Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Learning Explainable Disentangled Representations of E-Commerce Data by Aligning Their Visual and Textual Attributes

Understanding multimedia content remains a challenging problem in e-commerce search and recommendation applications. It is difficult to obtain item representations that capture the relevant product attributes since these product attributes are fine-grained and scattered across product images with huge visual variations and product descriptions that are noisy and incomplete. In addition, the interpretability and explainability of item representations have become more important in order to make e-commerce applications more intelligible to humans. Multimodal disentangled representation learning, where the independent generative factors of multimodal data are identified and encoded in separate subsets of features in the feature space, is an interesting research area to explore in an e-commerce context given the benefits of the resulting disentangled representations such as generalizability, robustness and interpretability. However, the characteristics of real-word e-commerce data, such as the extensive visual variation, noisy and incomplete product descriptions, and complex cross-modal relations of vision and language, together with the lack of an automatic interpretation method to explain the contents of disentangled representations, means that current approaches for multimodal disentangled representation learning do not suffice for e-commerce data. Therefore, in this work, we design an explainable variational autoencoder framework (E-VAE) which leverages visual and textual item data to obtain disentangled item representations by jointly learning to disentangle the visual item data and to infer a two-level alignment of the visual and textual item data in a multimodal disentangled space. As such, E-VAE tackles the main challenges in disentangling multimodal e-commerce data. Firstly, with the weak supervision of the two-level alignment our E-VAE learns to steer the disentanglement process towards discovering the relevant factors of variations in the multimodal data and to ignore irrelevant visual variations which are abundant in e-commerce data. Secondly, to the best of our knowledge our E-VAE is the first VAE-based framework that has an automatic interpretation mechanism that allows to explain the components of the disentangled item representations with text. With our textual explanations we provide insight in the quality of the disentanglement. Furthermore, we demonstrate that with our explainable disentangled item representations we achieve state-of-the-art outfit recommendation results on the Polyvore Outfits dataset and report new state-of-the-art cross-modal search results on the Amazon Dresses dataset.
Proposal to Improve the Image Quality of Short-Acquisition Time-Dedicated Breast Positron Emission Tomography Using the Pix2pix Generative Adversarial Network

This study aimed to evaluate the ability of the pix2pix generative adversarial network (GAN) to improve the image quality of low-count dedicated breast positron emission tomography (dbPET). Pairs of full- and low-count dbPET images were collected from 49 breasts. An image synthesis model was constructed using pix2pix GAN for each acquisition time with training (3776 pairs from 16 breasts) and validation data (1652 pairs from 7 breasts). Test data included dbPET images synthesized by our model from 26 breasts with short acquisition times. Two breast radiologists visually compared the overall image quality of the original and synthesized images derived from the short-acquisition time data (scores of 1−5). Further quantitative evaluation was performed using a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM). In the visual evaluation, both readers revealed an average score of >3 for all images. The quantitative evaluation revealed significantly higher SSIM (p < 0.01) and PSNR (p < 0.01) for 26 s synthetic images and higher PSNR for 52 s images (p < 0.01) than for the original images. Our model improved the quality of low-count time dbPET synthetic images, with a more significant effect on images with lower counts.
Developing digital literacy in initial EFL teacher education: A study in a Spanish distance university

21st-century EFL teachers are assumed to be properly trained to help develop future generations’ language proficiency and digital literacy. Moreover, with the impact that the current pandemic has had on education, technology seems to be the only possible way to guarantee the continuity of teaching and learning. Considering that English is the most studied foreign language in Europe, it is necessary thus to analyse whether EFL teachers believe they are prepared for such a task and whether studying at a distance university improves their training in this respect. This study examines the perceptions of pre-service teachers of English studying at the Spanish National University of Distance Education regarding their digital literacy. Through a quasi-experimental, quantitative design, findings show that participants value their digital skills positively but consider they have not worked enough on their digital literacy despite studying at a distance university. Men show more positive self-perceptions than women, while respondents with less years of university experience value their digital skills more positively. Furthermore, respondents acknowledge not knowing how to assess or improve their digital literacy. The results suggest the need for distance universities like UNED to strengthen teacher training in digital skills.
Solar Energy Production Planning in Antikythera: Adequacy Scenarios and the Effect of the Atmospheric Parameters

