Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Impact of employee loyalty on job performance: Mediating role of job satisfaction on the example of Zain company, Bahrain

The study aims to examine the effect of employee loyalty on job performance in Bahrain. Further, it investigates the mediating effect of job satisfaction on the relationship between employee loyalty and job performance. One hundred two participants employed by Zain company were selected through an online convenience sampling technique. The study chose Zain, a telecommunication company in Bahrain, due to easy access to employees, interest in studying company culture/methods, collaboration opportunities, and Zain’s reputation for innovation. SmartPLS4 was used to investigate potential correlations between employee loyalty and job performance and how job satisfaction indirectly affects employee loyalty and job performance. Findings show that employee loyalty significantly influences job performance and job satisfaction. Further, job satisfaction is significantly associated with job performance. In terms of mediating effect, the study found that job satisfaction significantly influences the relationship between employee loyalty and job performance. Every variable studied had an impact on job performance. As a result, the current study’s hypotheses are all confirmed. The model of the study is well fit, as the R-square is greater than 51%. The main contribution of this study is the insight that job satisfaction is a substantial mediator of the relationship between employee loyalty and job performance. Through theoretical and practical contributions, this study offers valuable implications that might benefit managers at companies, including Zain company, as well as interested readers and researchers.
LASSO–penalized clusterwise linear regression modelling: a two–step approach

In clusterwise regression analysis, the goal is to predict a response variable based on a set of explanatory variables, each with cluster-specific effects. In many real–life problems, the number of candidate predictors is typically large, with perhaps only a few of them meaningfully contributing to the prediction. A well–known method to perform variable selection is the LASSO, with calibration done by minimizing the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). However, existing LASSO-penalized estimators are problematic for several reasons. First, only certain types of penalties are considered. Second, the computations may sometimes involve approximate schemes. Third, variable selection is usually time consuming, due to a complex calibration of the penalty term, possibly requiring several multiple evaluations of an estimator for each plausible value of the tuning parameter(s). We introduce a two–step approach to fill these gaps. In step 1, we fit LASSO clusterwise linear regressions with some pre–specified level of penalization (Fit step). In step 2 (Selection step), we perform covariate selection locally, i.e. on the weighted data, with weights corresponding to the posterior probabilities from the previous step. This is done by using a generalization of the Least Angle Regression (LARS) algorithm, which permits covariate selection with a single evaluation of the estimator. In addition, both Fit and Selection steps leverage on an Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, fully in closed forms, designed with a very general version of the LASSO penalty. The advantages of our proposal, in terms of computation time reduction, and accuracy of model estimation and selection, are shown by means of a simulation study, and illustrated with a real data application.
Learning unidirectional coupling using an echo-state network

Reservoir Computing has found many potential applications in the field of complex dynamics. In this article, we explore the exceptional capability of the echo-state network (ESN) model to make it learn a unidirectional coupling scheme from only a few time series data of the system. We show that, once trained with a few example dynamics of a drive-response system, the machine is able to predict the response system's dynamics for any driver signal with the same coupling. Only a few time series data of an $A\ensuremath{-}B$ type drive-response system in training is sufficient for the ESN to learn the coupling scheme. After training, even if we replace drive system $A$ with a different system $C$, the ESN can reproduce the dynamics of response system $B$ using the dynamics of new drive system $C$ only.
CryptOpt: Verified Compilation with Randomized Program Search for Cryptographic Primitives

Most software domains rely on compilers to translate high-level code to multiple different machine languages, with performance not too much worse than what developers would have the patience to write directly in assembly language. However, cryptography has been an exception, where many performance-critical routines have been written directly in assembly (sometimes through metaprogramming layers). Some past work has shown how to do formal verification of that assembly, and other work has shown how to generate C code automatically along with formal proof, but with consequent performance penalties vs. the best- known assembly. We present CryptOpt, the first compilation pipeline that specializes high-level cryptographic functional programs into assembly code significantly faster than what GCC or Clang produce, with mechanized proof (in Coq) whose final theorem statement mentions little beyond the input functional program and the operational semantics of x86-64 assembly. On the optimization side, we apply randomized search through the space of assembly programs, with repeated automatic benchmarking on target CPUs. On the formal-verification side, we connect to the Fiat Cryptography framework (which translates functional programs into C-like IR code) and extend it with a new formally verified program-equivalence checker, incorporating a modest subset of known features of SMT solvers and symbolic-execution engines. The overall prototype is quite practical, e.g. producing new fastest-known implementations of finite-field arithmetic for both Curve25519 (part of the TLS standard) and the Bitcoin elliptic curve secp256k1 for the Intel 12𝑡ℎ and 13𝑡ℎ generations.
Generalized Policy-Based Noninterference for Efficient Confidentiality-Preservation

