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In contrast to the network security that relies on upper-layer encryption for the confidentiality and authenticity of communications, physical layer security (PLS) exploits the uniqueness and randomness of the physical channel to encrypt information and enhance the security of the system. In this paper, we study the PLS of a polar-coded wireless communication system. To be more specific, we leverage the unique properties in polar code construction and propose a channel quality indicator (CQI)-based frozen-bit pattern generation scheme. The transmitter employs the Gaussian approximation algorithm to generate the corresponding frozen bit pattern according to the instantaneous CQI of the legitimate link. At the receiver, by leveraging the full channel reciprocity in the time-division duplex (TDD) mode, we can map the CQI to the corresponding frozen bit pattern and correctly decode the received bits. By contrast, the eavesdropper was unable to have the knowledge of the legal channel, and hence cannot determine the frozen bit pattern of the polar-coded bit sequence. Our simulation results demonstrate that by adopting the proposed PLS key generation scheme, Eve was hardly able to correctly decode a complete frame, leading to a high block error rate (BLER), while Bob was able to attain a 10 − 5 BLER. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical data is frequently quite sensitive in terms of data privacy and security. Federated learning has been used to increase the privacy and security of medical data, which is a sort of machine learning technique. The training data is disseminated across numerous machines in federated learning, and the learning process is collaborative. There are numerous privacy attacks on deep learning (DL) models that attackers can use to obtain sensitive information. As a result, the DL model should be safeguarded from adversarial attacks, particularly in medical data applications. Homomorphic encryption-based model security from the adversarial collaborator is one of the answers to this challenge. Using homomorphic encryption, this research presents a privacy-preserving federated learning system for medical data. The proposed technique employs a secure multi-party computation protocol to safeguard the deep learning model from adversaries. The proposed approach is tested in terms of model performance using a real-world medical dataset in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis of CPA and Template Attacks on masked implementations of bitsliced AES, targeting a 32-bit platform through the ChipWhisperer side-channel acquisition tool. Our results show that Template Attacks can recover the full AES key successfully within 300 attack traces even on the masked implementation when using a first-order attack (no pre-processing). Furthermore, we confirm that the SubBytes operation is overall a better target for Template Attacks due to its non-linearity, even in the case of bitsliced implementations, where we can only use two bits per key byte target. However, we also show that targeting the AddRoundKey can be used to attack bitsliced implementations and that, in some cases, it can be more efficient than the SubBytes attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local fractional calculus (fractal calculus) plays a crucial role in applications, especially in computer sciences and engineering. One of these applications appears in the theory of chaos. Therefore, this paper studies the dynamics of a fractal complex logistic map and then employs this map to generate chaotic sequences for a new symmetric image encryption algorithm. Firstly, we derive the fractional complex logistic map and investigate its dynamics by determining its equilibria, geometric properties, and chaotic behavior. Secondly, the fractional chaotic sequences of the proposed map are employed to scramble and alter image pixels to increase resistance to decryption attacks. The output findings indicate that the proposed algorithm based on fractional complex logistic maps could effectively encrypt various kinds of images. Furthermore, it has better security performance than several existing algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, there has been a proliferation among the scientific community of works that focus on Alan Turing's contributions to the design and development of the modern computer. However, there are significant discrepancies among these studies, to such a point that some of them cast serious doubts on Alan Turing's work with respect to today's computer, and there are others that staunchly defend his leading role, as well as other studies that set out more well-balanced opinions. Faced with this situation, the aim of this paper is to analyse the evidence existing today in order to be able to draw a conclusion about whether or not Turing anticipated the trivialisation of the modern computer memory and, likewise, if his universal a-machine is the precursor of the general-purpose computer so omnipresent today. As a result of our research, the authors conclude that Turing did indeed play a leading role in the appearance of the modern computer, although he was not the only one or the first in the field of Computing Science, albeit he was the most influential, both in scope and in depth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social-media platforms have created new ways for citizens to stay informed and participate in public debates. However, to enable a healthy environment for information sharing, social deliberation, and opinion formation, citizens need to be exposed to sufficiently diverse viewpoints that challenge their assumptions, instead of being trapped inside filter bubbles. In this paper, we take a step in this direction and propose a novel approach to maximize the diversity of exposure in a social network. We formulate the problem in the context of information propagation, as a task of recommending a small number of news articles to selected users. In the proposed setting, we take into account content and user leanings, and the probability of further sharing an article. Our model allows to capture the balance between maximizing the spread of information and ensuring the exposure of users to diverse viewpoints. The resulting problem can be cast as maximizing a monotone and submodular function, subject to a matroid constraint on the allocation of articles to users. It is a challenging generalization of the influence-maximization problem. Yet, we are able to devise scalable approximation algorithms by introducing a novel extension to the notion of random reverse-reachable sets. We experimentally demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of our algorithm on several real-world datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzing the results from the experimental research environment to the user environment of technology products in the computer science industry is very necessary. In this study, firstly, we applied the local binary pattern and K-Nearest Neighbor method to create a facial gender recognition application with a database of 6000 images divided by male and female, the degree to which the accuracy of the model on recognition is 95.4%. Secondly, we use a 2-layer research model to analyze the results of the user survey about facial gender recognition technology products. Most of the previous studies on facial gender recognition techniques focused on analyzing the impact of factors affecting applications using single-step structure equation modeling (SEM). The purpose of this study, based on the technology acceptance method (TAM) theory, describes the artificial neural network (ANN) method to perform in-depth analysis, yielding more accurate