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To improve the accuracy of user implicit rating prediction, we combine the traditional latent factor model (LFM) and bidirectional gated recurrent unit neural network (BiGRU) model to propose a hybrid model that deeply mines the latent semantics in the unstructured content of the text and generates a more accurate rating matrix. First, we utilize the user’s historical behavior (favorites records) to build a user rating matrix and decompose the matrix to obtain the latent factor vectors of users and literature. We also apply the BERT model for word embedding of the research papers to obtain the sequence of word vectors. Then, we apply the BiGRU with the user attention mechanism to mine the research paper textual content and to generate the new literature latent feature vectors that are used to replace the original literature latent factor vectors decomposed from the rating matrix. Finally, a new rating matrix is generated to obtain users’ ratings of noninteractive research papers and to generate the recommendation list according to the user latent factor vector. We design experiments on the real datasets and verify that the research paper recommendation model is superior to traditional recommendation models in terms of precision, recall, F1-value, coverage, popularity and diversity.

Most existing studies and public datasets for handwritten Chinese text recognition are based on the regular documents with clean and blank background, lacking research reports for handwritten text recognition on challenging areas such as educational documents and financial bills. In this paper, we focus on examination paper text recognition and construct a challenging dataset named examination paper text (SCUT-EPT) dataset, which contains 50 000 text line images (40 000 for training and 10 000 for testing) selected from the examination papers of 2 986 volunteers. The proposed SCUT-EPT dataset presents numerous novel challenges, including character erasure, text line supplement, character/phrase switching, noised background, nonuniform word size, and unbalanced text length. In our experiments, the current advanced text recognition methods, such as convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) exhibits poor performance on the proposed SCUT-EPT dataset, proving the challenge and significance of the dataset. Nevertheless, through visualizing and error analysis, we observe that humans can avoid vast majority of the error predictions, which reveal the limitations and drawbacks of the current methods for handwritten Chinese text recognition (HCTR). Finally, three popular sequence transcription methods, connectionist temporal classification (CTC), attention mechanism, and cascaded attention-CTC are investigated for HCTR problem. It is interesting to observe that although the attention mechanism has been proved to be very effective in English scene text recognition, its performance is far inferior to the CTC method in the case of HCTR with large-scale character set.

Distress image retrieval for infrastructure maintenance via self-trained deep metric learning using experts’ knowledge is proposed in this paper. Since engineers take multiple images of a single distress part for inspection of road structures, it is necessary to construct a similar distress image retrieval method considering the input of multiple images to support determination of the level of deterioration. Thus, the construction of an image retrieval method while selecting an effective input from multiple images is described in this paper. The proposed method performs deep metric learning by using a small number of effective images labeled by experts’ knowledge with information about their effectiveness and a large number of unlabeled images via a self-training approach. Specifically, an end-to-end learning approach that performs retraining of the model by assigning pseudo-labels to these unlabeled images according to the output confidence of the model is achieved. Thus, the proposed method can select an effective image from multiple images that are input at the retrieval as a query image. This is the main contribution of this paper. As a result, the proposed method realizes highly accurate retrieval of similar distress images considering the actual situation of inspection in which multiple images of a distress part are input.

Machine reading comprehension is a very challenging task, which aims to determine the answer span based on the given context and question. The newly developed pre-training language model has achieved a series of successes in various natural language understanding tasks with its powerful contextual representation ability. However, these pre-training language models generally lack the downstream processing structure for specific tasks, which limits further performance improvement. In order to solve this problem and deepen the model’s understanding of the question and context, this paper proposes S&I Reader. On the basis of the pre-training model, skimming, intensive reading, and gated mechanism modules are added to simulate the behavior of humans reading text and filtering information. Based on the idea of granular computing, a multi-granularity module for computing context granularity and sequence granularity is added to the model to simulate the behavior of human beings to understand the text from words to sentences, from parts to the whole. Compared with the previous machine reading comprehension model, our model structure is novel. The skimming module and multi-granularity module proposed in this paper are used to solve the problem that the previous model ignores the key information of the text and cannot understand the text with multi granularity. Experiments show that the model proposed in this paper is effective for both Chinese and English datasets. It can better understand the question and context and give a more accurate answer. The performance has made new progress on the basis of the baseline model.