As more organizations are leveraging third-party cloud and edge data centers to process data efficiently, the issue of preserving data confidentiality becomes increasingly important. In response, numerous security mechanisms have been introduced and promoted in recent years including software-based ones such as homomorphic encryption, as well as hardware-based ones such as Intel SGX and AMD SEV. However these mechanisms vary in their security properties, performance characteristics, availability, and application modalities, making it hard for programmers to judiciously choose and correctly employ the right one for a given data query. This paper presents a mechanism-independent approach to distributed confidentiality-preserving data analytics. Our approach hinges on a core programming language which abstracts the intricacies of individual security mechanisms. Data is labeled using custom confidentiality levels arranged along a lattice in order to capture its exact confidentiality constraints. High-level mappings between available mechanisms and these labels are captured through a novel expressive form of security policy. Confidentiality is guaranteed through a type system based on a novel formulation of noninterference, generalized to support our security policy definition. Queries written in a largely security-agnostic subset of our language are transformed to the full language to automatically use mechanisms in an efficient, possibly combined manner, while provably preserving confidentiality in data queries end-to-end. We prototype our approach as an extension to the popular Apache Spark analytics engine, demonstrating the significant versatility and performance benefits of our approach over single hardwired mechanisms --- including in existing systems --- without compromising on confidentiality.
Better Together: Unifying Datalog and Equality Saturation

We present egglog, a fixpoint reasoning system that unifies Datalog and equality saturation (EqSat). Like Datalog, egglog supports efficient incremental execution, cooperating analyses, and lattice-based reasoning. Like EqSat, egglog supports term rewriting, efficient congruence closure, and extraction of optimized terms. We identify two recent applications -- a unification-based pointer analysis in Datalog and an EqSat-based floating-point term rewriter -- that have been hampered by features missing from Datalog but found in EqSat or vice-versa. We evaluate our system by reimplementing those projects in egglog. The resulting systems in egglog are faster, simpler, and fix bugs found in the original systems.
Consumers’ Perception of Corporate Social Responsibility in Iraq's Kurdistan Region

Managers and researchers are paying more and more attention to corporate social responsibility (CSR), especially in the area of consumer perception and response to CSR. The purpose of this study is to determine how Iraqi consumers in the Kurdistan Region perceive corporate social responsibility, as well as the importance of philanthropic, economic, environmental, ethical, and legal aspects of corporate social responsibility. The study will also compare the findings to those of numerous studies on social responsibility conducted in various countries with the current study. A questionnaire was designed to collect data from 75 participants, including (56%) women and (44%) men ranging in age from (Less than 20) to (More than 30). An appropriate random sample of undergraduate students, staff, and lecturers from Duhok Polytechnic University's Technical College of Administration was taken as a research community. Then comparing the finding of the study with other studies from different countries. The research presented in this paper improves our comprehension of corporate social responsibility from the consumer’s perspective in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The finding of this study demonstrates that the importance of ethical responsibility was prioritized by the study sample, with economic responsibility coming in second and legal responsibility coming third.
Fine-Grained Pornographic Image Recognition with Multi-Instance Learning

Image has become an essential medium for expressing meaning and disseminating information. Many images are uploaded to the Internet, among which some are pornographic, causing adverse effects on public psychological health. To create a clean and positive Internet environment, network enforcement agencies need an automatic and efficient pornographic image recognition tool. Previous studies on pornographic images mainly rely on convolutional neural networks (CNN). Because of CNN’s many parameters, they must rely on a large labeled training dataset, which takes work to build. To reduce the effect of the database on the recognition performance of pornographic images, many researchers view pornographic image recognition as a binary classification task. In actual application, when faced with pornographic images of various features, the performance and recognition accuracy of the network model often decrease. In addition, the pornographic content in images usually lies in several small-sized local regions, which are not a large proportion of the image. CNN, this kind of strong supervised learning method, usually cannot automatically focus on the pornographic area of the image, thus affecting the recognition accuracy of pornographic images. This paper established an image dataset with seven classes by crawling pornographic websites and Baidu Image Library. A weakly supervised pornographic image recognition method based on multiple instance learning (MIL) is proposed. The Squeeze and Extraction (SE) module is introduced in the feature extraction to strengthen the critical information and weaken the influence of non-key and useless information on the result of pornographic image recognition. To meet the requirements of the pooling layer operation in Multiple Instance Learning, we introduced the idea of an attention mechanism to weight and average instances. The experimental results show that the proposed method has better accuracy and F1 scores than other methods.
X-TRA: Improving Chest X-ray Tasks with Cross-Modal Retrieval Augmentation