results than the SEM model. The study measures the relationship between the readiness for new technologies (optimism, innovation, discomfort, and insecurity). Technology acceptance (Perceived ease of use, Perceived usefulness). Expectations confirmed and Information systems acceptance (service quality, system quality, and information quality) and user satisfaction on facial gender recognition systems such as personal information declaration systems at customs gates at domestic and international airports. This paper outlines the research model of the multi-analysis approach by combining Partial Least Squares - Structure Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) analysis. First, the PLS-SEM model evaluates the factors affecting the intention to use the facial gender recognition system. Second, ANN ranks the impact factors of important predictors from the PLS-SEM model. The findings from the PLS-SEM and ANN approach research model confirm the results obtained from PLS-SEM by ANN. In addition, ANN performs linear and non-linear relational modeling with high prediction accuracy compared with the SEM model. In addition, An Importance Performance Map Analysis (IPMA) analyzes the results accurately for factors' important performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel numerical algorithm for efficient modeling of three-dimensional shape transformation governed by the modified Allen-Cahn (A-C) equation is developed, which has important significance for computer science and graphics technology. The new idea of the proposed method is as follows. Firstly, the operator splitting method is used to decompose the three-dimensional problem into a series of one-dimensional subproblems that can be solved in parallel in the same direction. Secondly, a temporal p-adaptive strategy, which is based on the extrapolation technique, is proposed to improve the convergence order in time and preserve the computational efficiency simultaneously. Finally, a parallel least distance modification technique is developed to force the discrete maximum bound principle. The proposed method achieves high precision and high efficiency at the same time. Numerical examples include the effectiveness of the p-adaptive method and the bound preserving least distance modification, and a series of complex three-dimensional shape transformation modelings. • The operator splitting method is used to solve 3D shape transformation PDE. • A temporal p-adaptive strategy is developed to improve computational efficiency. • A least-distance modification is developed to force the discrete maximum bound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-overlapping codes are a set of codewords in $\bigcup _{n \ge 2} \mathbb {Z}_{q}^{n}$ , where $\mathbb {Z}_{q} = \{0,1, {\dots },q-1\}$ , such that the prefix of each codeword is not a suffix of any codeword in the set, including itself; and for variable-length codes, a codeword does not contain any other codeword as a subword. In this paper, we investigate a generic method to generalize binary codes to $q$ -ary ones for $q > 2$ , and analyze this generalization on the two constructions given by Levenshtein (also by Gilbert; Chee, Kiah, Purkayastha, and Wang) and Bilotta, respectively. The generalization on the former construction gives large non-expandable fixed-length non-overlapping codes whose size can be explicitly determined; the generalization on the latter construction is the first attempt to generate $q$ -ary variable-length non-overlapping codes. More importantly, this generic method allows us to utilize the generating function approach to analyze the cardinality of the underlying $q$ -ary non-overlapping codes. The generating function approach not only enables us to derive new results, e.g., recurrence relations on their cardinalities, new combinatorial interpretations for the constructions, and the superior limit of their cardinalities for some special cases, but also greatly simplifies the arguments for these results. Furthermore, we give an exact formula for the number of fixed-length words that do not contain the codewords in a variable-length non-overlapping code as subwords. This thereby solves an open problem by Bilotta and induces a recursive upper bound on the maximum size of variable-length non-overlapping codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sidelnikov sequences, a kind of cyclotomic sequences with many desired properties such as low correlation and variable alphabet sizes, can be employed to construct a polyphase sequence family that has many applications in high-speed data communications. Recently, cyclotomic numbers have been used to investigate the linear complexity of Sidelnikov sequences, mainly about binary ones, although the limitation on the orders of the available cyclotomic numbers makes it difficult. This paper continues to study the linear complexity over $\mathbb {F}_{M}$ of $M$ -ary Sidelnikov sequence of period $q-1$ using Hasse derivative, which implies $q=p^{m}$ , $m\geq 1$ and $M|(q-1)$. The $t$ th Hasse derivative formulas are presented in terms of cyclotomic numbers, and some upper bounds on the linear complexity for $M=2$ and 3 are obtained only with some additional restrictions on $q$. Furthermore, concrete illustrations for several families of these sequences, such as $q\equiv 1\pmod {2}$ and $q\equiv 1\pmod {3}$ , show these upper bounds are tight and reachable; especially for $q=2\times 3^{\lambda }+1 (1\leq \lambda \leq 20)$ , the exact linear complexities over $\mathbb {F}_{3}$ of the ternary Sidelnikov sequences are determined; and it turns out that all the linear complexities of the sequences considered are very close to their periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data have significant economic or social value in many application fields including science, business, governance, etc. This naturally leads to the emergence of many data markets such as GBDEx and YoueData. As a result, the data trade through data markets has started to receive attentions from both industry and academia. During the data buying and selling, how to price the data is an indispensable problem. However, pricing incomplete data is more challenging, even though incomplete data exist pervasively in a vast lot of real-life scenarios. In this paper, we attempt to explore the pricing problem for queries over incomplete data. We propose a sophisticated pricing mechanism, termed as ${\sf iDBPricer}$ iDBPricer , which takes a series of essential factors into consideration, including the data contribution/usage, data completeness, and query quality. We present two novel price functions, namely, the usage, and completeness-aware price function (UCA price for short) and the quality, usage, and completeness-aware price function (QUCA price for short). Moreover, we develop efficient algorithms for deriving the query prices. Extensive experiments using both real and benchmark datasets demonstrate ${\sf iDBPricer}$ iDBPricer is of excellent performance in terms of effectiveness and scalability, compared with the state-of-the-art price functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is to study the minimal realization theory for a fuzzy multiset language in the framework of category theory, which has already provided the tools and techniques for the advancement of several features of theoretical computer science. Specifically, by using the well-known categorical concepts, it is shown herein that there is a minimal realization (called the Nerode realization) for each fuzzy multiset language, and all minimal realizations for a given fuzzy multiset language are isomorphic to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For applied scientists and engineers, graph theory is a strong and vital