Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
On the Effect of Observed Subject Biases in Apparent Personality Analysis From Audio-Visual Signals

Personality perception is implicitly biased due to many subjective factors, such as cultural, social, contextual, gender, and appearance. Approaches developed for automatic personality perception are not expected to predict the real personality of the target but the personality external observers attributed to it. Hence, they have to deal with human bias, inherently transferred to the training data. However, bias analysis in personality computing is an almost unexplored area. In this article, we study different possible sources of bias affecting personality perception, including emotions from facial expressions, attractiveness, age, gender, and ethnicity, as well as their influence on prediction ability for apparent personality estimation. To this end, we propose a multimodal deep neural network that combines raw audio and visual information alongside predictions of attribute-specific models to regress apparent personality. We also analyze spatio-temporal aggregation schemes and the effect of different time intervals on first impressions. We base our study on the ChaLearn first impressions dataset, consisting of one-person conversational videos. Our model shows state-of-the-art results regressing apparent personality based on the Big-Five model. Furthermore, given the interpretability nature of our network design, we provide an incremental analysis on the impact of each possible source of bias on final network predictions.
A Systematic Mapping Study on Engineering Function-as-a-Service Platforms and Tools

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a novel cloud service model allowing to develop fine-grained, provider-managed cloud applications. In this work, we investigate which challenges motivate researchers to introduce or enhance FaaS platforms and tools. We use a systematic mapping study method to collect and analyze the relevant scientific literature, which helps us answering the three clearly-defined research questions. We design our study using well-established guidelines and systematically apply it to 62 selected publications. The collected and synthesized data provides useful insights into the main challenges that motivate researchers to work on this topic and can be helpful in identifying research gaps for future research.
Bi-Labeled LDA: Inferring Interest Tags for Non-famous Users in Social Network

Abstract User tags in social network are valuable information for many applications such as Web search, recommender systems and online advertising. Thus, extracting high quality tags to capture user interest has attracted many researchers’ study in recent years. Most previous studies inferred users’ interest based on text posted in social network. In some cases, ordinary users usually only publish a small number of text posts and text information is not related to their interest very much. Compared with famous user, it is more challenging to find non-famous (ordinary) user’s interest. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic topic model, Bi - Labeled LDA, to automatically find interest tags for non-famous users in social network such as Twitter. Instead of extracting tags from text posts, tags of non-famous users are inferred from interest topics of famous users. With the proposed model, the formulation of social relationship between non-famous users and famous user is simulated and interest tags of famous users are exploited to supervise the training of the model and to make use of latent relation among famous users. Furthermore, the influence of popularity of famous user and popular tags are considered, and tags of non-famous users are ranked based on random walk model. Experiments were conducted on Twitter real datasets. Comparison with state-of-the-art methods shows that our method is more superior in terms of both ranking and quality of the tagging results.
Speculator

Speculative execution attacks exploit vulnerabilities at a CPU's microarchitectural level, which, until recently, remained hidden below the instruction set architecture, largely undocumented by CPU vendors. New speculative execution attacks are released on a monthly basis, showing how aspects of the so-far unexplored microarchitectural attack surface can be exploited. In this paper, we introduce, Speculator, a new tool to investigate these new microarchitectural attacks and their mitigations, which aims to be the GDB of speculative execution. Using speculative execution markers, set of instructions that we found are observable through performance counters during CPU speculation, Speculator can study microarchitectural behavior of single snippets of code, or more complex attacker and victim scenarios (e.g. Branch Target Injection (BTI) attacks). We also present our findings on multiple CPU platforms showing the precision and the flexibility offered by Speculator and its templates.
Autonomous Robot Navigation System Using the Evolutionary Multi-Verse optimizer Algorithm

The field of neuroevolution has received great attention in recent years due to its promising capability for developing well-performing models. It has been applied to many real-world problems ranging from medical diagnosis to autonomous robots. The choice of the evolutionary algorithm (EA) has a huge impact on the neuroevolution overall performance. Despite recent progress in the field, it is not clear what the best choice of EA is. The problem becomes more severe considering a dozen of EAs available for neuroevolution applications. In this paper, six state of the art EAs are applied for the task of autonomous robot navigation. These EAs are MultiVerse optimizer (MVO), moth-flame optimization (MFO), particle swarm optimization (PSO), cuckoo search (CS), Grey wolf optimizer (GWO) and bat algorithm. MLP networks are trained using these six evolutionary algorithms to solve the classification task related to the autonomous robot navigation. Comprehensive experiments are conducted using three datasets and obtained results are visually and statistically compared. To the best knowledge of the authors, comparison among the aforementioned algorithms has not been considered in the literature. It is found that neuroevolution methods perform well for the task of autonomous robot navigation. Amongst investigated EAs, MVOtrained achieves the highest and most consistent performance metrics.
A Modulation Classification Algorithm for Multipath Signals Based on Cepstrum

