented using a small number of optical circuit switches) and the key observation that this topology can be enhanced using dynamic (''opportunistic'') links between its nodes. In contrast to previous systems, Duo has several desired features: i) It makes effective use of the network capacity by supporting integrated and multi-hop routing (paths that combine both static and dynamic links). ii) It uses a work-conserving queue scheduling which enables out-of-the-box TCP support. iii) Duo employs greedy routing that is implemented using standard IP longest prefix match with small forwarding tables. And iv) during topological reconfigurations, routing tables require only local updates, making this approach ideal for dynamic networks. We evaluate Duo in end-to-end packet-level simulations, comparing it to the state-of-the-art static and dynamic networks designs. We show that Duo provides higher throughput, shorter paths, lower flow completion times for high priority flows, and minimal packet reordering, all using existing network and transport layer protocols. We also report on a proof-of-concept implementation of Duo's control and data plane.
A High-Quality Rice Leaf Disease Image Data Augmentation Method Based on a Dual GAN

Deep learning models need sufficient training samples to support them in the training process; otherwise, overfitting occurs, resulting in model failure. However, in the field of smart agriculture, there are common problems, such as difficulty in obtaining high-quality disease samples and high cost. To solve this problem, this paper proposed a high-quality image augmentation (HQIA) method for generating high-quality rice leaf disease images based on a dual generative adversarial network (GAN). First, the original samples were used to train Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs (WGAN-GP) to generate pseudo-data samples. The pseudo-data samples were put into the Optimized-Real-ESRGAN (Opt-Real-ESRGAN) to generate high-quality pseudo-data samples. Finally, the high-quality pseudo-data samples were put into the disease classification convolutional neural network, and the effectiveness of the method was verified by indicators. Experimental results showed that this method can generate high-quality rice leaf disease images, and the recognition accuracy of high-quality rice disease image samples augmented by this method was 4.57% higher than that of using only the original training set on ResNet18 and 4.1% higher on VGG11. Compared with the data augmentation method only by WGAN-GP, the accuracy of ResNet18 increased by 3.08%, and the accuracy of VGG11 increased by 3.55%. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method with limited training datasets.
UAV Aerial Image Generation of Crucial Components of High-Voltage Transmission Lines Based on Multi-Level Generative Adversarial Network

With the aim of improving the image quality of the crucial components of transmission lines taken by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), a priori work on the defective fault location of high-voltage transmission lines has attracted great attention from researchers in the UAV field. In recent years, generative adversarial nets (GAN) have achieved good results in image generation tasks. However, the generation of high-resolution images with rich semantic details from complex backgrounds is still challenging. Therefore, we propose a novel GANs-based image generation model to be used for the critical components of power lines. However, to solve the problems related to image backgrounds in public data sets, considering that the image background of the common data set CPLID (Chinese Power Line Insulator Dataset) is simple. However, it cannot fully reflect the complex environments of transmission line images; therefore, we established an image data set named “KCIGD” (The Key Component Image Generation Dataset), which can be used for model training. CFM-GAN (GAN networks based on coarse–fine-grained generators and multiscale discriminators) can generate the images of the critical components of transmission lines with rich semantic details and high resolutions. CFM-GAN can provide high-quality image inputs for transmission line fault detection and line inspection models to guarantee the safe operation of power systems. Additionally, we can use these high-quality images to expand the data set. In addition, CFM-GAN consists of two generators and multiple discriminators, which can be flexibly applied to image generation tasks in other scenarios. We introduce a penalty mechanism-related Monte Carlo search (MCS) approach in the CFM-GAN model to introduce more semantic details in the generated images. Moreover, we presented a multiscale discriminator structure according to the multitask learning mechanisms to effectively enhance the quality of the generated images. Eventually, the experiments using the CFM-GAN model on the KCIGD dataset and the publicly available CPLID indicated that the model used in this work outperformed existing mainstream models in improving image resolution and quality.
MCS-YOLO: A Multiscale Object Detection Method for Autonomous Driving Road Environment Recognition

Object detection and recognition of road scenes are crucial tasks of the autonomous driving environmental perception system.The low inference speed and accuracy in object detection models hinder the development of autonomous driving technology.Searching for improvement of detection accuracy and speed is still a challenging task.For solving these problems, we proposed an MCS-YOLO algorithm.Firstly, a coordinate attention module is inserted into the backbone to aggregate the feature map's spatial coordinate and cross-channel information.Then, we designed a multiscale small object detection structure to improve the recognition sensitivity of dense small object.Finally, we applied the Swin Transformer structure to the CNN to enable the network to focus on contextual spatial information.Conducting ablation study on the autonomous driving dataset BDD100K, MCS-YOLO algorithm achieves a mean average precision of 53.6% and a recall rate of 48.3%, which are 4.3% and 3.9% better than the YOLOv5s algorithm respectively.In addition, it can achieve real-time detection speed of 55 frames per second in a real scene.The results show that the MCS-YOLO algorithm is effective and superior in the task of automatic driving object detection.
Space and Time-Efficient Quantum Multiplier in Post Quantum Cryptography Era