tool for evaluating and inventing solutions for a variety of issues. Graph theory is extremely important in complex systems, particularly in computer science. Many scientific areas use graph theory, including biological sciences, engineering, coding, and operational research. A strategy for the orthogonal labelling of a bipartite graph G with n edges has been proposed in the literature, yielding cyclic decompositions of balanced complete bipartite graphs K n , n by the graph G. A generalization to circulant-balanced complete multipartite graphs K n , n , ⋯ , n ⏟ m ; m , n ≥ 2 , is our objective here. In this paper, we expand the orthogonal labelling approach used to generate cyclic decompositions for K n , n to a generalized orthogonal labelling approach that may be used for decomposing K n , n , ⋯ , n ⏟ m . We can decompose K n , n , ⋯ , n ⏟ m into distinct graph classes based on the proposed generalized orthogonal labelling approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this articles is to identify errors related to management information systems through a Scientometric analysis to divulge the dynamics of the research topic to the academic community. The study was carried out, between 1971 and January 30, 2021, using the Scopus database and VOSviewer software. As a result of the search string "management information system" and "error*" or "mistakes" were obtained 826 published scientific articles. The highest percentage of documents published are conference paper (53.3%), and Article (39.7%). The most productive countries are the United States and Austria (60% articles) and citations are focused on United States (65%). The chronological analysis revealed that the scientific production in the area showed a particular increase from 2006 to 2009. The Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Lecture notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics was the most productive journal. The 32.7% of the literature was published in the Computer Science field. 6 clusters were identified, and 19 keywords related with errors or mistakes were recognized. The Scientometric analysis accomplished allowed a descriptive analysis and identification of the countries, journals, keywords, sponsors, most cited articles, clustering the results facilitating the visual representation of the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a series of thoughts about the meaning of intelligence in neuroscience and computer science. This work aims to present an understandable definition that fits our contemporary artificial intelligence background. The research methodology of this essay lies in existing theories of artificial intelligence, focused on computer science and neuroscience. I analyze the relationship between intelligence and neuroscience and Hawkin's Thousand Brains Theory, an approach to show what it is an intelligent agent according to neuroscience. Here, the main result relies on the verification that intelligence is only possible in the neocortex. According to this result, the study performs a second critical analysis aiming to demonstrate why there is no artificial intelligence today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzing human behaviors using computer-based approaches is a new dimension of digital humanity. It integrates computing with healthcare, psychology, and social media. Like other healthcare and medical-related problems, anxiety and depressive disorders are common in Pakistan. In the existing era, this disease is not only affecting people of all ages but the impact of depression is also witnessed on social media communications. On social media, anyone could not guess about the mental conditions of a user through his/ her tweets or comments. Especially, the prediction of depressed unknown users through his behavior on social media is a hard task. Computer science and the medical domain can eliminate such healthcare-related issues. In this paper, a system has been proposed to detect and analyze the behavior of a user on social media. The proposed system comprises of an algorithm that performs sentimental analysis of users’ tweets and comments and a web-based platform to share best practices and success stories of users who have recovered from the disease. The system has been tested on real-time data obtained from tweeter using Application Programming Interface (API). Top trends have been focused to obtain the data and the proposed system successfully detected the users under depression. After working on the huge dataset, the proposed system will be a good contribution to humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose two GAN-based deep subspace clustering approaches: deep subspace clustering via dual adversarial generative networks (DSC-DAG) and self-supervised deep subspace clustering with adversarial generative networks (S $^2$ 2 DSC-AG). In DSC-DAG, the distributions of both the inputs and corresponding latent representations are learnt via adversarial training simultaneously. Besides, there are two kinds of synthetic representations to facilitate the fine-tuning of the encoder: the combinations of latent representations with random combination coefficients and representations of real-like inputs derived from noise variables. In S $^2$ 2 DSC-AG, a self-supervised information learning module substitutes for adversarial learning in the latent space, since both of them play the same role in learning discriminative latent representations. We analyze connections between these methods and demonstrate their equivalences. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple real-world data sets against state-of-the-art subspace clustering methods in terms of accuracy, normalized mutual information and purity. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the ubiquity of smart devices, Spatial Crowdsourcing (SC) has emerged as a new transformative platform that engages mobile users to perform spatio-temporal tasks by physically traveling to specified locations. Thus, various SC techniques have been studied for performance optimization, among which one of the major challenges is how to assign workers the tasks that they are really interested in and willing to perform. In this paper, we propose a novel preference-aware spatial task assignment system based on workers’ temporal preferences, which consists of two components: History-based Context-aware Tensor Decomposition (HCTD) for workers’ temporal preferences modeling and preference-aware task assignment. We model workers’ preferences with a three-dimension tensor (worker-task-time). Supplementing the missing entries of the tensor through HCTD with the assistant of historical data and other two context matrices, we recover workers’ preferences for different categories of tasks in different time slots. Several preference-aware individual task assignment algorithms are then devised, aiming to maximize the total number of task assignments at every time instance, in which we give higher priorities to the workers who are more interested in the tasks. In order to make our proposed framework applicable to more scenarios, we further optimize the original framework by proposing strategies to allow each task to be assigned to a group of workers such that the task can be completed by these workers simultaneously, wherein workers’ tolerable waiting time, consensus, and tasks’ rewards are taken into consideration. We conduct extensive experiments using a real dataset, verifying the practicability of our proposed methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the huge demand for graph analytics in many real-world applications, massive iterative graph processing jobs are concurrently performed on the same graphs and suffer from significant high data access