The National Observatory of Athens intends to operate a European Climate Change Observatory (ECCO) on the island of Antikythera, which meets the criteria to become a first-class research infrastructure. This project requires electricity that is unprofitable to get from the thermal units of this small island (20 km2). Solar energy is the subject that was examined in case it can give an environmentally and economically viable solution, both for the observatory and for the whole island. Specifically, observational and modeled data were utilized relevant to solar dynamic and atmospheric parameters in order to simulate the solar energy production by photovoltaics (PV) and Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plant technologies. To this direction, a synergy of aerosol and cloud optical properties from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) and the Eumetsat’s support to nowcasting and very short range forecasting (NWC SAF) with Radiative Transfer Model (RTM) techniques was used in order to quantify the solar radiation and energy production as well as the effect of the atmospheric parameters and to demonstrate energy adequacy scenarios and financial analysis. The ultimate goal is to highlight the opportunity for energy transition and autonomy for both the island itself and the rest of the community with the operation of ECCO, and hence to tackle climate change.
Automatic Time Picking for Weak Seismic Phase in the Strong Noise and Interference Environment: An Hybrid Method Based on Array Similarity

The extraction of travel-time curve of seismic phase is very important for the subsequent inference of the structural properties of underground media in seismology. In recent years, with the increase in the amount of data, manual processing is facing significant challenges, and automatic signal processing has gradually become the mainstream. According to the similarity of array signals and considering the elimination of outliers, we propose an improved multi-channel cross-correlation method using the L1 norm measure to obtain preliminary results, which builds on a new controllable measurement mode. Then, the post-correction step is carried out in combination with the signal gain property of beamforming technique. Based on these two methods, this paper proposes a new scheme of automatic arrival time picking. We apply the scheme to actual data to verify the effects of the two methods step by step. The entire scheme achieves fine results: direct water waves, seismic waves refracted by the crust and seismic waves reflected by the upper mantle are automatically detected. In addition, compared with the two traditional methods, the scheme proposed in this paper has a better overall effect and a reasonable computation cost.
Task analysis guidance for number of and readability of steps for individuals with intellectual disabilities

We examined the relationship of number of and readability of content of steps of task analyses with subsequent task performance. The results of the current study indicate that the number of and readability of steps were significantly associated with task performance via a non-linear, quadratic relationship. From our results, we suggest that task analyses may consider up to seven steps with a grade level of content (i.e., readability) of up to approximately 7th grade without diminishing task performance. These results do not provide final guidance as to the suggested number of steps or readability of content for task analyses but some initial guidance, especially in the absence of well-established task analyses. We suggest results should be used for those practitioners seeking guidelines for content development in the absence of well-established task analyses for suggested values for number of and readability of steps.
Multi‐scale homography estimation based on dual feature aggregation transformer

Abstract The accuracy of registration in image stitching task directly affects the performance of subsequent stages. Traditional registration methods rely heavily on the quality of the features when calculating the homography matrix, resulting in alignment failures in low‐texture or low‐overlap scenes due to extracting insufficient features. On the other hand, existing DNN‐based methods for homography estimation are more robust in multiple scenes but previous work usually employs an overly simple convolutional network structure to directly regress the homography, ignoring the redundant information contained in the feature maps so that their prediction accuracy is inferior to the traditional methods in simple scenarios. To overcome the disadvantages of the two methods, a Multi‐scale structure is proposed to extract feature maps at three scales and design two modules to handle the matrix prediction respectively. The DFA‐T module analyzes semantic information on the high‐level features to accomplish coarse‐grained alignment while the Contextual Correlation module on the bottom level to accomplish more accurate alignment. Experiments demonstrate that this method provides more accurate alignment results than the existing state‐of‐the‐art DNN‐based methods and outperforms traditional algorithms with more stable results in some extreme scenarios.
BLOCKCHAIN-BASED IoFLT FEDERATED LEARNING IN A FUZZY/GAN ENVIRONMENT FOR A SMART TRADING BOT

A DAPP is performed with collaborative training, where “Federated Learning” uses each device client to work as a singular artificial intelligence model using machine learning. The purpose is to reduce the latency by using computing resources from all client devices and increase privacy since personal data does not leave the client’s devices. Applying machine learning massively in decentralized trading bots using blockchain seems to be a great solution. This learning solution can be improved using a fuzzy generative adversarial network environment to help the training. In this case, the expert system has a Python bot to interact with the Binance API to place buy/sell orders for the BTC–USD pair.
Multivariate Sequential Analytics for Cardiovascular Disease Event Prediction

