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Current stomach disease detection and diagnosis is challenged by data complexity and high dimensionality and requires effective deep learning algorithms to improve diagnostic accuracy. To address this challenge, in this paper, an improved strategy based on the Adam algorithm is proposed, which aims to alleviate the influence of local optimal solutions, overfitting, and slow convergence rates by controlling the restart strategy and the gradient norm joint clipping technique. This improved algorithm is abbreviated as the CG-Adam algorithm. The control restart strategy performs a restart operation by periodically checking the number of steps and once the number of steps reaches a preset restart period. After the restart is completed, the algorithm will restart the optimization process. It helps the algorithm avoid falling into the local optimum and maintain convergence stability. Meanwhile, gradient norm joint clipping combines both gradient clipping and norm clipping techniques, which can avoid gradient explosion and gradient vanishing problems and help accelerate the convergence of the optimization process by restricting the gradient and norm to a suitable range. In order to verify the effectiveness of the CG-Adam algorithm, experimental validation is carried out on the MNIST, CIFAR10, and Stomach datasets and compared with the Adam algorithm as well as the current popular optimization algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that the improved algorithm proposed in this paper achieves an accuracy of 98.59%, 70.7%, and 73.2% on the MNIST, CIFAR10, and Stomach datasets, respectively, surpassing the Adam algorithm. The experimental results not only prove the significant effect of the CG-Adam algorithm in accelerating the model convergence and improving generalization performance but also demonstrate its wide potential and practical application value in the field of medical image recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enhancing the environmental perception of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in intelligent transportation systems requires computer vision technology to be effective in detecting objects and obstacles, particularly in adverse weather conditions. Adverse weather circumstances present serious difficulties for object-detecting systems, which are essential to contemporary safety procedures, infrastructure for monitoring, and intelligent transportation. AVs primarily depend on image processing algorithms that utilize a wide range of onboard visual sensors for guidance and decisionmaking. Ensuring the consistent identification of critical elements such as vehicles, pedestrians, and road lanes, even in adverse weather, is a paramount objective. This paper not only provides a comprehensive review of the literature on object detection (OD) under adverse weather conditions but also delves into the ever-evolving realm of the architecture of AVs, challenges for automated vehicles in adverse weather, the basic structure of OD, and explores the landscape of traditional and deep learning (DL) approaches for OD within the realm of AVs. These approaches are essential for advancing the capabilities of AVs in recognizing and responding to objects in their surroundings. This paper further investigates previous research that has employed both traditional and DL methodologies for the detection of vehicles, pedestrians, and road lanes, effectively linking these approaches with the evolving field of AVs. Moreover, this paper offers an in-depth analysis of the datasets commonly employed in AV research, with a specific focus on the detection of key elements in various environmental conditions, and then summarizes the evaluation matrix. We expect that this review paper will help scholars to gain a better understanding of this area of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Salient object detection (SOD) aims to identify the most visually striking objects in a scene, simulating the function of the biological visual attention system. The attention mechanism in deep learning is commonly used as an enhancement strategy which enables the neural network to concentrate on the relevant parts when processing input data, effectively improving the model's learning and prediction abilities. Existing saliency object detection methods based on RGB deep learning typically treat all regions equally by using the extracted features, overlooking the fact that different regions have varying contributions to the final predictions. Based on the U2Net algorithm, this paper incorporates the split coordinate channel attention (SCCA) mechanism into the feature extraction stage. SCCA conducts spatial transformation in width and height dimensions to efficiently extract the location information of the target to be detected. While pixel-level semantic segmentation based on annotation has been successful, it assigns the same weight to each pixel which leads to poor performance in detecting the boundary of objects. In this paper, the Canny edge detection loss is incorporated into the loss calculation stage to improve the model's ability to detect object edges. Based on the DUTS and HKU-IS datasets, experiments confirm that the proposed strategies effectively enhance the model's detection performance, resulting in a 0.8% and 0.7% increase in the F1-score of U2Net. This paper also compares the traditional attention modules with the newly proposed attention, and the SCCA attention module achieves a top-three performance in prediction time, mean absolute error (MAE), F1-score, and model size on both experimental datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic evaluation is a process of assessing and measuring researchers, institutions, or disciplinary fields. Its goal is to evaluate their contributions and impact in the academic community, as well as to determine their reputation and status within specific disciplinary domains. Web of Science (WOS), being the most renowned global academic citation database, provides crucial data for academic evaluation. However, due to factors such as institutional changes, translation discrepancies, transcription errors in databases, and authors' individual writing habits, there exist ambiguities in the institution names recorded in the WOS literature, which in turn affect the scientific evaluation of researchers and institutions. To address the issue of data reliability in academic evaluation, this paper proposes a WOS institution name synonym recognition framework that integrates multi-granular embeddings and multi-contextual information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transfer learning has gained significant traction in natural language processing due to the emergence of state-of-the-art pre-trained language models (PLMs). Unlike traditional word embedding methods such as TF-IDF and Word2Vec, PLMs are context-dependent and outperform conventional techniques when fine-tuned for specific tasks. This paper proposes an innovative hard voting classifier to enhance crash severity classification by combining machine learning and deep learning models with various word embedding techniques, including BERT, RoBERTa, Word2Vec, and TF-IDF. Our study involves two comprehensive experiments using motorists' crash data from the Missouri State Highway Patrol. The first experiment evaluates the performance of three machine learning models—XGBoost (XGB), random forest (RF), and naive Bayes (NB)—paired with TF-IDF, Word2Vec, and BERT feature extraction techniques. Additionally, BERT and RoBERTa are fine-tuned with a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) classification model. All models are initially evaluated on the original dataset. The second experiment repeats the evaluation using an augmented dataset to address the severe data imbalance. The results from the original dataset show strong performance for all models in the "Fatal" and "Personal Injury" classes but a poor classification of the minority "Property Damage" class. In the augmented dataset, while the models continued to excel with the majority classes, only XGB/TFIDF and BERT-LSTM showed improved performance for the minority class. The ensemble model outperformed individual models in both datasets, achieving an F1 score of 99% for "Fatal" and "Personal Injury" and 62% for "Property Damage" on the augmented dataset. These findings suggest that ensemble models, combined with data augmentation, are highly effective for crash severity classification and potentially other textual classification tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents a comprehensive analysis of utilizing TensorFlow Lite on mobile phones for the on-edge medical diagnosis of lung diseases. This paper focuses on the technical deployment of various deep learning architectures to classify nine respiratory system diseases using X-ray imagery. We propose a simple deep learning architecture that experiments with six different convolutional neural networks. Various quantization techniques are employed to convert the classification models into TensorFlow Lite, including post-classification quantization with floating point 16 bit representation, integer quantization with representative data, and quantization-aware