cost. To lower the data access cost toward high performance, several out-of-core concurrent graph processing solutions are recently designed to handle concurrent jobs by enabling these jobs to share the accesses of the same graph data. However, the set of active vertices in each partition are usually different for various concurrent jobs and also evolve with time, where some high-degree ones (or called hub-vertices) of these active vertices require more iterations to converge due to the power-law property of real-world graphs. In consequence, existing solutions still suffer from much unnecessary I/O traffic, because they have to entirely load each partition into the memory for concurrent jobs even if most vertices in this partition are inactive and may be shared by a few jobs. In this paper, we propose an efficient structure-aware storage system, called GraphSO, for higher throughput of the execution of concurrent graph processing jobs. It can be integrated into existing out-of-core graph processing systems to promote the execution efficiency of concurrent jobs with lower I/O overhead. The key design of GraphSO is a fine-grained storage management scheme. Specifically, it logically divides the partitions of existing graph processing systems into a series of small same-sized chunks. At runtime, these small chunks with active vertices are judiciously loaded by GraphSO to construct new logical partitions (i.e., each logical partition is a subset of active chunks) for existing graph processing systems to handle, where the most-frequently-used chunks are preferentially loaded to construct the logical partitions and the other ones are delayed to wait to be required by more jobs. In this way, it can effectively spare the cost of loading the graph data associated with the inactive vertices with low repartitioning overhead and can also enable the loaded graph data to be fully shared by concurrent jobs. Moreover, GraphSO also designs a buffering strategy to efficiently cache the most-frequently-used chunks in the main memory to further minimize the I/O traffic by avoiding repeated load of them. Experimental results show that GraphSO improves the throughput of GridGraph, GraphChi, X-Stream, DynamicShards, LUMOS, Graphene, and Wonderland by 1.4-3.5 times, 2.1-4.3 times, 1.9-4.1 times, 1.9-2.9 times, 1.5-3.1 times, 1.3-1.5 times, and 1.3-2.7 times after integrating with them, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the challenging person re-identification (Re-ID) task under the cloth-changing scenario, where the same identity (ID) suffers from uncertain cloth changes. To learn cloth- and ID-invariant features, it is crucial to collect abundant training data with varying clothes, which is difficult in practice. To alleviate the reliance on rich data collection, we reinforce the feature learning process by designing powerful complementary data augmentation strategies, including positive and negative data augmentation. Specifically, the positive augmentation fulfills the ID space by randomly patching the person images with different clothes, simulating rich appearance to enhance the robustness against clothes variations. For negative augmentation, its basic idea is to randomly generate out-of-distribution synthetic samples by combining various appearance and posture factors from real samples. The designed strategies seamlessly reinforce the feature learning without additional information introduction. Extensive experiments conducted on both cloth-changing and -unchanging tasks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, consistently improving the accuracy over various baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Textbook Question Answering (TQA) is the task of answering diagram and non-diagram questions given large multi-modal contexts consisting of abundant text and diagrams. Deep text understandings and effective learning of diagram semantics are important for this task due to its specificity. In this paper, we propose a Weakly Supervised learning method for TQA (WSTQ), which regards the incompletely accurate results of essential intermediate procedures for this task as supervision to develop Text Matching (TM) and Relation Detection (RD) tasks and then employs the tasks to motivate itself to learn strong text comprehension and excellent diagram semantics respectively. Specifically, we apply the result of text retrieval to build positive as well as negative text pairs. In order to learn deep text understandings, we first pre-train the text understanding module of WSTQ on TM and then fine-tune it on TQA. We build positive as well as negative relation pairs by checking whether there is any overlap between the items/regions detected from diagrams using object detection. The RD task forces our method to learn the relationships between regions, which are crucial to express the diagram semantics. We train WSTQ on RD and TQA simultaneously, i.e., multitask learning, to obtain effective diagram semantics and then improve the TQA performance. Extensive experiments are carried out on CK12-QA and AI2D to verify the effectiveness of WSTQ. Experimental results show that our method achieves significant accuracy improvements of 5.02% and 4.12% on test splits of the above datasets respectively than the current state-of-the-art baseline. We have released our code on https://github.com/dr-majie/WSTQ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous single image super-resolution (SISR) algorithms have been proposed during the past years to reconstruct a high-resolution (HR) image from its low-resolution (LR) observation. However, how to fairly compare the performance of different SISR algorithms/results remains a challenging problem. So far, the lack of comprehensive human subjective study on large-scale real-world SISR datasets and accurate objective SISR quality assessment metrics makes it unreliable to truly understand the performance of different SISR algorithms. We in this paper make efforts to tackle these two issues. Firstly, we construct a real-world SISR quality dataset (i.e., RealSRQ) and conduct human subjective studies to compare the performance of the representative SISR algorithms. Secondly, we propose a new objective metric, i.e., KLTSRQA, based on the Karhunen-Loéve Transform (KLT) to evaluate the quality of SISR images in a no-reference (NR) manner. Experiments on our constructed RealSRQ and the latest synthetic SISR quality dataset (i.e., QADS) have demonstrated the superiority of our proposed KLTSRQA metric, achieving higher consistency with human subjective scores than relevant existing NR image quality assessment (NR-IQA) metrics. The dataset and the code will be made available at https://github.com/Zhentao-Liu/RealSRQ-KLTSRQA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The frequent detection of persistent per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in organisms and environment coupled with surging evidence for potential detrimental impacts, have attracted widespread attention throughout the world. In order to reveal research hotspots and trends of technologies for PFAS removal, herein, we performed a data-driven analysis of 3975 papers and 436 patents from Web of Science Core Collection and Derwent Innovation Index databases up to 2023. The results showed that China and the USA led the way in the research of PFAS removal with outstanding contributions to publications. The progression generally transitioned from accidental discovery of decomposition, to experimentation with removal effects and mechanisms of existing methods, and finally to enhanced defluorination and mechanism-driven design approaches. The keywords co-occurrence network and technology classification together revealed the main knowledge framework, which was