An important component of human analysis of medical images and their context is the ability to relate newly seen things to related instances in our memory. In this paper we mimic this ability by using multi-modal retrieval augmentation and apply it to several tasks in chest X-ray analysis. By retrieving similar images and/or radiology reports we expand and regularize the case at hand with additional knowledge, while maintaining factual knowledge consistency. The method consists of two components. First, vision and language modalities are aligned using a pre-trained CLIP model. To enforce that the retrieval focus will be on detailed disease-related content instead of global visual appearance it is fine-tuned using disease class information. Subsequently, we construct a non-parametric retrieval index, which reaches state-of-the-art retrieval levels. We use this index in our downstream tasks to augment image representations through multi-head attention for disease classification and report retrieval. We show that retrieval augmentation gives considerable improvements on these tasks. Our downstream report retrieval even shows to be competitive with dedicated report generation methods, paving the path for this method in medical imaging.
Noise2Contrast: Multi-contrast Fusion Enables Self-supervised Tomographic Image Denoising

Self-supervised image denoising techniques emerged as convenient methods that allow training denoising models without requiring ground-truth noise-free data. Existing methods usually optimize loss metrics that are calculated from multiple noisy realizations of similar images, e.g., from neighboring tomographic slices. However, those approaches fail to utilize the multiple contrasts that are routinely acquired in medical imaging modalities like MRI or dual-energy CT. In this work, we propose the new self-supervised training scheme Noise2Contrast that combines information from multiple measured image contrasts to train a denoising model. We stack denoising with domain-transfer operators to utilize the independent noise realizations of different image contrasts to derive a self-supervised loss. The trained denoising operator achieves convincing quantitative and qualitative results, outperforming state-of-the-art self-supervised methods by 4.7–11.0%/4.8–7.3% (PSNR/SSIM) on brain MRI data and by 43.6–50.5%/57.1–77.1% (PSNR/SSIM) on dual-energy CT X-ray microscopy data with respect to the noisy baseline. Our experiments on different real measured data sets indicate that Noise2Contrast training generalizes to other multi-contrast imaging modalities.
MetaMorph: Learning Metamorphic Image Transformation with Appearance Changes

This paper presents a novel predictive model, MetaMorph, for metamorphic registration of images with appearance changes (i.e., caused by brain tumors). In contrast to previous learning-based registration methods that have little or no control over appearance-changes, our model introduces a new regularization that can effectively suppress the negative effects of appearance changing areas. In particular, we develop a piecewise regularization on the tangent space of diffeomorphic transformations (also known as initial velocity fields) via learned segmentation maps of abnormal regions. The geometric transformation and appearance changes are treated as joint tasks that are mutually beneficial. Our model MetaMorph is more robust and accurate when searching for an optimal registration solution under the guidance of segmentation, which in turn improves the segmentation performance by providing appropriately augmented training labels. We validate MetaMorph on real 3D human brain tumor magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art learning-based registration models. The proposed MetaMorph has great potential in various image-guided clinical interventions, e.g., real-time image-guided navigation systems for tumor removal surgery.
Radon CLF: A Novel Approach for Skew Detection Using Radon Transform

In the digital world, a wide range of handwritten and printed documents should be converted to digital format using a variety of tools, including mobile phones and scanners. Unfortunately, this is not an optimal procedure, and the entire document image might be degraded. Imperfect conversion effects due to noise, motion blur, and skew distortion can lead to significant impact on the accuracy and effectiveness of document image segmentation and analysis in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems. In Document Image Analysis Systems (DIAS), skew estimation of images is a crucial step. In this paper, a novel, fast, and reliable skew detection algorithm based on the Radon Transform and Curve Length Fitness Function (CLF), so-called Radon CLF, was proposed. The Radon CLF model aims to take advantage of the properties of Radon spaces. The Radon CLF explores the dominating angle more effectively for a 1D signal than it does for a 2D input image due to an innovative fitness function formulation for a projected signal of the Radon space. Several significant performance indicators, including Mean Square Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Measure (SSIM), Accuracy, and run-time, were taken into consideration when assessing the performance of our model. In addition, a new dataset named DSI5000 was constructed to assess the accuracy of the CLF model. Both two- dimensional image signal and the Radon space have been used in our simulations to compare the noise effect. Obtained results show that the proposed method is more effective than other approaches already in use, with an accuracy of roughly 99.87% and a run-time of 0.048 (s). The introduced model is far more accurate and time-efficient than current approaches in detecting image skew.
Approximation of classifiers by deep perceptron networks