training. This results in a total of 18 models suitable for on-edge deployment for the classification of lung diseases. We then examine the generated models in terms of model size reduction, accuracy, and inference time. Our findings indicate that the quantization-aware training approach demonstrates superior optimization results, achieving an average model size reduction of 75.59%. Among many CNNs, MobileNetV2 exhibited the highest performance-to-size ratio, with an average accuracy loss of 4.1% across all models using the quantization-aware training approach. In terms of inference time, TensorFlow Lite with integer quantization emerged as the most efficient technique, with an average improvement of 1.4 s over other conversion approaches. Our best model, which used EfficientNetB2, achieved an F1-Score of approximately 98.58%, surpassing state-of-the-art performance on the X-ray lung diseases dataset in terms of accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity. The model experienced an F1 loss of around 1% using quantization-aware optimization. The study culminated in the development of a consumer-ready app, with TensorFlow Lite models tailored to mobile devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Breast tumor segmentation of ultrasound images provides valuable tumor information for early detection and diagnosis. However, speckle noise and blurred boundaries in breast ultrasound images present challenges for tumor segmentation, especially for malignant tumors with irregular shapes. Recent vision transformers have shown promising performance in handling the variation through global context modeling. Nevertheless, they are often dominated by features of large patterns and lack the ability to recognize negative information in ultrasound images, which leads to the loss of breast tumor details (e.g., boundaries and small objects). In this paper, we propose a novel noise suppression and boundary refinement network, NSBR-Net, to simultaneously alleviate speckle noise interference and blurred boundary problems of breast tumor segmentation. Specifically, we propose two innovative designs, namely, the Noise Suppression Module (NSM) and the Boundary Refinement Module (BRM). The NSM filters noise information from the coarse-grained feature maps, while the BRM progressively refines the boundaries of significant lesion objects. Our method demonstrates superior accuracy over state-of-the-art deep learning models, achieving significant improvements of 3.67% on Dataset B and 2.30% on the BUSI dataset in mDice for testing malignant tumors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing growth in knowledge about the functioning of the nervous system of mammals and humans, as well as the significant neuromorphic technology developments in recent decades, has led to the emergence of a large number of brain–computer interfaces and neuroprosthetics for regenerative medicine tasks. Neurotechnologies have traditionally been developed for therapeutic purposes to help or replace motor, sensory or cognitive abilities damaged by injury or disease. They also have significant potential for memory enhancement. However, there are still no fully developed neurotechnologies and neural interfaces capable of restoring or expanding cognitive functions, in particular memory, in mammals or humans. In this regard, the search for new technologies in the field of the restoration of cognitive functions is an urgent task of modern neurophysiology, neurotechnology and artificial intelligence. The hippocampus is an important brain structure connected to memory and information processing in the brain. The aim of this paper is to propose an approach based on deep neural networks for the prediction of hippocampal signals in the CA1 region based on received biological input in the CA3 region. We compare the results of prediction for two widely used deep architectures: reservoir computing (RC) and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. The proposed study can be viewed as a first step in the complex task of the development of a neurohybrid chip, which allows one to restore memory functions in the damaged rodent hippocampus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of academic expert finding, this paper investigates and compares the performance of information retrieval (IR) and machine learning (ML) methods, including deep learning, to approach the problem of identifying academic figures who are experts in different domains when a potential user requests their expertise. IR-based methods construct multifaceted textual profiles for each expert by clustering information from their scientific publications. Several methods fully tailored for this problem are presented in this paper. In contrast, ML-based methods treat expert finding as a classification task, training automatic text classifiers using publications authored by experts. By comparing these approaches, we contribute to a deeper understanding of academic-expert-finding techniques and their applicability in knowledge discovery. These methods are tested with two large datasets from the biomedical field: PMSC-UGR and CORD-19. The results show how IR techniques were, in general, more robust with both datasets and more suitable than the ML-based ones, with some exceptions showing good performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote sensing datasets usually have a wide range of spatial and spectral resolutions. They provide unique advantages in surveillance systems, and many government organizations use remote sensing multispectral imagery to monitor security-critical infrastructures or targets. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has advanced rapidly in recent years and has been widely applied to remote image analysis, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. However, AI models are vulnerable and can be easily deceived or poisoned. A malicious user may poison an AI model by creating a stealthy backdoor. A backdoored AI model performs well on clean data but behaves abnormally when a planted trigger appears in the data. Backdoor attacks have been extensively studied in machine learning-based computer vision applications with natural images. However, much less research has been conducted on remote sensing imagery, which typically consists of many more bands in addition to the red, green, and blue bands found in natural images. In this paper, we first extensively studied a popular backdoor attack, BadNets, applied to a remote sensing dataset, where the trigger was planted in all of the bands in the data. Our results showed that SOTA defense mechanisms, including Neural Cleanse, TABOR, Activation Clustering, Fine-Pruning, GangSweep, Strip, DeepInspect, and Pixel Backdoor, had difficulties detecting and mitigating the backdoor attack. We then proposed an explainable AI-guided backdoor attack specifically for remote sensing imagery by placing triggers in the image sub-bands. Our proposed attack model even poses stronger challenges to these SOTA defense mechanisms, and no method was able to defend it. These results send an alarming message about the catastrophic effects the backdoor attacks may have on satellite imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the wide application of deep learning, power inspection technology has made great progress. However, substation inspection videos often present challenges such as complex backgrounds, uneven lighting distribution, variations in the appearance of power equipment targets, and occlusions, which increase the difficulty of object segmentation and tracking, thereby adversely affecting the accuracy and reliability of power equipment condition monitoring. In this paper, a pixel-level equalized memory matching network (PEMMN) for power intelligent inspection segmentation and tracking is proposed. Firstly, an equalized memory matching network is designed to collect historical information about the target using a memory bank, in which a pixel-level equalized matching method is used to ensure that the reference frame information can be transferred to the current frame reliably, guiding the segmentation tracker to focus on the most informative region in the current frame. Then, to prevent memory explosion and the accumulation of segmentation template errors, a mask quality evaluation module is introduced to obtain the confidence level of the current segmentation result so as to selectively store the frames with high segmentation quality to ensure the reliability of the memory update. Finally, the synthetic feature map generated by the PEMMN and the mask quality assessment strategy are unified into the segmentation tracking framework to achieve accurate segmentation and robust tracking. Experimental results show that the method performs excellently on real substation inspection scenarios and three generalized datasets and has high practical value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Adam algorithm is a widely used optimizer for neural network training due to efficient convergence speed. The algorithm is prone to unstable learning rate and performance degradation on some models. To solve these problems, in this paper, an improved algorithm named Linear Curvature Momentum Adam (LCMAdam) is proposed, which introduces