In the process of power transmission and distribution, non-technical losses are usually caused by users’ abnormal power consumption behavior. It will not only affect the dispatch and operation of the distribution network, bring hidden dangers to the security of the power grid, but also damage the operating costs of power companies and disrupt the operation of the power market. Aiming at users’ abnormal electricity consumption behavior, this paper proposes a model based on particle swarm optimization and long-short term memory with the attention mechanism (PSO-Attention-LSTM). Firstly, according to the actual electricity theft behavior, six typical electricity theft modes are summarized, and 4 composite modes are obtained by combining them, so as to comprehensively test the detection performance of the model for various electricity theft behaviors. Secondly, a detection model based on PSO-Attention-LSTM is proposed, and the model is built using the TensorFlow framework. The model uses the attention mechanism to give different weights to the hidden state of LSTM, which reduces the loss of historical information, strengthens important information and suppresses useless information. Use PSO to solve the difficult problem of model parameter selection, and optimize the hyperparameters to improve the model performance. Finally, the data set of the University of Massachusetts was used for simulation and compared with convolutional neural network-long short term memory (CNN-LSTM), attention mechanism-based long short term memory (Attention-LSTM), LSTM, gated recurrent unit (GRU), support vector regression (SVR), random forest (RF) and linear regression (LR) to verify the effectiveness and accuracy of the method used in this article. In this paper, Matlab software is used to analyze and visualize the detection result data.

This paper aims to provide an in-depth study of the detection of historical alarm subsequences, which are frequently used as an initial step for alarm flood analysis methods. Therefore, state-of-the-art approaches are comprehensively examined, evaluated, and compared. To overcome the limitations of these methods, a novel approach is presented, which uses outlier detection in time distances between alarm events (activation and return to normal) and an alarm coactivation constraint. The effectiveness and performance of the examined methods are illustrated by means of an openly accessible dataset, which is introduced in this paper. It is based on the “Tennessee-Eastman-Process”, a benchmark in process automation. The intent is to provide a suitable dataset for the development and evaluation of alarm management methods in complex industrial processes using both quantitative and qualitative information from different sources. It is shown that the integration of supplementary information is beneficial for the overall performance and robustness of the detection method proposed here. This method allows for a more accurate detection of coherent historical abnormal situations, including phases with active root-cause disturbances and the normalization phases that follow their termination. Furthermore, the proposed method has the advantage that the detection results are less influenced by the alarm count, the propagation velocity, the duration of the situation, and the time distance between two causally independent situations in comparison to state-of-the-art approaches.

An intrusion detection system (IDS) is an important protection instrument for detecting complex network attacks. Various machine learning (ML) or deep learning (DL) algorithms have been proposed for implementing anomaly-based IDS (AIDS). Our review of the AIDS literature identifies some issues in related work, including the randomness of the selected algorithms, parameters, and testing criteria, the application of old datasets, or shallow analyses and validation of the results. This paper comprehensively reviews previous studies on AIDS by using a set of criteria with different datasets and types of attacks to set benchmarking outcomes that can reveal the suitable AIDS algorithms, parameters, and testing criteria. Specifically, this paper applies 10 popular supervised and unsupervised ML algorithms for identifying effective and efficient ML-AIDS of networks and computers. These supervised ML algorithms include the artificial neural network (ANN), decision tree (DT), k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), naive Bayes (NB), random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithms, whereas the unsupervised ML algorithms include the expectation-maximization (EM), k-means, and self-organizing maps (SOM) algorithms. Several models of these algorithms are introduced, and the turning and training parameters of each algorithm are examined to achieve an optimal classifier evaluation. Unlike previous studies, this study evaluates the performance of AIDS by measuring the true positive and negative rates, accuracy, precision, recall, and F-Score of 31 ML-AIDS models. The training and testing time for ML-AIDS models are also considered in measuring their performance efficiency given that time complexity is an important factor in AIDSs. The ML-AIDS models are tested by using a recent and highly unbalanced multiclass CICIDS2017 dataset that involves real-world network attacks. In general, the k-NN-AIDS, DT-AIDS, and NB-AIDS models obtain the best results and show a greater capability in detecting web attacks compared with other models that demonstrate irregular and inferior results.