constructed and correlated through contaminants, substrates, materials, processes and properties. Moreover, adsorption was demonstrated to be the dominant removal process among the current studies. Subsequently, we concluded the principles, advances and drawbacks of enrichment and separation, biological methods, advanced oxidation and reduction processes. Further exploration indicated the hotspots such as alternatives and precursors for PFAS ("genx": 1.258, "f-53b": 0.337), degradable mineralization technologies ("photocatalytic degrad": 0.529, "hydrated electron": 0.374), environment-friendly remediation technologies ("phytoremedi": 0.939, "constructed wetland": 0.462) and combination with novel materials ("metal-organic framework": 1.115, "layered double hydroxid": 0.559) as well as computer science ("molecular dynamics simul": 0.559, "machine learn"). Furthermore, the future direction of technological innovation might lie in high-performance processes that minimize secondary pollution, the development of recyclable and renewable treatment agents, and collaborative control strategies for multiple pollutants. Overall, this study offers comprehensive and objective review for researchers and industry professionals in this field, enabling rapid access to knowledge guidance and insights into research frontiers. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributed Systems architectures are becoming the standard computational model for processing and transportation of information, especially for Cloud Computing environments. The increase in demand for application processing and data management from enterprise and end-user workloads continues to move from a single-node client-server architecture to a distributed multitier design where data processing and transmission are segregated. Software development must considerer the orchestration required to provision its core components in order to deploy the services efficiently in many independent, loosely coupled—physically and virtually interconnected—data centers spread geographically, across the globe. This network routing challenge can be modeled as a variation of the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). This paper proposes a new optimization algorithm for optimum route selection using Algorithmic Information Theory. The Kelly criterion for a Shannon-Bernoulli process is used to generate a reliable quantitative algorithm to find a near optimal solution tour. The algorithm is then verified by comparing the results with benchmark heuristic solutions in 3 test cases. A statistical analysis is designed to measure the significance of the results between the algorithms and the entropy function can be derived from the distribution. The tested results shown an improvement in the solution quality by producing routes with smaller length and time requirements. The quality of the results proves the flexibility of the proposed algorithm for problems with different complexities without relying in nature-inspired models such as Genetic Algorithms, Ant Colony, Cross Entropy, Neural Networks, 2opt and Simulated Annealing. The proposed algorithm can be used by applications to deploy services across large cluster of nodes by making better decision in the route design. The findings in this paper unifies critical areas in Computer Science, Mathematics and Statistics that many researchers have not explored and provided a new interpretation that advances the understanding of the role of entropy in decision problems encoded in Turing Machines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The data-driven approach is popular to automate learning of fuzzy rules and tuning membership function parameters in fuzzy inference systems (FIS) development. However, researchers highlight different challenges and issues of this FIS development because of its complexity. This paper evaluates the current state of the art of FIS development complexity issues in Computer Science, Software Engineering and Information Systems, specifically: 1)What complexity issues exist in the context of developing FIS? 2) Is it possible to systematize existing solutions of identified complexity issues? We have conducted a hybrid systematic literature review combined with a systematic mapping study that includes keyword map to address these questions. This review has identified the main FIS development complexity issues that practitioners should consider when developing FIS. The paper also proposes a framework of complexity issues and their possible solutions in FIS development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of teaching tools has become an alternative to complement the learning of school content. This paper provides some overview aspects of Compilation and performance analysis of the computational tools GALS, Grammophone, The Context Grammar Free Checker, Verto, and Parsing Simulator that were developed to support the compilation process and aim at assisting the learning in Compilers course. There are several known tools, but only a few were built for academic purposes and will be presented in this paper, as they were tested by students in the Compilers course in the Undergraduate course and also int the Master's course in Computer Science at a Brazilian Public University in Paraná to analyze hypotheses, to help verifying parsing examples and to exchange experiences about these Compiler tools. It was observed that the lexical and mainly syntactic analysis phases become more didactic and attractive to the students, making it easier to understand their functionalities and implementation of a compiler as a whole. GALS has shown to be a good option with a simple interface, working with lexical and syntactic analysis for more than one language (Java, C++ and Delphi). Studies of Context Free Grammars in LL(1), LR(0) and LR(1) format may be favored not only with GALS, but also with the tools Grammophone and The Context Grammar Free Checker. Verto, on the other hand, works didactically, not only on the lexical and syntactic analysis steps (the latter also with LR(1) Parser), but also on code generation. Parsing Simulator proved to be an intuitive tool and also presents an extensive collection of syntactic analysis options showing the step by step LL(1) and LR(K) analysis tables, promoting teaching-learning in Compilers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a bibliometric analysis from 2014 to 2020 of the emerging and engaging field of quantum computing called Quantum Machine Learning (QML). The study discusses the analysis results from the comprehensive high indexed databases worldwide such as Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Scopus, Web of Science (WOS), Google Scholar and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Tools like iMapbuilder, IBM and SPSS Statistics are used to provide meaningful insights and flawless representations of the extracted data. There has been little research to provide a macroscopic overview of renowned authors, subject areas, funding agencies and patent applications related to Quantum Clustering (QC). The result and analysis of this study show an interesting fact, most researchers are now aware of quantum technology from the past few years. The purpose of bibliometric and patentometric analysis papers is to figure out the importance and utility of the QC research area. Most of the countries are taking an initiative to seek attention towards QC but the analysis shows that China and the US are leading. The survey revealed that the maximum numbers of publications of QC are from Physics and Astronomy followed by Computer Science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Events of interest to Computer Society members. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Science advances by pushing the boundaries of the adjacent possible. While the global scientific enterprise grows at an exponential pace, at the mesoscopic level the exploration and exploitation of research ideas are reflected through the rise and fall of research fields. The empirical literature has largely studied such dynamics on a case-by-case basis, with a focus on explaining how and why communities of knowledge production evolve. Although fields rise and fall on different temporal and population scales, they are generally argued to pass through a common set of evolutionary stages. To understand the social processes that drive these stages beyond case studies, we need a way to quantify and compare different fields on the same terms. In this paper we develop techniques for identifying common patterns in the evolution of scientific fields and demonstrate their usefulness using 1.5 million preprints from the arXiv repository covering 175 research fields spanning Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology and Quantitative Finance. We show that fields consistently follow a rise and fall pattern captured by a two parameters right-tailed Gumbel temporal distribution. We introduce a field-specific re-scaled time and explore the generic properties shared by articles and authors at the creation, adoption, peak, and decay evolutionary phases. We find that the early phase of a field is characterized by disruptive works mixing of cognitively distant fields written by small teams of interdisciplinary authors, while late phases exhibit the role of specialized, large teams building on the previous works in the field. This method provides foundations to quantitatively explore the generic patterns underlying the evolution of research fields in science, with general implications in innovation studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "Companion Modeling" community is a French association that gathers dozens of researchers in ecology, computer science and social sciences from France and the Global South. Its objective is to propose tools, such as debates, simulations and games, to administrations and local populations in order to deescalate conflictual situations involving the management of natural commons. ComMod's treatment of futures in the context of committed action-research is distinct. Existing taxonomies seem to neglect the specificity of their practices, whose main objective is pedagogic and empowering, not anticipatory nor predictive. ComMod anticipates the collapse of natural resources through very simple scenario-building, in order to raise awareness within a given community and push people to change their behaviors. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a novel term to describe this specific relationship to futures--"committed scenario-building"--which ComMod can be seen as a prototype of. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capturing long-range dependencies during feature extraction is crucial for video-based person re-identification (re-id) since it would help to tackle many challenging problems such as occlusion and dramatic pose variation. Moreover, capturing subtle differences, such as bags and glasses, is indispensable to distinguish similar pedestrians. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficacious Statistic Attention (SA) block which can capture both the long-range dependencies and subtle differences. SA block leverages high-order statistics of feature maps, which contain both long-range and high-order information. By modeling relations with these statistics, SA block can explicitly capture long-range dependencies with less time complexity. In addition, high-order statistics usually concentrate on details of feature maps and can perceive the subtle differences between pedestrians. In this way, SA block is capable of discriminating pedestrians with subtle differences. Furthermore, this lightweight block can be conveniently inserted into existing deep neural networks at any depth to form Statistic Attention Network (SANet). To evaluate its performance, we conduct extensive experiments on two challenging video re-id datasets, showing that our SANet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, to show the generalizability of SANet, we evaluate it on three image re-id datasets and two more general image classification datasets, including ImageNet. The source code is available at http://vipl.ict.ac.cn/resources/codes/code/SANet_code.zip. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, most coverless image steganography (CIS) methods are based on robust mapping rules. However, due to the limited mapping expression relationship between secret information and hash sequence, it is a challenge to further improve the hiding ability of coverless information hiding. Towards this goal, this paper proposes a robust coverless steganography scheme using camouflage image(CI-CIS). For the sender, CI-CIS introduces an camouflage image as the transmission carrier and establishes the correlation between them by Convolutional Neural Network(CNN) features. For the receiver, the camouflage image can retrieve the corresponding stego-image to recover the secret information. To this end, we designed a reversible retrieval scheme between stego-image and camouflage image by using image clustering. At the same time, since the semantic features represented by CNN are robust to image attacks, our method can increase the capability of the CIS effectively. Besides, we also build an inverted index to improve retrieval efficiency. Experimental results and analysis show that the CI-CIS has higher robustness and more flexible capacity setting compared with the existing CIS methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines consciousness from the perspective of theoretical computer science (TCS), a branch of mathematics concerned with understanding the underlying principles of computation and complexity, including the implications and surprising consequences of resource limitations. We propose a formal TCS model, the Conscious Turing Machine (CTM). The CTM is influenced by Alan Turing's simple yet powerful model of computation, the Turing machine (TM), and by the global workspace theory (GWT) of consciousness originated by cognitive neuroscientist Bernard Baars and further developed by him, Stanislas Dehaene, Jean-Pierre Changeux, George Mashour, and others. Phenomena generally associated with consciousness, such as blindsight, inattentional blindness, change blindness, dream creation, and free will, are considered. Explanations derived from the model draw confirmation from consistencies at a high level, well above the level of neurons, with the cognitive neuroscience literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a large family of problems in which an ordering (or, more precisely, a chain of subsets) of a finite set must be chosen to minimize some weighted sum of costs. This family includes variations of min sum set cover, several scheduling and search problems, and problems in Boolean function evaluation. We define a new problem, called the min sum ordering problem (MSOP), which generalizes all these problems using a cost and a weight function defined on subsets of a finite set. Assuming a polynomial time α-approximation algorithm for the problem of finding a subset whose ratio of weight to cost is maximal, we show that under very minimal assumptions, there is a polynomial time 4 α -approximation algorithm for MSOP. This approximation result generalizes a proof technique used for several distinct problems in the literature. We apply this to obtain a number of new approximation results. Summary of Contribution: This paper provides a general framework for min sum ordering problems. Within