curvature-controlled gradient and linear interpolation strategies. The curvature-controlled gradient can make the gradient update smoother, and the linear interpolation technique can adaptively adjust the size of the learning rate according to the characteristics of the curve during the training process so that it can find the exact value faster, which improves the efficiency and robustness of training. The experimental results show that the LCMAdam algorithm achieves 98.49% accuracy on the MNIST dataset, 75.20% on the CIFAR10 dataset, and 76.80% on the Stomach dataset, which is more difficult to recognize medical images. The LCMAdam optimizer achieves significant performance gains on a variety of neural network structures and tasks, proving its effectiveness and utility in the field of deep learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy (DR) can effectively prevent irreversible vision loss and assist ophthalmologists in providing timely and accurate treatment plans. However, the existing methods based on deep learning have a weak perception ability of different scale information in retinal fundus images, and the segmentation capability of subtle lesions is also insufficient. This paper aims to address these issues and proposes MLNet for DR lesion segmentation, which mainly consists of the Multi-Scale Attention Block (MSAB) and the Lesion Perception Block (LPB). The MSAB is designed to capture multi-scale lesion features in fundus images, while the LPB perceives subtle lesions in depth. In addition, a novel loss function with tailored lesion weight is designed to reduce the influence of imbalanced datasets on the algorithm. The performance comparison between MLNet and other state-of-the-art methods is carried out in the DDR dataset and DIARETDB1 dataset, and MLNet achieves the best results of 51.81% mAUPR, 49.85% mDice, and 37.19% mIoU in the DDR dataset, and 67.16% mAUPR and 61.82% mDice in the DIARETDB1 dataset. The generalization experiment of MLNet in the IDRiD dataset achieves 59.54% mAUPR, which is the best among other methods. The results show that MLNet has outstanding DR lesion segmentation ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have gained prominence in various applications, but remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that manipulate data to mislead a DNN. This paper aims to challenge the efficacy and transferability of two contemporary defense mechanisms against adversarial attacks: (a) robust training and (b) adversarial training. The former suggests that training a DNN on a data set consisting solely of robust features should produce a model resistant to adversarial attacks. The latter creates an adversarially trained model that learns to minimise an expected training loss over a distribution of bounded adversarial perturbations. We reveal a significant lack in the transferability of these defense mechanisms and provide insight into the potential dangers posed by L ∞ -norm attacks previously underestimated by the research community. Such conclusions are based on extensive experiments involving (1) different model architectures, (2) the use of canonical correlation analysis, (3) visual and quantitative analysis of the neural network's latent representations, (4) an analysis of networks' decision boundaries and (5) the use of equivalence of L 2 and L ∞ perturbation norm theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid expansion and pervasive reach of the internet in recent years have raised concerns about evolving and adaptable online threats, particularly with the extensive integration of Machine Learning (ML) systems into our daily routines. These systems are increasingly becoming targets of malicious attacks that seek to distort their functionality through the concept of poisoning. Such attacks aim to warp the intended operations of these services, deviating them from their true purpose. Poisoning renders systems susceptible to unauthorized access, enabling illicit users to masquerade as legitimate ones, compromising the integrity of smart technology-based systems like Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDSs). Therefore, it is necessary to continue working on studying the resilience of deep learning network systems while there are poisoning attacks, specifically interfering with the integrity of data conveyed over networks. This paper explores the resilience of deep learning (DL)—based NIDSs against untethered white-box attacks. More specifically, it introduces a designed poisoning attack technique geared especially for deep learning by adding various amounts of altered instances into training datasets at diverse rates and then investigating the attack's influence on model performance. We observe that increasing injection rates (from 1% to 50%) and random amplified distribution have slightly affected the overall performance of the system, which is represented by accuracy (0.93) at the end of the experiments. However, the rest of the results related to the other measures, such as PPV (0.082), FPR (0.29), and MSE (0.67), indicate that the data manipulation poisoning attacks impact the deep learning model. These findings shed light on the vulnerability of DL-based NIDS under poisoning attacks, emphasizing the significance of securing such systems against these sophisticated threats, for which defense techniques should be considered. Our analysis, supported by experimental results, shows that the generated poisoned data have significantly impacted the model performance and are hard to be detected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drones play a pivotal role in various industries of Industry 4.0. For achieving the application of drones in a dynamic environment, finding a clear path for their autonomous flight requires more research. This paper addresses the problem of finding a navigation path for an autonomous drone based on visual scene information. A deep learning-based object detection approach can localize obstacles detected in a scene. Considering this approach, we propose a solution framework that includes masking with a color-based segmentation method to identify an empty area where the drone can fly. The scene is described using segmented regions and localization points. The proposed approach can be used to remotely guide drones in dynamic environments that have poor coverage from global positioning systems. The simulation results show that the proposed framework with object detection and the proposed masking technique support drone navigation in a dynamic environment based only on the visual input from the front field of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of classification-capable artificial intelligence (AI) across a wide range of domains (e.g., agriculture, construction, etc.) has been allowed to optimize and complement several tasks, typically operationalized by humans. The computational training that allows providing such support is frequently hindered by various challenges related to datasets, including the scarcity of examples and imbalanced class distributions, which have detrimental effects on the production of accurate models. For a proper approach to these challenges, strategies smarter than the traditional brute force-based K-fold cross-validation or the naivety of hold-out are required, with the following main goals in mind: (1) carrying out one-shot, close-to-optimal data arrangements, accelerating conventional training optimization; and (2) aiming at maximizing the capacity of inference models to its fullest extent while relieving computational burden. To that end, in this paper, two image-based feature-aware dataset splitting approaches are proposed, hypothesizing a contribution towards attaining classification models that are closer to their full inference potential. Both rely on strategic image harvesting: while one of them hinges on weighted random selection out of a feature-based clusters set, the other involves a balanced picking process from a sorted list that stores data features' distances to the centroid of a whole feature space. Comparative tests on datasets related to grapevine leaves phenotyping and bridge defects showcase promising results, highlighting a viable alternative to K-fold cross-validation and hold-out methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are playing a crucial role in transforming healthcare by enhancing the quality, accessibility, and efficiency of medical care, research, and operations. These algorithms enable healthcare providers to offer more accurate diagnoses, predict outcomes, and customize treatments to individual patient needs. AI also improves operational efficiency by automating routine tasks and optimizing resource management. However, there are challenges to adopting AI in healthcare, such as data privacy concerns and potential biases in algorithms. Collaboration among stakeholders is necessary to ensure ethical use of AI and its positive impact on the field. AI also has applications in medical research, preventive medicine, and public health. It is important to recognize that AI should augment, not replace, the expertise and compassionate care provided by healthcare professionals. The ethical implications and societal impact of AI in healthcare must be carefully considered, guided by fairness, transparency, and accountability principles. Several research papers in this special issue explore the application of AI algorithms in various aspects of healthcare, such as gait analysis for Parkinson's disease diagnosis, human activity recognition, heart disease prediction, compliance assessment with clinical protocols, epidemic management, neurological complications identification, fall prevention, leukemia diagnosis, and genetic clinical pathways. These studies demonstrate the potential of AI in improving medical diagnostics, patient monitoring, and personalized care. [Extracted from the article]