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) is an important intermediate step between signal detection and demodulation by the receiving instrument in the noncooperative communication system. Multipath fading causes serious degradation in classification performance of AMC. For the purpose of improving the performance of AMC for multipath modulation signals, we proposed a novel cepstrum-based preprocessing algorithm to eliminate the effect of multipath channel coefficient, and a logarithmic functional fitting method to classify modulated signals. First, we mathematically proved the feasibility of the proposed approach. Then, we experimentally tested our algorithm by the practically measured modulation data of quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK), 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM), and 64-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (64QAM). The results confirmed that our algorithm performed well for multipath signals and was robust to slight frequency and timing offsets. Compared with the existing methods, our algorithm also performed better than the techniques based on high-order cumulants or cyclic statistics and suffered less computational complexity than the cumulant-based method with channel estimation procedure.
Damage characterization and numerical simulation of shear experiment of plain woven glass-fiber reinforced composites based on 3D geometric reconstruction

The investigation on the effect of defects on the mechanical properties of composites is vital to explain the failure mechanism of materials. A computer tomography (CT) scanning in-situ shear test is designed to obtain u-CT images of plain weave glass-fiber reinforced composites. The images are then applied to reconstruct the samples by using image processing techniques. Damage evolution characterization of the plain weave glass-fiber composites under in-situ shear experiment are realized by visualizing damages in three dimension. The damage evolution process is compared with the numerical simulation results to verify the materials failure mode.
Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process-Based Mobile Robot Path Planning

This study presents a new path planning method based on Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) for a mobile robot to be effectively operated through a multi-objective decision making problem. Unlike typical AHP, the proposed FAHP has a difference in using triangulation fuzzy number based extent analysis to derive weight vectors among the considerations. FAHP framework for finding the optimal position in this study is defined with the highest level (goal), middle level (objectives), and the lowest level (alternatives). It analytically selects an optimal position as a sub-goal among points on the sensing boundary of the mobile robot considering the three objectives: the travel distance to the target, robot’s rotation, and safety against collision between obstacles. Alternative solutions are evaluated by quantifying the relative importance for the objectives. Comparative results obtained from the artificial potential field, AHP, and FAHP simulations show that FAHP is much preferable for mobile robot’s path planning than typical AHP.
A Blockchain Framework for Ensuring Data Quality in Multi-Organizational Clinical Trials

The cost and complexity of conducting multi-site clinical trials have significantly increased over time, with site monitoring, data management, and Institutional Review Board (IRB) amendments being key drivers. Trial sponsors, such as pharmaceutical companies, are also increasingly outsourcing trial management to multiple organizations. Enforcing compliance with standard operating procedures, such as preserving data privacy for human subject protection, is crucial for upholding the integrity of a study and its findings. Current efforts to ensure quality of data collected at multiple sites and by multiple organizations lack a secure, trusted, and efficient framework for fragmented data capture. To address this challenge, we propose a novel data management infrastructure based on a permissioned blockchain with private channels, smart contracts, and distributed ledgers. We use an example multi-organizational clinical trial to design and implement a blockchain network: generate activity-specific private channels to segregate data flow for confidentiality, write channel-specific smart contracts to enforce regulatory guidelines, monitor the immutable transaction log to detect protocol breach, and auto-generate audit trail. Through comprehensive experimental study, we demonstrate that our system handles high-throughput transactions, exhibits low-latency, and constitutes a trusted, scalable solution.
Blockchain solutions for healthcare

Blockchain is known as the technology powering bitcoin cryptocurrency. But blockchain's potential goes far beyond this, with healthcare being just one of the industries set to be revolutionized. This chapter focuses on the healthcare use cases and applications of blockchain, as well as the challenges facing the technology, which are currently being addressed by blockchain researchers and developers worldwide.
Energy-efficiency virtual machine placement based on binary gravitational search algorithm