Automated clinical decision support for risk assessment is a powerful tool in combating cardiovascular disease (CVD), enabling targeted early intervention that could avoid issues of overtreatment or undertreatment. However, current CVD risk prediction models use observations at baseline without explicitly representing patient history as a time series.The aim of this study is to examine whether by explicitly modelling the temporal dimension of patient history event prediction may be improved.This study investigates methods for multivariate sequential modelling with a particular emphasis on long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks. Data from a CVD decision support tool is linked to routinely collected national datasets including pharmaceutical dispensing, hospitalization, laboratory test results, and deaths. The study uses a 2-year observation and a 5-year prediction window. Selected methods are applied to the linked dataset. The experiments performed focus on CVD event prediction. CVD death or hospitalization in a 5-year interval was predicted for patients with history of lipid-lowering therapy.The results of the experiments showed temporal models are valuable for CVD event prediction over a 5-year interval. This is especially the case for LSTM, which produced the best predictive performance among all models compared achieving AUROC of 0.801 and average precision of 0.425. The non-temporal model comparator ridge classifier (RC) trained using all quarterly data or by aggregating quarterly data (averaging time-varying features) was highly competitive achieving AUROC of 0.799 and average precision of 0.420 and AUROC of 0.800 and average precision of 0.421, respectively.This study provides evidence that the use of deep temporal models particularly LSTM in clinical decision support for chronic disease would be advantageous with LSTM significantly improving on commonly used regression models such as logistic regression and Cox proportional hazards on the task of CVD event prediction.
UML diagram classification model based on convolution neural network

Nowadays, the amount of data generated daily in various fields is constantly expanding, and the research field of UML diagram is no exception. It has strong expressiveness for complex systems, so it has become the best choice for modeling in many fields. Accordingly, this paper obtains and classifies UML diagram data based on convolution neural network diagram classification algorithm. This paper first analyzes the content and concept of UML, then further describes the importance of building a graphical UML classification model, the complete form convolutional neural network based on image is constructed by analyzing its theory, and then deduces the graphical UML classification model. Finally, a set of UML diagram data set is constructed by using the collected UML diagram design. After data preprocessing, the overall iteration times of the model and the accuracy and average time impact of UML diagram classification model and classification results are obtained. The graph classification algorithm model designed in this study has a good analysis and classification effect for UML object diagrams.Compared with the existing image-based convolutional neural networks and graph neural networks, the proposed UML diagram classification modeling method and GPC-GCN graph neural network have better performance for UML diagram classification. In this study, convolutional neural network technology is applied to the field of UML diagram classification model, thus promoting the development of related technologies in the field of UML diagram classification model.
Tumor-identification method for predicting recurrence of early-stage lung adenocarcinoma using digital pathology images by machine learning

Lung cancer is one of the cancers with the highest morbidity and mortality in the world. Recurrence often occurs even after complete resection of early-stage lung cancer, and prediction of recurrence after resection is clinically important. However, the pathological characteristics of the recurrence of pathological stage IB lung adenocarcinoma (LAIB) have not yet been elucidated. Therefore, the problem is what type of histological image of lung adenocarcinoma recurs, and it is important to examine the histological image of recurrence. We attempted to predict recurrence of early lung adenocarcinoma after resection on the basis of digital pathological images of hematoxylin and eosin-stained specimens and machine learning applying a convolutional neural network. We constructed a model that extracts the features of two-color spaces and a switching model that automatically switches between our extraction model and one that extracts the features of one-color space for each image. We then developed a tumor-identification method for predicting the presence or absence of LAIB recurrence using these models. We conducted an experiment involving 55 patients with LAIB who underwent surgical resection to evaluate the proposed method. The proposed method determined LAIB recurrence with an accuracy of 84.8%. The use of digital pathology and machine learning can be used for highly accurate prediction of LAIB recurrence after surgical resection. The proposed method has the potential for objective postoperative follow-up observation.
Off-Road Drivable Area Detection: A Learning-Based Approach Exploiting LiDAR Reflection Texture Information