Using a safety belt is crucial for preventing severe injuries and fatalities during vehicle accidents. In this paper, we propose a real-time vehicle occupant safety belt detection system based on the YOLOv7 (You Only Look Once version seven) object detection algorithm. The proposed approach aims to automatically detect whether the occupants of a vehicle have buckled their safety belts or not as soon as they are detected within the vehicle. A dataset for this purpose was collected and annotated for validation and testing. By leveraging the efficiency and accuracy of YOLOv7, we achieve near-instantaneous analysis of video streams, making our system suitable for deployment in various surveillance and automotive safety applications. This paper outlines a comprehensive methodology for training the YOLOv7 model using the labelImg tool to annotate the dataset with images showing vehicle occupants. It also discusses the challenges of detecting seat belts and evaluates the system's performance on a real-world dataset. The evaluation focuses on distinguishing the status of a safety belt between two classes: "buckled" and "unbuckled". The results demonstrate a high level of accuracy, with a mean average precision (mAP) of 99.6% and an F1 score of 98%, indicating the system's effectiveness in identifying the safety belt status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The verticillium fungus has become a widespread threat to olive fields around the world in recent years. The accurate and early detection of the disease at scale could support solving the problem. In this paper, we use the YOLO version 5 model to detect verticillium fungus in olive trees using aerial RGB imagery captured by unmanned aerial vehicles. The aim of our paper is to compare different architectures of the model and evaluate their performance on this task. The architectures are evaluated at two different input sizes each through the most widely used metrics for object detection and classification tasks (precision, recall, mAP@0.5 and mAP@0.5:0.95). Our results show that the YOLOv5 algorithm is able to deliver good results in detecting olive trees and predicting their status, with the different architectures having different strengths and weaknesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reinforcement Learning is one of the many machine learning paradigms. With no labelled data, it is concerned with balancing the exploration and exploitation of an environment with one or more agents present in it. Recently, many breakthroughs have been made in the creation of these agents for video game machine learning development, especially in first-person shooters with platforms such as ViZDoom, DeepMind Lab, and Unity's ML-Agents. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art of creation of Reinforcement Learning agents for use in multiplayer deathmatch first-person shooters. We selected various platforms, frameworks, and training architectures from various papers and examined each of them, analysing their uses. We compared each platform and training architecture, and then concluded whether machine learning agents can now face off against humans and whether they make for better gameplay than traditional Artificial Intelligence. In the end, we thought about future research and what researchers should keep in mind when exploring and testing this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies various deep learning models for word-level lip-reading technology, one of the tasks in the supervised learning of video classification. Several public datasets have been published in the lip-reading research field. However, few studies have investigated lip-reading techniques using multiple datasets. This paper evaluates deep learning models using four publicly available datasets, namely Lip Reading in the Wild (LRW), OuluVS, CUAVE, and Speech Scene by Smart Device (SSSD), which are representative datasets in this field. LRW is one of the large-scale public datasets and targets 500 English words released in 2016. Initially, the recognition accuracy of LRW was 66.1%, but many research groups have been working on it. The current the state of the art (SOTA) has achieved 94.1% by 3D-Conv + ResNet18 + {DC-TCN, MS-TCN, BGRU} + knowledge distillation + word boundary. Regarding the SOTA model, in this paper, we combine existing models such as ResNet, WideResNet, WideResNet, EfficientNet, MS-TCN, Transformer, ViT, and ViViT, and investigate the effective models for word lip-reading tasks using six deep learning models with modified feature extractors and classifiers. Through recognition experiments, we show that similar model structures of 3D-Conv + ResNet18 for feature extraction and MS-TCN model for inference are valid for four datasets with different scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicting student dropout is a crucial task in online education. Traditionally, each educational entity (institution, university, faculty, department, etc.) creates and uses its own prediction model starting from its own data. However, that approach is not always feasible or advisable and may depend on the availability of data, local infrastructure, and resources. In those cases, there are various machine learning approaches for sharing data and/or models between educational entities, using a classical centralized machine learning approach or other more advanced approaches such as transfer learning or federated learning. In this paper, we used data from three different LMS Moodle servers representing homogeneous different-sized educational entities. We tested the performance of the different machine learning approaches for the problem of predicting student dropout with multiple educational entities involved. We used a deep learning algorithm as a predictive classifier method. Our preliminary findings provide useful information on the benefits and drawbacks of each approach, as well as suggestions for enhancing performance when there are multiple institutions. In our case, repurposed transfer learning, stacked transfer learning, and centralized approaches produced similar or better results than the locally trained models for most of the entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of the 0.35 T MR-Linac (MRIdian, ViewRay) system in radiation therapy allows precise tumor targeting for moving lesions. However, the lack of an automatic volume segmentation function in the MR-Linac's treatment planning system poses a challenge. In this paper, we propose a deep-learning-based multiorgan segmentation approach for the thoracic region, using EfficientNet as the backbone for the network architecture. The objectives of this approach include accurate segmentation of critical organs, such as the left and right lungs, the heart, the spinal cord, and the esophagus, essential for minimizing radiation toxicity during external radiation therapy. Our proposed approach, when evaluated on an internal dataset comprising 81 patients, demonstrated superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, the results for our approach with a 2.5D strategy were as follows: a dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 0.820 ± 0.041, an intersection over union (IoU) of 0.725 ± 0.052, and a 3D Hausdorff distance (HD) of 10.353 ± 4.974 mm. Notably, the 2.5D strategy surpassed the 2D strategy in all three metrics, exhibiting higher DSC and IoU values, as well as lower HD values. This improvement strongly suggests that our proposed approach with the 2.5D strategy may hold promise in achieving more precise and accurate segmentations when compared to the conventional 2D strategy. Our work has practical implications in the improvement of treatment planning precision, aligning with the evolution of medical imaging and innovative strategies for multiorgan segmentation tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stereo 3D object detection remains a crucial challenge within the realm of 3D vision. In the pursuit of enhancing stereo 3D object detection, feature fusion has emerged as a potent strategy. However, the design of the feature fusion module and the determination of pivotal features in this fusion process remain critical. This paper proposes a novel feature attention module tailored for stereo 3D object detection. Serving as a pivotal element for feature fusion, this module not only discerns feature importance but also facilitates informed enhancements based on its conclusions. This study delved into the various facets aided by the feature attention module. Firstly, a interpretability analysis was conducted concerning the function of the image segmentation methods. Secondly, we explored