the realm of theoretical computer science, these problems include min sum set cover and its generalizations, as well as problems in Boolean function evaluation. On the operations research side, they include problems in search theory and scheduling. We present and analyze a very general algorithm for these problems, unifying several previous results on various min sum ordering problems and resulting in new constant factor guarantees for others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we mainly study quaternary linear codes and their binary subfield codes. First we obtain a general explicit relationship between quaternary linear codes and their binary subfield codes in terms of generator matrices and defining sets. Second, we construct quaternary linear codes via simplicial complexes and determine the weight distributions of these codes. Third, the weight distributions of the binary subfield codes of these quaternary codes are also computed by employing the general characterization. Furthermore, we present two infinite families of optimal linear codes with respect to the Griesmer Bound, and a class of binary almost optimal codes with respect to the Sphere Packing Bound. We also need to emphasize that we obtain at least 9 new quaternary linear codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advances in noiseless non-adaptive group testing have led to a precise asymptotic characterization of the number of tests required for high-probability recovery in the sublinear regime $k = n^{\theta }$ (with $\theta \in (0,1)$), with $n$ individuals among which $k$ are infected. However, the required number of tests may increase substantially under real-world practical constraints, notably including bounds on the maximum number $\Delta $ of tests an individual can be placed in, or the maximum number $\Gamma $ of individuals in a given test. While previous works have given recovery guarantees for these settings, significant gaps remain between the achievability and converse bounds. In this paper, we substantially or completely close several of the most prominent gaps. In the case of $\Delta $ -divisible items, we show that the definite defectives (DD) algorithm coupled with a random regular design is asymptotically optimal in dense scaling regimes, and optimal to within a factor of e more generally; we establish this by strengthening both the best known achievability and converse bounds. In the case of $\Gamma $ -sized tests, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the regime $\Gamma = \Theta (1)$ , and again establish a precise threshold proving the asymptotic optimality of SCOMP (a slight refinement of DD) equipped with a tailored pooling scheme. Finally, for each of these two settings, we provide near-optimal adaptive algorithms based on sequential splitting, and provably demonstrate gaps between the performance of optimal adaptive and non-adaptive algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new algorithm is presented for detecting the global reflection symmetry of geometric objects. The algorithm works for 2D and 3D objects which may be open or closed and may or may not contain holes. The algorithm accepts a point cloud obtained by sampling the object's surface at the input. The points are inserted into a uniform grid and so-called boundary cells are identified. The centroid of the boundary cells is determined, and a testing symmetry axis/plane is set through it. In this way, the boundary cells are split into two parts and they are faced with the symmetry estimation function. If the function estimates the symmetric case, the boundary cells are further split until a given threshold is reached or a non-symmetric result is obtained. The new testing axis/plane is then derived and tested by rotation around the centroid. This paper introduces three techniques to accelerate the computation. Competitive results were obtained when the algorithm was compared against the state of the art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Causal Inference plays an important role in decision making in many fields, such as social marketing, healthcare, and public policy. One fundamental problem in causal inference is the treatment effect estimation in observational studies when variables are confounded. Controlling for confounding effects is generally handled by propensity score. But it treats all observed variables as confounders and ignores the adjustment variables, which have no influence on treatment but are predictive of the outcome. Recently, it has been demonstrated that the adjustment variables are effective in reducing the variance of the estimated treatment effect. However, how to automatically separate the confounders and adjustment variables in observational studies is still an open problem, especially in the scenarios of high dimensional variables, which are common in the big data era. In this paper, we first propose a Data-Driven Variable Decomposition (D $^2$ 2 VD) algorithm, which can 1) automatically separate confounders and adjustment variables with a data-driven approach, and 2) simultaneously estimate treatment effect in observational studies with high dimensional variables. Under standard assumptions, we theoretically prove that our D $^2$ 2 VD algorithm can unbiased estimate treatment effect and achieve lower variance than traditional propensity score based methods. Moreover, to address the challenges from high-dimensional variables and nonlinear, we extend our D $^2$ 2 VD to a non-linear version, namely Nonlinear-D $^2$ 2 VD (N-D $^2$ 2 VD) algorithm. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms, we conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our D $^2$ 2 VD and N-D $^2$ 2 VD algorithms can automatically separate the variables precisely, and estimate treatment effect more accurately and with tighter confidence intervals than the state-of-the-art methods. We also demonstrated that the top-ranked features by our algorithm have the best prediction performance on an online advertising dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Density Peak Clustering (DPC), a popular density-based clustering approach, has received considerable attention from the research community primarily due to its simplicity and fewer-parameter requirement. However, the resultant clusters obtained using DPC are influenced by the sensitive parameter $d_c$ d c , which depends on data distribution and requirements of different users. Besides, the original DPC algorithm requires visiting a large number of objects, making it slow. To this end, this paper investigates index-based solutions for DPC. Specifically, we propose two list-based index methods viz. (i) a simple List Index, and (ii) an advanced Cumulative Histogram Index. Efficient query algorithms are proposed for these indices which significantly avoids irrelevant comparisons at the cost of space. For memory-constrained systems, we further introduce an approximate solution to the above indices which allows substantial reduction in the space cost, provided that slight inaccuracies are admissible. Furthermore, owing to considerably lower memory requirements of existing tree-based index structures, we also present effective pruning techniques and efficient query algorithms to support DPC using the popular Quadtree Index and R-tree Index. Finally, we practically evaluate all the above indices and present the findings and results, obtained from a set of extensive experiments on six synthetic and real datasets. The experimental insights obtained can help to guide in selecting a befitting index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decade has seen growing importance being attached to the Completely Independent Spanning Trees (CISTs). The CISTs can facilitate many