Cloud computing is a remarkable growing paradigm for hosting and offering services through the Internet. It attracted the most notorious business companies and resulted to an exponential increase of its users from simple end users to companies that deploy more and more of their system over the cloud. The amount of resources to provide the demand became tremendous. therefore, a great need energy supply. The world as we know is highly concerned about the environment and the energy-efficiency in all aspect of life and the domain of IT is one them. To deal with energy wastage in data centers, researches use Virtual machine placement as a main key to assure cloud consolidation and reduce power wastage. Several approaches were proposed for Virtual machine placement. This paper proposes a solution based on Binary gravitational search algorithm (BGSA) for the virtual machine placement in the heterogeneous data center. In this work, we compared the BGSA method to fit with virtual machines in data centers with particle swarm optimization, First-fit, Best-fit, and worst-fit. results showed significant difference of energy save comparing to other strategies. The results obtained gave the advantage to our approach and its better response with the increase of number of virtual machines.
Algebraically Structured LWE, Revisited

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of algebraically structured Learning With Errors (LWE) variants, including Ring-LWE, Module-LWE, Polynomial-LWE, Order-LWE, and Middle-Product LWE, and a web of reductions to support their hardness, both among these problems themselves and from related worst-case problems on structured lattices. However, these reductions are often difficult to interpret and use, due to the complexity of their parameters and analysis, and most especially their (frequently large) blowup and distortion of the error distributions. In this paper we unify and simplify this line of work. First, we give a general framework that encompasses all proposed LWE variants (over commutative base rings), and in particular unifies all prior “algebraic” LWE variants defined over number fields. We then use this framework to give much simpler, more general, and tighter reductions from Ring-LWE to other algebraic LWE variants, including Module-LWE, Order-LWE, and Middle-Product LWE. In particular, all of our reductions have easy-to-analyze and frequently small error expansion; in some cases they even leave the error unchanged. A main message of our work is that it is straightforward to use the hardness of the original Ring-LWE problem as a foundation for the hardness of all other algebraic LWE problems defined over number fields, via simple and rather tight reductions.
Traffic Light Detection Using Tensorflow Object Detection Framework

Traditional methods in machine learning for detecting traffic lights and classification are replaced by the recent enhancements of deep learning object detection methods by success of building convolutional neural networks (CNN), which is a component of deep learning. This paper presents a deep learning approach for robust detection of traffic light by comparing two object detection models and by evaluating the flexibility of the TensorFlow Object Detection Framework to solve the real-time problems. They include Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD) MobileNet V2 and Faster-RCNN. Our experimental study shows that Faster-RCNN delivers 97.015%, which outperformed SSD by 38.806% for a model which had been trained using 441 images.
A Model for Joint Probabilistic Forecast of Solar Photovoltaic Power and Outdoor Temperature

In this paper, a stochastic model is proposed for a joint statistical description of solar photovoltaic (PV) power and outdoor temperature. The underlying correlation emerges from solar irradiance that is responsible in part for both the variability in solar PV power and temperature. The proposed model can be used to capture the uncertainty in solar PV power and its correlation with the electric power consumption of thermostatically controlled loads. First, a model for solar PV power that explicitly incorporates the stochasticity due to clouds via a regime-switching process between the three classes of sunny, overcast and partly cloudy is proposed. Then, the relationship between temperature and solar power is postulated using a second-order Volterra model. This joint modeling is leveraged to develop a joint probabilistic forecasting method for solar PV power and temperature. Real-world datasets that include solar PV power and temperature measurements in California are analyzed and the effectiveness of the joint model in providing probabilistic forecasts is verified. The proposed forecasting methodology outperforms several reference methods thus portraying that the underlying correlation between temperature and solar PV power is well defined and only requires a simple lower-complexity sampling space.
Language Features Matter: Effective Language Representations for Vision-Language Tasks

Shouldn't language and vision features be treated equally in vision-language (VL) tasks? Many VL approaches treat the language component as an afterthought, using simple language models that are either built upon fixed word embeddings trained on text-only data or are learned from scratch. We conclude that language features deserve more attention, which has been informed by experiments which compare different word embeddings, language models, and embedding augmentation steps on five common VL tasks: image-sentence retrieval, image captioning, visual question answering, phrase grounding, and text-to-clip retrieval. Our experiments provide some striking results; an average embedding language model outperforms a LSTM on retrieval-style tasks; state-of-the-art representations such as BERT perform relatively poorly on vision-language tasks. From this comprehensive set of experiments we can propose a set of best practices for incorporating the language component of vision-language tasks. To further elevate language features, we also show that knowledge in vision-language problems can be transferred across tasks to gain performance with multi-task training. This multi-task training is applied to a new Graph Oriented Vision-Language Embedding (GrOVLE), which we adapt from Word2Vec using WordNet and an original visual-language graph built from Visual Genome, providing a ready-to-use vision-language embedding: http://ai.bu.edu/grovle.
Interactive-Multiple-Model Algorithm Based on Minimax Particle Filtering