the augmentation of the feature fusion module through a category reweighting strategy. Lastly, we investigated global feature fusion methods and model compression strategies. The models devised through our proposed design underwent an effective analysis, yielding commendable performance, especially in small object detection within the pedestrian category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ensemble learning, online learning and deep learning are very effective and versatile in a wide spectrum of problem domains, such as feature extraction, multi-class classification and retrieval. In this paper, combining the ideas of ensemble learning, online learning and deep learning, we propose a novel deep learning method called deep error-correcting output codes (DeepECOCs). DeepECOCs are composed of multiple layers of the ECOC module, which combines several incremental support vector machines (incremental SVMs) as base classifiers. In this novel deep architecture, each ECOC module can be considered as two successive layers of the network, while the incremental SVMs can be viewed as weighted links between two successive layers. In the pre-training procedure, supervisory information, i.e., class labels, can be used during the network initialization. The incremental SVMs lead this procedure to be very efficient, especially for large-scale applications. We have conducted extensive experiments to compare DeepECOCs with traditional ECOC, feature learning and deep learning algorithms. The results demonstrate that DeepECOCs perform, not only better than existing ECOC and feature learning algorithms, but also related to deep learning ones in most cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the advent of Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency landscape has seen the emergence of several virtual currencies that have quickly established their presence in the global market. The dynamics of this market, influenced by a multitude of factors that are difficult to predict, pose a challenge to fully comprehend its underlying insights. This paper proposes a methodology for suggesting when it is appropriate to buy or sell cryptocurrencies, in order to maximize profits. Starting from large sets of market and social media data, our methodology combines different statistical, text analytics, and deep learning techniques to support a recommendation trading algorithm. In particular, we exploit additional information such as correlation between social media posts and price fluctuations, causal connection among prices, and the sentiment of social media users regarding cryptocurrencies. Several experiments were carried out on historical data to assess the effectiveness of the trading algorithm, achieving an overall average gain of 194% without transaction fees and 117% when considering fees. In particular, among the different types of cryptocurrencies considered (i.e., high capitalization, solid projects, and meme coins), the trading algorithm has proven to be very effective in predicting the price trends of influential meme coins, yielding considerably higher profits compared to other cryptocurrency types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instructors face significant time and effort constraints when grading students' assessments on a large scale. Clustering similar assessments is a unique and effective technique that has the potential to significantly reduce the workload of instructors in online and large-scale learning environments. By grouping together similar assessments, marking one assessment in a cluster can be scaled to other similar assessments, allowing for a more efficient and streamlined grading process. To address this issue, this paper focuses on text assessments and proposes a method for reducing the workload of instructors by clustering similar assessments. The proposed method involves the use of distributed representation to transform texts into vectors, and contrastive learning to improve the representation that distinguishes the differences among similar texts. The paper presents a general framework for clustering similar texts that includes label representation, K-means, and self-organization map algorithms, with the objective of improving clustering performance using Accuracy (ACC) and Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) metrics. The proposed framework is evaluated experimentally using two real datasets. The results show that self-organization maps and K-means algorithms with Pre-trained language models outperform label representation algorithms for different datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed significant challenges in accurately diagnosing the disease, as severe cases may present symptoms similar to pneumonia. Real-Time Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) is the conventional diagnostic technique; however, it has limitations in terms of time-consuming laboratory procedures and kit availability. Radiological chest images, such as X-rays and Computed Tomography (CT) scans, have been essential in aiding the diagnosis process. In this research paper, we propose a deep learning (DL) approach based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to enhance the detection of COVID-19 and its variants from chest X-ray images. Building upon the existing research in SARS and COVID-19 identification using AI and machine learning techniques, our DL model aims to extract the most significant features from the X-ray scans of affected individuals. By employing an explanatory CNN-based technique, we achieved a promising accuracy of up to 97 % in detecting COVID-19 cases, which can assist physicians in effectively screening and identifying probable COVID-19 patients. This study highlights the potential of DL in medical imaging, specifically in detecting COVID-19 from radiological images. The improved accuracy of our model demonstrates its efficacy in aiding healthcare professionals and mitigating the spread of the disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the prevalence and sophistication of cyber threats continue to increase, the development of robust vulnerability detection techniques becomes paramount in ensuring the security of computer systems. Neural models have demonstrated significant potential in identifying vulnerabilities; however, they are not immune to adversarial attacks. This paper presents a set of evolutionary techniques for generating adversarial instances to enhance the resilience of neural models used for vulnerability detection. The proposed approaches leverage an evolution strategy (ES) algorithm that utilizes as the fitness function the output of the neural network to deceive. By starting from existing instances, the algorithm evolves individuals, represented by source code snippets, by applying semantic-preserving transformations, while utilizing the fitness to invert their original classification. This iterative process facilitates the generation of adversarial instances that can mislead the vulnerability detection models while maintaining the original behavior of the source code. The significance of this research lies in its contribution to the field of cybersecurity by addressing the need for enhanced resilience against adversarial attacks in vulnerability detection models. The evolutionary approach provides a systematic framework for generating adversarial instances, allowing for the identification and mitigation of weaknesses in AI classifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to determine whether regularization improves image reconstruction in electrical impedance tomography (EIT) using a radial basis network. The primary purpose is to investigate the effect of regularization to estimate the network parameters of the radial basis function network to solve the inverse problem in EIT. Our approach to studying the efficacy of the radial basis network with regularization is to compare the performance among several different regularizations, mainly Tikhonov, Lasso, and Elastic Net regularization. We vary the network parameters, including the fixed and variable widths for the Gaussian used for the network. We also perform a robustness study for comparison of the different regularizations used. Our results include (1) determining the optimal number of radial basis functions in the network to avoid overfitting; (2) comparison of fixed versus variable Gaussian width with or without regularization; (3) comparison of image reconstruction with or without regularization, in particular, no regularization, Tikhonov, Lasso, and Elastic Net; (4) comparison of both mean square and mean absolute error and the corresponding variance; and (5) comparison of robustness, in particular, the performance of the different methods concerning noise level. We conclude that by looking at the R2 score, one can determine the optimal number of radial basis functions. The fixed-width radial basis function network with regularization results in improved performance. The fixed-width Gaussian with Tikhonov regularization performs very well. The regularization helps reconstruct the images outside of the training data set. The regularization may cause the quality of the reconstruction to deteriorate; however, the stability is much improved. In terms of robustness, the RBF with Lasso and Elastic Net seem very robust compared to Tikhonov. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning has enabled a straightforward, convenient method of road pavement infrastructure management that facilitates a secure, cost-effective, and efficient transportation network. Manual road pavement inspection is time-consuming and dangerous, making timely road repair difficult. This research showcases You Only Look Once version 5 (YOLOv5), the most commonly employed object detection model trained on the latest benchmark Road Damage Dataset, Road Damage Detection 2022 (RDD 2022). The RDD 2022 dataset includes four common types of road pavement damage, namely vertical cracks, horizontal cracks, alligator cracks, and potholes. This paper presents an improved deep neural network model based on YOLOv5 for real-time road pavement damage detection in photographic representations of outdoor road surfaces, making it an indispensable tool for efficient, real-time, and cost-effective road infrastructure management. The YOLOv5 model has been modified to incorporate several techniques that improve its accuracy and generalization performance. These techniques include the Efficient Channel Attention module (ECA-Net), label smoothing, the K-means++ algorithm, Focal Loss, and an additional prediction layer. In addition, a 1.9% improvement in mean average precision (mAP) and a 1.29% increase in F1-Score were attained by the model in comparison to YOLOv5s, with an increment of 1.1 million parameters. Moreover, a 0.11% improvement in mAP and 0.05% improvement in F1 score was achieved by the proposed model compared to YOLOv8s while having 3 million fewer parameters and 12 gigabytes fewer Giga Floating Point Operation per Second (GFlops). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Timely information about the need to thin forests is vital in forest management to maintain a healthy forest while maximizing income. Currently, very-high-spatial-resolution remote sensing data can provide crucial assistance to experts when evaluating the maturity of thinnings. Nevertheless, this task is still predominantly carried out in the field and demands extensive resources. This paper presents a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) to detect the necessity and urgency of carrying out thinnings using only remote sensing data. The approach uses very-high-spatial-resolution RGB and near-infrared orthophotos; a canopy height model (CHM); a digital terrain model (DTM); the slope; and reference data, which, in this case, originate from spruce-dominated forests in the Austrian Alps. After tuning, the model achieves an F1 score of 82.23% on our test data, which indicates that the model is usable in a practical setting. We conclude that DCNNs are capable of detecting the need to carry out thinnings in forests. In contrast, attempts to assess the urgency of the need for thinnings with DCNNs proved to be unsuccessful. However, additional data, such as age or yield class, have the potential to improve the results. Our investigation into the influence of each individual input feature shows that orthophotos appear to contain the most relevant information for detecting the need for thinning. Moreover, we observe a gain in performance when adding the CHM and slope, whereas adding the DTM harms the model's performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Day by day pollution in cities is increasing due to urbanization. One of the biggest challenges posed by the rapid migration of inhabitants into cities is increased air pollution. Sustainable Development Goal 11 indicates that 99 percent of the world's urban population breathes polluted air. In such a trend of urbanization, predicting the concentrations of pollutants in advance is very important. Predictions of pollutants would help city administrations to take timely measures for ensuring Sustainable Development Goal 11. In data engineering, imputation and the removal of outliers are very important steps prior to forecasting the concentration of air pollutants. For pollution and meteorological data, missing values and outliers are critical problems that need to be addressed. This paper proposes a novel method called multiple iterative imputation using autoencoder-based long short-term memory (MIA-LSTM) which uses iterative imputation using an extra tree regressor as an estimator for the missing values in multivariate data followed by an LSTM autoencoder for the detection and removal of outliers present in the dataset. The preprocessed data were given to a multivariate LSTM for forecasting PM2.5 concentration. This paper also presents the effect of removing outliers and missing values from the dataset as well as the effect of imputing missing values in the process of forecasting the concentrations of air pollutants. The proposed method provides better results for forecasting with a root mean square error (RMSE) value of 9.8883. The obtained results were compared with the traditional gated recurrent unit (GRU), 1D convolutional neural network (CNN), and long short-term memory (LSTM) approaches for a dataset of the Aotizhonhxin area of Beijing in China. Similar results were observed for another two locations in China and one location in India. The results obtained show that imputation and outlier/anomaly removal improve the accuracy of air pollution forecasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic state estimation (TSE) is a critical component of the efficient intelligent transportation systems (ITS) operations. In the literature, TSE methods are divided into model-driven methods and data-driven methods. Each approach has its limitations. The physics information-based neural network (PINN) framework emerges to mitigate the limitations of the traditional TSE methods, while the state-of-art of such a framework has focused on single road segments but can hardly deal with traffic networks. This paper introduces a PINN framework that can effectively make use of a small amount of observational speed data to obtain high-quality TSEs for a traffic network. Both model-driven and data-driven components are incorporated into PINNs to combine the advantages of both approaches and to overcome their disadvantages. Simulation data of simple traffic networks are used for studying the highway network TSE. This paper demonstrates how to solve the popular LWR physical traffic flow model with a PINN for a traffic network. Experimental results confirm that the proposed approach is promising for estimating network traffic accurately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a special issue of the journal "Algorithms" focused on algorithms in data classification. It provides an overview of different subcategories of data classification, such as binary classification, multi-class classification, and text classification. The issue includes twelve papers that cover a wide range of applications, including class imbalance in Gaussian mixture models, blood cell classification using deep learning techniques, student dropout prediction in online education, and energy consumption in industrial plants. Other topics covered include the use of artificial intelligence models for rehabilitation guidance, hyperparameter optimization of artificial neural networks, feature selection in big data classification, and the classification of acute psychological stress and physical activity using wristband devices. The issue also includes specialized software for data classification and the use of artificial intelligence models for intelligent wear monitoring. [Extracted from the article]

The recognition of human activities using vision-based techniques has become a crucial research field in video analytics. Over the last decade, there have been numerous advancements in deep learning algorithms aimed at accurately detecting complex human actions in video streams. While these algorithms have demonstrated impressive performance in activity recognition, they often exhibit a bias towards either model performance or computational efficiency. This biased trade-off between robustness and efficiency poses challenges when addressing complex human activity recognition problems. To address this issue, this paper presents a computationally efficient yet robust approach, exploiting saliency-aware spatial and temporal features for human action recognition in videos. To achieve effective representation of human actions, we propose an efficient approach called the dual-attentional Residual 3D Convolutional Neural Network (DA-R3DCNN). Our proposed method utilizes a unified channel-spatial attention mechanism, allowing it to efficiently extract significant human-centric features from video frames. By combining dual channel-spatial attention layers with residual 3D convolution layers, the network becomes more discerning in capturing spatial receptive fields containing objects within the feature maps. To assess the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed method, we have conducted extensive experiments on four well-established benchmark datasets for human action recognition. The quantitative results obtained validate the efficiency of our method, showcasing significant improvements in accuracy of up to 11% as compared to state-of-the-art