The detection of drivable areas in off-road scenes is a challenging problem due to the presence of unstructured class boundaries, irregular features, and dust noise. Three-dimensional LiDAR data can effectively describe the terrain features, and a bird’s eye view (BEV) not only shows these features, but also retains the relative size of the environment compared to the forward viewing. In this paper, a method called LRTI, which is used for detecting drivable areas based on the texture information of LiDAR reflection data, is proposed. By using an instance segmentation network to learn the texture information, the drivable areas are obtained. Furthermore, a multi-frame fusion strategy is applied to improve the reliability of the output, and a shelter’s mask of a dynamic object is added to the neural network to reduce the perceptual delay caused by multi-frame fusion. Through TensorRT quantization, LRTI achieves real-time processing on the unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). The experiments on our dataset show the robustness and adaptability of LRTI to sand dust and occluded scenes.
Deep Feature Pyramid Hashing for Efficient Image Retrieval

Thanks to the success of deep learning, deep hashing has recently evolved as a leading method for large-scale image retrieval. Most existing hashing methods use the last layer to extract semantic information from the input image. However, these methods have deficiencies because semantic features extracted from the last layer lack local information, which might impact the global system’s performance. To this end, a Deep Feature Pyramid Hashing DFPH is proposed in this study, which can fully utilize images’ multi-level visual and semantic information. Our architecture applies a new feature pyramid network designed for deep hashing to the VGG-19 model, so the model becomes able to learn the hash codes from various feature scales and then fuse them to create final binary hash codes. The experimental results performed on two widely used image retrieval datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Improved Spatiotemporal Framework for Human Activity Recognition in Smart Environment

The rapid development of microsystems technology with the availability of various machine learning algorithms facilitates human activity recognition (HAR) and localization by low-cost and low-complexity systems in various applications related to industry 4.0, healthcare, ambient assisted living as well as tracking and navigation tasks. Previous work, which provided a spatiotemporal framework for HAR by fusing sensor data generated from an inertial measurement unit (IMU) with data obtained by an RGB photodiode for visible light sensing (VLS), already demonstrated promising results for real-time HAR and room identification. Based on these results, we extended the system by applying feature extraction methods of the time and frequency domain to improve considerably the correct determination of common human activities in industrial scenarios in combination with room localization. This increases the correct detection of activities to over 90% accuracy. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that this solution is applicable to real-world operating conditions in ambient light.
Human Activity Recognition Based on an Efficient Neural Architecture Search Framework Using Evolutionary Multi-Objective Surrogate-Assisted Algorithms

Human activity recognition (HAR) is a popular and challenging research topic driven by various applications. Deep learning methods have been used to improve HAR models’ accuracy and efficiency. However, this kind of method has a lot of manually adjusted parameters, which cost researchers a lot of time to train and test. So, it is challenging to design a suitable model. In this paper, we propose HARNAS, an efficient approach for automatic architecture search for HAR. Inspired by the popular multi-objective evolutionary algorithm, which has a strong capability in solving problems with multiple conflicting objectives, we set weighted f1-score, flops, and the number of parameters as objects. Furthermore, we use a surrogate model to select models with a high score from the large candidate set. Moreover, the chosen models are added to the training set of the surrogate model, which makes the surrogate model update along the search process. Our method avoids manually designing the network structure, and the experiment results demonstrate that it can reduce 40% training costs on both time and computing resources on the OPPORTUNITY dataset and 75% on the UniMiB-SHAR dataset. Additionally, we also prove the portability of the trained surrogate model and HAR model by transferring them from the training dataset to a new dataset.
Tone Mapping Method Based on the Least Squares Method

Tone mapping is used to compress the dynamic range of image data without distortion. To compress the dynamic range of HDR images and prevent halo artifacts, a tone mapping method is proposed based on the least squares method. Our method first uses weights for the estimation of the illumination, and the image detail layer is obtained by the Retinex model. Then, a global tone mapping function with the parameter is used to compress the dynamic range, and the parameter is obtained by fitting the function to the histogram equalization. Finally, the detail layer and the illumination layer are fused to obtain the LDR image. The experimental results show that the proposed method can efficiently restore real-world scene information while preventing halo artifacts. Therefore, tone mapping quality index and mean Weber contrast of the tone-mapped image are 8% and 12% higher than the closest competition tone mapping method.