This paper examines the asymptotic performance of multiplication and the cost of quantum implementation for the Naive schoolbook, Karatsuba, and Toom-Cook methods in the classical and quantum cases and provides insights into multiplication roles in the post-quantum cryptography (PQC) era.Further, considering that the lattice-based PQC algorithm is based on polynomial multiplication algorithms, including the Toom-Cook 4-way multiplier as its fundamental building block, we propose a higher-degree multiplier, the Toom-Cook 8-way multiplier, which has the lowest asymptotic performance and implementation cost.Additionally, the designed multiplication will include additional sub-operations to complete the multiplication of large integers in order to prevent side-channel attacks.To design our Toom-Cook 8-way in detail, we employ detailed step computations such as splitting, evaluation, point-wise multiplication, interpolation, and recomposition, as well as several strategies to reduce space and time requirements.Existing asymptotic performance and quantum implementation cost multipliers are compared with our 2way, 4-way, and 8-way Toom-Cook multiplier designs.Our Toom-Cook 8-way quantum multiplier has the lowest asymptotic performance analysis or qubit count in terms of space efficiency, with ( 15 8 ) log 15(2 log 15-log 8) log 8 or asymptotically ( 1.245 ).The design has the lowest logical Toffoli counts bound at 112 log 8 15 -128 and Toffoli depth of ( 15 8 ) 1-log 15 (2 log 15-log 8) log 8 , asymptotically close to ( 1.0569 ), which corresponds to a space-and time-efficient multiplication.
Expansive and extractive networks of Web3

The self-proclaimed usurper of Web 2.0, Web3 quickly became the center of attention. Not long ago, the public discourse was saturated with projects, promises, and peculiarities of Web3. Now the spotlight has swung around to focus on the many faults, failures, and frauds of Web3. The cycles of technological trends and investment bubbles seem to be accelerating in such a way as to escape any attempt at observing them in motion before they crash, and then everybody moves on to the next thing. Importantly, Web3 was not an anomaly or curiosity in the broader tech industry. It articulates patterns that existed before Web3 and will exist after. Web3 should be understood as a case study of innovation within the dominant model of Silicon Valley venture capitalism. Our focus in this article is on understanding how the movement around Web3 formed through an interplay between (1) normative concepts and contestations related to ideas of “decentralization” and (2) political economic interests and operations related to the dynamics of fictitious capital. By offering a critical analysis of Web3, our goal is also to show how any even potentially progressive (or as we call them “expansive”) forms of Web3 development struggle for success, recognition, and attention due to the wild excesses of hype and investment devoted to “extractive” forms of Web3. In the process, they provide us a better view of how different arrangements of technopolitics can exist at the same time, side-by-side, in complicated ways.
Seasonal assessment of heavy metal contamination of groundwater in two major dumpsites in Sierra Leone

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A Novel Blockchain and Internet of Things-Based Food Traceability System for Smart Cities

Rapid urbanization has recently caused serious problems for cities all around the world. Smart cities have drawn much interest from researchers in the present research paradigm to manage the expanding urban population. Frameworks for smart cities are planned and implemented using platforms based on blockchain and the Internet of Things (BIOT). Smart cities may use the BIoT platform to provide improved transportation, food traceability, and healthcare services. Food safety is one of the sectors where less research has been done than the others. The importance of food safety is now more widely recognized, making it essential to improve the traceability and transparency of the food supply chain. In this paper, a novel BIOT-based layered framework using EOSIO has been proposed for effective food traceability. The proposed system first identifies the suitable traceability units to provide better transparency and traceability and then defines and implements a layered architecture using Ethereum and EOSIO blockchain platforms. The performance of the proposed EOSIO-based model is evaluated using the practicality of the consensus algorithm, block production rate, throughput, and block confirmation time. The proposed traceability system attains a block production rate of 0.5 s and a block confirmation time of 1 s, which is much lower than the Ethereum-based traceability system. Hence, from the experimental evidence, the superiority of the proposed EOSIO-based food traceability can be observed.
SDRC-YOLO: A Novel Foreign Object Intrusion Detection Algorithm in Railway Scenarios

Foreign object intrusion detection is vital to ensure the safety of railway transportation. Recently, object detection algorithms based on deep learning have been applied in a wide range of fields. However, in complex and volatile railway environments, high false detection, missed detection, and poor timeliness still exist in traditional object detection methods. To address these problems, an efficient railway foreign object intrusion detection approach SDRC-YOLO is proposed. First, a hybrid attention mechanism that fuses local representation ability is proposed to improve the identification accuracy of small targets. Second, DW-Decoupled Head is proposed to construct a mixed feature channel to improve localization and classification ability. Third, a large convolution kernel is applied to build a larger receptive field and improve the feature extraction capability of the network. In addition, the lightweight universal upsampling operator CARAFE is employed to sample the size and proportion of the intruding foreign body features in order to accelerate the convergence speed of the network. Experimental results show that, compared with the baseline YOLOv5s algorithm, SDRC-YOLO improved the mean average precision (mAP) by 2.8% and 1.8% on datasets RS and Pascal VOC 2012, respectively.
Unsupervised Anomaly Detection for IoT-Based Multivariate Time Series: Existing Solutions, Performance Analysis and Future Directions

The recent wave of digitalization is characterized by the widespread deployment of sensors in many different environments, e.g., multi-sensor systems represent a critical enabling technology towards full autonomy in industrial scenarios. Sensors usually produce vast amounts of unlabeled data in the form of multivariate time series that may capture normal conditions or anomalies. Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection (MTSAD), i.e., the ability to identify normal or irregular operative conditions of a system through the analysis of data from multiple sensors, is crucial in many fields. However, MTSAD is challenging due to the need for simultaneous analysis of temporal (intra-sensor) patterns and spatial (inter-sensor) dependencies. Unfortunately, labeling massive amounts of data is practically impossible in many real-world situations of interest (e.g., the reference ground truth may not be available or the amount of data may exceed labeling capabilities); therefore, robust unsupervised MTSAD is desirable. Recently, advanced techniques in machine learning and signal processing, including deep learning methods, have been developed for unsupervised MTSAD. In this article, we provide an extensive review of the current state of the art with a theoretical background about multivariate time-series anomaly detection. A detailed numerical evaluation of 13 promising algorithms on two publicly available multivariate time-series datasets is presented, with advantages and shortcomings highlighted.