human action recognition methods. Additionally, our evaluation of inference time reveals that the proposed method achieves up to a 74× improvement in frames per second (FPS) compared to existing approaches, thus showing the suitability and effectiveness of the proposed DA-R3DCNN for real-time human activity recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid development of speech synthesis technology has significantly improved the naturalness and human-likeness of synthetic speech. As the technical barriers for speech synthesis are rapidly lowering, the number of illegal activities such as fraud and extortion is increasing, posing a significant threat to authentication systems, such as automatic speaker verification. This paper proposes an end-to-end speech synthesis detection model based on audio feature fusion in response to the constantly evolving synthesis techniques and to improve the accuracy of detecting synthetic speech. The model uses a pre-trained wav2vec2 model to extract features from raw waveforms and utilizes an audio feature fusion module for back-end classification. The audio feature fusion module aims to improve the model accuracy by adequately utilizing the audio features extracted from the front end and fusing the information from timeframes and feature dimensions. Data augmentation techniques are also used to enhance the performance generalization of the model. The model is trained on the training and development sets of the logical access (LA) dataset of the ASVspoof 2019 Challenge, an international standard, and is tested on the logical access (LA) and deep-fake (DF) evaluation datasets of the ASVspoof 2021 Challenge. The equal error rate (EER) on ASVspoof 2021 LA and ASVspoof 2021 DF are 1.18% and 2.62%, respectively, achieving the best results on the DF dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For its robust predictive power (compared to pure physics-based models) and sample-efficient training (compared to pure deep learning models), physics-informed deep learning (PIDL), a paradigm hybridizing physics-based models and deep neural networks (DNNs), has been booming in science and engineering fields. One key challenge of applying PIDL to various domains and problems lies in the design of a computational graph that integrates physics and DNNs. In other words, how the physics is encoded into DNNs and how the physics and data components are represented. In this paper, we offer an overview of a variety of architecture designs of PIDL computational graphs and how these structures are customized to traffic state estimation (TSE), a central problem in transportation engineering. When observation data, problem type, and goal vary, we demonstrate potential architectures of PIDL computational graphs and compare these variants using the same real-world dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern smart grids are built based on top of advanced computing and networking technologies, where condition monitoring relies on secure cyberphysical connectivity. Over the network infrastructure, transported data containing confidential information, must be protected as smart grids are vulnerable and subject to various cyberattacks. Various machine learning based classifiers were proposed for intrusion detection in smart grids. However, each of them has respective advantage and disadvantages. Aiming to improve the performance of existing machine learning based classifiers, this paper proposes an adaptive deep learning algorithm with a data pre-processing module, a neural network pre-training module and a classifier module, which work together classify intrusion data types using their high-dimensional data features. The proposed Adaptive Deep Learning (ADL) algorithm obtains the number of layers and the number of neurons per layer by determining the characteristic dimension of the network traffic. With transfer learning, the proposed ADL algorithm can extract the original data dimensions and obtain new abstract features. By combining deep learning models with traditional machine learning-based classification models, the performance of classification of network traffic data is significantly improved. By using the Network Security Laboratory-Knowledge Discovery in Databases (NSL-KDD) dataset, experimental results show that the proposed ADL algorithm improves the effectiveness of existing intrusion detection methods and reduces the training time, indicating a promising candidate to enhance network security in smart grids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Channel identification is a useful function to support wireless telecommunication operations because the knowledge of the radio frequency propagation channel characteristics can improve communication efficiency and robustness. In recent times, the application of machine learning (ML) algorithms to the problem of channel identification has been proposed in the literature. In particular, Deep Learning (DL) has demonstrated superior performance to 'shallow' machine learning algorithms for many wireless communication functions. Inspired by the success of DL in literature, the authors in this paper apply Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to the problem of channel identification, which is still an emerging research area. CNN is a deep learning algorithm that has demonstrated superior performance to ML algorithms, in particular for image processing tasks. Because the digitized RF signal is a one-dimensional time series, different algorithms are applied to convert the time series to images using various Time Frequency Transform (TFT) including the CWTs, spectrogram, and Wigner Ville distribution. The images are then provided as input to the CNN. The approach is applied to a data set based on weather radar pulse signals generated in the laboratory of the author's facilities on which different fading models are applied. These models are inspired by the tap-delay-line 3GPP configurations defined in the standards, but they have been customized with Nakagami-m fading distribution (3GPP-like fading models). The results show the superior performance of time–frequency CNN in comparison to 1D CNN for different values of Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) in dB. In particular, the study shows that the Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) has the optimal performance in this data set, but the choice of the mother wavelet remains a problem to be solved (this is a well-known problem in the research literature). Then, this study also proposes an adaptive technique for the choice of the optimal mother wavelet, which is evaluated on the mentioned data set. The results show that the adaptive proposed approach is able to obtain the optimal performance for most of the SNR conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology, which is characterized by the use of a large number of antennas, is a key enabler for the next-generation wireless communication and beyond. Despite its potential for high performance, implementing a massive MIMO system presents numerous technical challenges, including the high hardware complexity, cost, and power consumption that result from the large number of antennas and the associated front-end circuits. One solution to these challenges is the use of hybrid beamforming, which divides the transceiving process into both analog and digital domains. To perform hybrid beamforming efficiently, it is necessary to optimize the analog beamformer, referred to as the compressive measurement matrix (CMM) here, that allows the projection of high-dimensional signals into a low-dimensional manifold. Classical approaches to optimizing the CMM, however, are computationally intensive and time consuming, limiting their usefulness for real-time processing. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based approach to optimizing the CMM using long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. This approach offers high accuracy with low complexity, making it a promising solution for the real-time implementation of massive MIMO systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep neural networks are exposed to the risk of adversarial attacks via the fast gradient sign method (FGSM), projected gradient descent (PGD) attacks, and other attack algorithms. Adversarial training is one of the methods used to defend against the threat of adversarial attacks. It is a training schema that utilizes an alternative objective function to provide model generalization for both adversarial data and clean data. In this systematic review, we focus particularly on adversarial training as a method of improving the defensive capacities and robustness of machine learning models. Specifically, we focus on adversarial sample accessibility through adversarial sample generation methods. The purpose of this systematic review is to survey state-of-the-art adversarial training and robust optimization methods to identify the research gaps within this field of applications. The literature search was conducted using Engineering Village (Engineering Village is an engineering literature search tool, which provides access to 14 engineering literature and patent databases), where we collected 238 related papers. The papers were filtered according to