In this letter, we propose a new approach to tracking a target that maneuvers based on the multiple-constant-turns model. Usually, the interactive-multiple-model (IMM) algorithm based on the extended Kalman filter (IMM-EKF) is employed for this problem with successful tracking performance. Recently proposed IMM-particle filtering (IMM-PF) showed outperforming results over IMM-EKF for this nonlinear problem. The proposed approach in this letter is a new framework of PF that adopts the minimax strategy to IMM-PF. The minimax strategy results in the decreased variance of the weights of particles that provides the robustness against the degeneracy phenomenon (a common problem of generic PF). In this letter, we show outperforming results by IMM-minimax-PF over IMM-PF besides the IMM-EKF in terms of estimation accuracy and computational complexity.
Adaptive Learning for Robust Radial Basis Function Networks

This article addresses the robust estimation of the output layer linear parameters in a radial basis function network (RBFN). A prominent method used to estimate the output layer parameters in an RBFN with the predetermined hidden layer parameters is the least-squares estimation, which is the maximum-likelihood (ML) solution in the specific case of the Gaussian noise. We highlight the connection between the ML estimation and minimizing the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the actual noise distribution and the assumed Gaussian noise. Based on this connection, a method is proposed using a variant of a generalized KL divergence, which is known to be more robust to outliers in the pattern recognition and machine-learning problems. The proposed approach produces a surrogate-likelihood function, which is robust in the sense that it is adaptive to a broader class of noise distributions. Several signal processing experiments are conducted using artificially generated and real-world data. It is shown that in all cases, the proposed adaptive learning algorithm outperforms the standard approaches in terms of mean-squared error (MSE). Using the relative increase in the MSE for different noise conditions, we compare the robustness of our proposed algorithm with the existing methods for robust RBFN training and show that our method results in overall improvement in terms of absolute MSE values and consistency.
Point-to-Point Video Generation

While image synthesis achieves tremendous breakthroughs (e.g., generating realistic faces), video generation is less explored and harder to control, which limits its applications in the real world. For instance, video editing requires temporal coherence across multiple clips and thus poses both start and end constraints within a video sequence. We introduce point-to-point video generation that controls the generation process with two control points: the targeted start- and end-frames. The task is challenging since the model not only generates a smooth transition of frames but also plans ahead to ensure that the generated end-frame conforms to the targeted end-frame for videos of various lengths. We propose to maximize the modified variational lower bound of conditional data likelihood under a skip-frame training strategy. Our model can generate end-frame-consistent sequences without loss of quality and diversity. We evaluate our method through extensive experiments on Stochastic Moving MNIST, Weizmann Action, Human3.6M, and BAIR Robot Pushing under a series of scenarios. The qualitative results showcase the effectiveness and merits of point-to-point generation.
Artificial bee colony directive for continuous optimization

The artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm, a relatively new swarm intelligence optimization technique, has been shown to be a competitive alternative to other population-based algorithms. This paper fundamentally modifies the solution search equations of the ABC in a manner that sends bee agents in search of three types of search regions that improve convergence speeds and proposes an innovative artificial bee colony directive (ABCD) algorithm. Moreover, this paper validates the ABCD algorithm by showing better performance by improving two familiar ABC variants in experimental tests. In addition, 10 applicable search strategies that adopt the proposed three search-region types are presented. The proposed ABCD not only improves the original ABC and its subsequently improved versions but is also useful for setting the search regions of other swarm intelligence algorithms.
Recognition of Activities of Daily Living and Environments Using Acoustic Sensors Embedded on Mobile Devices

The identification of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) is intrinsic with the user’s environment recognition. This detection can be executed through standard sensors present in every-day mobile devices. On the one hand, the main proposal is to recognize users’ environment and standing activities. On the other hand, these features are included in a framework for the ADL and environment identification. Therefore, this paper is divided into two parts—firstly, acoustic sensors are used for the collection of data towards the recognition of the environment and, secondly, the information of the environment recognized is fused with the information gathered by motion and magnetic sensors. The environment and ADL recognition are performed by pattern recognition techniques that aim for the development of a system, including data collection, processing, fusion and classification procedures. These classification techniques include distinctive types of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), analyzing various implementations of ANN and choosing the most suitable for further inclusion in the following different stages of the developed system. The results present 85.89% accuracy using Deep Neural Networks (DNN) with normalized data for the ADL recognition and 86.50% accuracy using Feedforward Neural Networks (FNN) with non-normalized data for environment recognition. Furthermore, the tests conducted present 100% accuracy for standing activities recognition using DNN with normalized data, which is the most suited for the intended purpose.