We employ properties of high-dimensional geometry to obtain some insights into capabilities of deep perceptron networks to classify large data sets. We derive conditions on network depths, types of activation functions, and numbers of parameters that imply that approximation errors behave almost deterministically. We illustrate general results by concrete cases of popular activation functions: Heaviside, ramp sigmoid, rectified linear, and rectified power. Our probabilistic bounds on approximation errors are derived using concentration of measure type inequalities (method of bounded differences) and concepts from statistical learning theory.
Face mask detection in foggy weather from digital images using transfer learning

Community mask use is an efficacious non-pharmacologic way to minimize viral infection spread. It is a recommendation that individuals wear face masks as protective gear. Under ideal weather conditions, machine and artificial intelligence techniques can typically determine if a person is wearing a mask properly. Identification becomes more difficult under inclement weather such as fog, clouds, haze or rain. In this work, we propose a technique that can detect a human face wearing a mask even in adverse weather. For this, homogeneous foggy images have been considered. The main challenge with this problem is that video quality degrades because of fog. Here, diverse Deep learning models train regular datasets containing digital pictures of persons with facial and non-facial masks. The training and validation parameters ensure 97% accuracy in classifying faces wearing a mask.
Artificial Intelligence Based Sentence Level Sentiment Analysis of COVID-19

Web-blogging sites such as Twitter and Facebook are heavily influenced by emotions, sentiments, and data in the modern era. Twitter, a widely used microblogging site where individuals share their thoughts in the form of tweets, has become a major source for sentiment analysis. In recent years, there has been a significant increase in demand for sentiment analysis to identify and classify opinions or expressions in text or tweets. Opinions or expressions of people about a particular topic, situation, person, or product can be identified from sentences and divided into three categories: positive for good, negative for bad, and neutral for mixed or confusing opinions. The process of analyzing changes in sentiment and the combination of these categories is known as “sentiment analysis.” In this study, sentiment analysis was performed on a dataset of 90,000 tweets using both deep learning and machine learning methods. The deep learning-based model long-short-term memory (LSTM) performed better than machine learning approaches. Long short-term memory achieved 87% accuracy, and the support vector machine (SVM) classifier achieved slightly worse results than LSTM at 86%. The study also tested binary classes of positive and negative, where LSTM and SVM both achieved 90% accuracy.
Adaptive streaming of 3D content for web-based virtual reality: an open-source prototype including several metrics and strategies

Virtual reality is a new technology that has been developing a lot during the last decade. With autonomous head-mounted displays appearing on the market, new uses and needs have been created. The 3D content displayed by those devices can now be stored on distant servers rather than directly in the device's memory. In such networked immersive experiences, the 3D environment has to be streamed in real-time to the headset. In that context, several recent papers proposed utility metrics and selection strategies to schedule the streaming of the different objects composing the 3D environment, in order to minimize the latency and to optimize the quality of what is being visualized by the user at each moment. However, these proposed frameworks are hardly comparable since they operate on different systems and data. Therefore, we hereby propose an open-source DASH-based web framework for adaptive streaming of 3D content in a 6 Degrees of Freedom (DoFs) scenario. Our framework integrates several strategies and utility metrics from the state of the art, as well as several relevant features: 3D graphics compression, levels of details and the use of a visual quality index. We used our software to demonstrate the relevance of those tools and provide useful hints for the community for the further improvements of 3D streaming systems.
Stylized Data-to-text Generation: A Case Study in the E-Commerce Domain

Existing data-to-text generation efforts mainly focus on generating a coherent text from non-linguistic input data, such as tables and attribute–value pairs, but overlook that different application scenarios may require texts of different styles. Inspired by this, we define a new task, namely stylized data-to-text generation, whose aim is to generate coherent text for the given non-linguistic data according to a specific style. This task is non-trivial, due to three challenges: the logic of the generated text, unstructured style reference and biased training samples. To address these challenges, we propose a novel stylized data-to-text generation model, named StyleD2T, comprising three components: logic planning-enhanced data embedding, mask-based style embedding, and unbiased stylized text generation. In the first component, we introduce a graph-guided logic planner for attribute organization to ensure the logic of generated text. In the second component, we devise feature-level mask-based style embedding to extract the essential style signal from the given unstructured style reference. In the last one, pseudo triplet augmentation is utilized to achieve unbiased text generation, and a multi-condition based confidence assignment function is designed to ensure the quality of pseudo samples. Extensive experiments on a newly collected dataset from Taobao 1 have been conducted, and the results show the superiority of our model over existing methods.