defined inclusion and exclusion criteria, and information was extracted from these papers according to a defined strategy. A total of 78 papers published between 2016 and 2021 were selected. Data were extracted and categorized using a defined strategy, and bar plots and comparison tables were used to show the data distribution. The findings of this review indicate that there are limitations to adversarial training methods and robust optimization. The most common problems are related to data generalization and overfitting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The availability of large amounts of data in combination with Big Data analytics has transformed many application domains. In this paper, we provide insights into how the area has developed in the last decade. First, we identify seven major application areas and six groups of important enabling technologies for Big Data applications and systems. Then, using bibliometrics and an extensive literature review of more than 80 papers, we identify the most important research trends in these areas. In addition, our bibliometric analysis also includes trends in different geographical regions. Our results indicate that manufacturing and agriculture or forestry are the two application areas with the fastest growth. Furthermore, our bibliometric study shows that deep learning and edge or fog computing are the enabling technologies increasing the most. We believe that the data presented in this paper provide a good overview of the current research trends in Big Data and that this kind of information is very useful when setting strategic agendas for Big Data research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of medical imaging, the division of an image into meaningful structures using image segmentation is an essential step for pre-processing analysis. Many studies have been carried out to solve the general problem of the evaluation of image segmentation results. One of the main focuses in the computer vision field is based on artificial intelligence algorithms for segmentation and classification, including machine learning and deep learning approaches. The main drawback of supervised segmentation approaches is that a large dataset of ground truth validated by medical experts is required. In this sense, many research groups have developed their segmentation approaches according to their specific needs. However, a generalised application aimed at visualizing, assessing and comparing the results of different methods facilitating the generation of a ground-truth repository is not found in recent literature. In this paper, a new graphical user interface application (MedicalSeg) for the management of medical imaging based on pre-processing and segmentation is presented. The objective is twofold, first to create a test platform for comparing segmentation approaches, and secondly to generate segmented images to create ground truths that can then be used for future purposes as artificial intelligence tools. An experimental demonstration and performance analysis discussion are presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clustering is a critical part of many tasks and, in most applications, the number of clusters in the data are unknown and must be estimated. This paper presents an Extreme Value Theory-based approach to threshold selection for clustering, proving that the "correct" linkage distances must follow a Weibull distribution for smooth feature spaces. Deep networks and their associated deep features have transformed many aspects of learning, and this paper shows they are consistent with our extreme-linkage theory and provide Unreasonable Clusterability. We show how our novel threshold selection can be applied to both classic agglomerative clustering and the more recent FINCH (First Integer Neighbor Clustering Hierarchy) algorithm. Our evaluation utilizes over a dozen different large-scale vision datasets/subsets, including multiple face-clustering datasets and ImageNet for both in-domain and, more importantly, out-of-domain object clustering. Across multiple deep features clustering tasks with very different characteristics, our novel automated threshold selection performs well, often outperforming state-of-the-art clustering techniques even when they select parameters on the test set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In engineering design, oftentimes a system's dynamic response is known or can be measured, but the source generating these responses is not known. The mathematical problem where the focus is on inferring the source terms of the governing equations from the set of observations is known as an inverse source problem (ISP). ISPs are traditionally solved by optimization techniques with regularization, but in the past few years, there has been a lot of interest in approaching these problems from a deep-learning viewpoint. In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach—infused with physics information—to recover the forcing function (source term) of systems with one degree of freedom from the response data. We test our architecture first to recover smooth forcing functions, and later functions involving abruptly changing gradient and jump discontinuities in the case of a linear system. Finally, we recover the harmonic, the sum of two harmonics, and the gaussian function, in the case of a non-linear system. The results obtained are promising and demonstrate the efficacy of this approach in recovering the forcing functions from the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network alignment (NA) offers a comprehensive way to build associations between different networks by identifying shared nodes. While the majority of current NA methods rely on the topological consistency assumption, which posits that shared nodes across different networks typically have similar local structures or neighbors, we argue that anchor nodes, which play a pivotal role in NA, face a more challenging scenario that is often overlooked. In this paper, we conduct extensive statistical analysis across networks to investigate the connection status of labeled anchor node pairs and categorize them into four situations. Based on our analysis, we propose an end-to-end network alignment framework that uses node representations as a distribution rather than a point vector to better handle the structural diversity of networks. To mitigate the influence of specific nodes, we introduce a mask mechanism during the representation learning process. In addition, we utilize meta-learning to generalize the learned information on labeled anchor node pairs to other node pairs. Finally, we perform comprehensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets to confirm the efficacy of our proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As in manufacturing with its Industry 4.0 transformation, the enormous potential of artificial intelligence (AI) is also being recognized in the construction industry. Specifically, the equipment-intensive construction industry can benefit from using AI. AI applications can leverage the data recorded by the numerous sensors on machines and mirror them in a digital twin. Analyzing the digital twin can help optimize processes on the construction site and increase productivity. We present a case from special foundation engineering: the machine production of bored piles. We introduce a hierarchical classification for activity recognition and apply a hybrid deep learning model based on convolutional and recurrent neural networks. Then, based on the results from the activity detection, we use discrete-event simulation to predict construction progress. We highlight the difficulty of defining the appropriate modeling granularity. While activity detection requires equipment movement, simulation requires knowledge of the production flow. Therefore, we present a flow-based production model that can be captured in a modularized process catalog. Overall, this paper aims to illustrate modeling using digital-twin technologies to increase construction process improvement in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of application of data-driven product development is diverse and ranges from requirements through the early phases to the detailed design of the product. The goal is to consistently analyze data to support and improve individual steps in the development process. In the context of this work, the focus is on the design and detailing phase, represented by the virtual testing of products through Finite Element (FE) simulations. However, due to the heterogeneous data of a simulation model, automatic use is a big challenge. A method is therefore presented that utilizes the entire stock of calculated simulations to predict the plausibility of new simulations. Correspondingly, a large amount of data is utilized to support less experienced users of FE software in the application. Thus, obvious errors in the simulation should be detected immediately with this procedure and unnecessary iterations are therefore avoided. Previous solutions were only able to perform a general plausibility classification, whereas the approach presented in this paper is intended to predict specific error sources in FE simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]