network functionalities, and the existence and construction schemes of CISTs in various networks can be an indicator of the network's robustness. In this paper, we establish the number of CISTs that can be constructed in the line graph of the complete graph $K_n$ K n (denoted $L(K_n)$ L (K n) , for $n\geq 4$ n ≥ 4 ), and present an algorithm to construct the optimal (i.e., maximal) number of CISTs in $L(K_n)$ L (K n) . The $L(K_n)$ L (K n) is a special class of SWCube [13], an architectural model proposed for data center networks. Our construction algorithm is also implemented to verify its validity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hidden Weighted Bit function plays an important role in the study of classical models of computation. A common belief is that this function is exponentially hard to implement using reversible ancilla-free circuits, even though introducing a small number of ancillae allows a very efficient implementation. In this paper, we refute the exponential hardness conjecture by developing a polynomial-size reversible ancilla-free circuit computing the Hidden Weighted Bit function. Our circuit has size $O(n^{6.42})$ O (n 6. 42) , where $n$ n is the number of input bits. We also show that the Hidden Weighted Bit function can be computed by a quantum ancilla-free circuit of size $O(n^2)$ O (n 2) . The technical tools employed come from a combination of Theoretical Computer Science (Barrington's theorem) and Physics (simulation of fermionic Hamiltonians) techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid rise in the number of people buying houses, the demand for interior space design has also increased accordingly. The diversification of existing room types and the diversity of the public's perception of fashion make interior designers in short supply. The future of computer science and technology in the field of automatic design of indoor areas will be immeasurable. This paper proposes an automatic layout method for spatial area design based on convolutional neural networks (CNN). CNN methods are a fast and efficient method. By mimicking the designer's design process, it proposes a two-stage algorithm that defines the room first and the wall later, and the algorithm also provides a large-scale dataset called RPLAN that contains more than 80,000 interior layout plans from real residential buildings. Starting from the prediction living room, the automatic layout of the indoor areas is completed by iteration. A large number of empirical results show that the interior area design effect of this method is comparable to the interior design floor plan of professional designers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many practical problems, such as computer science, communications network, product design, system control, statistics and finance, etc.,can be formulated as a probabilistic constrained optimization problem (PCOP) which is challenging to solve since it is usually nonconvex and nonsmooth. Effective methods for the probabilistic constrained optimization problem mostly focus on approximation techniques, such as convex approximation, D.C. (difference of two convex functions) approximation, and so on. This paper aims at studying a smooth approximation approach. A smooth approximation to the probabilistic constraint function based on a sigmoid function is analyzed. Equivalence of PCOP and the corresponding approximation problem are shown under some appropriate assumptions. Sequential convex approximation (SCA) algorithm is implemented to solve the smooth approximation problem. Numerical results suggest that the smooth approximation approach proposed is effective for optimization problems with probabilistic constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gender gap in computer science (CS) research is a well-studied problem, with an estimated ratio of 15%–30% women researchers. However, far less is known about gender representation in specific fields within CS. Here, we investigate the gender gap in one large field, computer systems. To this end, we collected data from 72 leading peer-reviewed CS conferences, totalling 6,949 accepted papers and 19,829 unique authors (2,946 women, 16,307 men, the rest unknown). We combined these data with external demographic and bibliometric data to evaluate the ratio of women authors and the factors that might affect this ratio. Our main findings are that women represent only about 10% of systems researchers, and that this ratio is not associated with various conference factors such as size, prestige, double-blind reviewing, and inclusivity policies. Author research experience also does not significantly affect this ratio, although author country and work sector do. The 10% ratio of women authors is significantly lower than the 16% in the rest of CS. Our findings suggest that focusing on inclusivity policies alone cannot address this large gap. Increasing women's participation in systems research will require addressing the systemic causes of their exclusion, which are even more pronounced in systems than in the rest of CS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graph query autocompletion (gQAC) generates a small list of ranked query suggestions during the graph query formulation process in a visual environment. The current state-of-the-art of gQAC provides suggestions that are formed by adding subgraph increments to arbitrary places of an existing (partial) user query. However, according to the research results on human-computer interaction (HCI), humans can only interact with a small number of recent software artifacts in hand. Hence, many of such suggestions could be irrelevant. In this paper, we present the GFocus framework that exploits a novel notion of user focus of graph query formulation (or simply focus). Intuitively, the focus is the subgraph that a user is working on. We formulate locality principles inspired by the HCI research to automatically identify and maintain the focus. We propose novel monotone submodular ranking functions for generating popular and comprehensive query suggestions only at the focus. In particular, the query suggestions of GFocus have high result counts (when they are used as queries) and maximally cover the possible suggestions at the focus. We propose efficient algorithms and an index for ranking the suggestions. Our results show that GFocus saves 12-32 percent more mouse clicks and is 35× more efficient than the state-of-the-art competitor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a family of $[{q}^{2}-1, 4, {q}^{2}-{q}-2]$ cyclic codes over ${\mathbb F}_{{q}}$ meeting the Griesmer bound is presented. Their duals are $[{q}^{2}-1,{q}^{2}-5,4]$ almost MDS codes and are optimal with respect to the sphere-packing bound. The ${q}_{0}$ -ary subfield codes of this family of cyclic codes are also investigated, where ${q}_{0}$ is any prime power such that q is power of ${q}_{0}$. Some of the subfield codes are optimal and some have the best known parameters. It is shown that the subfield codes are equivalent to a family of primitive BCH codes and thus the parameters of the BCH codes are solved. The duals of the subfield codes are also optimal with respect to the sphere-packing bound. A family of $[{q}^{2}, 4, {q}^{2}-{q}-1]$ linear codes over ${\mathbb F}_{{q}}$ meeting the Griesmer bound is presented. Their duals are $[{q}^{2},{q}^{2}-4,4]$ almost MDS codes and are optimal with respect to the sphere-packing bound. The ${q}_{0}$ -ary subfield codes of this family of linear codes are also investigated, where ${q}_{0}$ is any prime power such that q is power of ${q}_{0}$. Five infinite families of 2-designs are also constructed with three families of linear codes of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]