Handwritten mathematical expressions are an essential part of many domains, including education, engineering, and science. The pervasive availability of computationally powerful touch-screen devices, similar to the recent emergence of deep neural networks as high-quality sequence recognition models, result in the widespread adoption of online recognition of handwritten mathematical expressions. Also, a deeper study and improvement of such technologies is necessary to address the current challenges posed by the extensive usage of distance learning, and remote work due to the world pandemic. This paper delineates the state-of-the-art recognition methods along with the user's experience in pen-centric applications for operating with handwritten mathematical expressions. Recognition methods have been categorized into classes, with a description of their merits and limitations. Particular attention is paid to end-to-end approaches based on encoder-decoder architecture and multi-modal input. Evaluation protocols and open benchmark datasets are considered as well as the comparison of the recognition performance, based on open competition results. The use of handwritten math recognition is illustrated by examples of applications for various fields and platforms. A distinctive part of the survey is that we also considered how UI design relies on the use of different recognition approaches, which is aimed at helping potential researchers improve the performance of the introduced approaches toward the best responses in practical applications. Finally, this paper presents the prospective survey of future research directions in handwritten mathematical expression recognition and their applications.

Multimedia sensors have recently become a significant data source in the Internet of Things (IoT), giving rise to the Internet of Media Things (IoMT). Since multimedia applications are usually latency-sensitive, data processing in the cloud is not always suitable. A strategy to minimize delay is processing multimedia streams closer to data sources, exploiting resources at the network edge. Moreover, virtualization is widely used to reduce complexity arising from heterogeneity in IoT environments. In this paper, we propose an edge-based architecture and platform to manage virtual multimedia sensors (VMS), enabling IoMT applications to be easily deployed. Our proposal encompasses V-PRISM, a software architecture tailored for IoMT, and ALFA, a distributed implementation of the architecture. V-PRISM components were designed to be deployed and executed in multiple edge nodes. VMSs are in charge of processing multimedia streams and provide an abstraction layer between IoMT applications and physical devices that produce those streams. This paper describes the proposal and the results of experiments showing that the proposed approach can successfully perform multimedia stream processing for applications that requires low-latency.

The selection of the system-architecture is critical step in software-engineering lifecycle. Unfortunately, the selecting a suitable architecture is a hard mission. The difficulty of the adopting architecture increases in inconsistence case as in SOA and MSA. The paper answers “when architecture transform”, “to which architecture migrate” and “how”. The paper addresses the lack of evaluation ERPs in post-implementation phase. The paper provides static and dynamic analysis for monolith, SOA and MSA by numerical-comparison and Benchmark. This paper proposes a roadmap for migration-architecture. The roadmap consists of flowchart of migration and migration-decision model that is supported with criteria of evaluation form for assessing system’s baseline and making a consistence decision by Neutrosophic-ANP. Because of the dependency between factors of information system evolution, ANP is used. Furthermore, Neutrosophic set is selected because its accuracy in inconsistence. Benchmark assesses OpenBravoERP, Odoo12 and Metasfresh5.144 to represent monolith, SOA and MSA respectively. Benchmark assesses performance, time to the market, stability, future proof, network issue and cost. They are tested based on scenario tests which grantee that transactions are executed within more than one module of ERPS, simulates real business’s procedures, huge number of records and concurrent load by virtual users. The proposed model and benchmark help “Hitac’ enterprise in two decisions for its expansion-plan in COVID-19 crisis. The numerical steps of this case-study are provided. Most published papers and literatures about Microservices are not empirical. The main paper’s result is filling this gap by a one of the empirical aspects with an academic study support.

Autonomous driving (AD) provides a reliable solution for safe driving by replacing human drivers responsible for the majority of accidents. The emergence of Machine Learning, specifically Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), and its ability to solve complex games proved its potential to address AD challenges. However, model-free methods still suffer from safety-related issues that can be resolved using safe-DRL approaches. The addition of model-based safety filters to the learning-based algorithms provides safety bounds on their performance and constraint satisfaction. In this paper, we investigate the addition of a safety filter based on Model Predictive Control and show an increase in mean testing episode reward by 110% from −75 mean episode reward during testing for 50 episodes for Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient ( $DDPG$ ) to 7.758. We study the impacts of safety filters (7.758 mean reward), heuristic rules, bounded additive noises (0.49% performance increase comparing to noise-free case), and exploration (3.425 mean reward) on the learning algorithm. We compare the effects of filters in the context of simulated exploration and bounded exploration and prove that bounded exploration results in 9.86% increase in mean reward and 12.95% decrease in std comparing to the other method. Additionally, inspired by Deep Internal Learning and biological mechanisms like brain plasticity, we investigate the idea of using each sample for training only once instead of utilizing stochastic batches which increases the mean testing accumulated reward by 1.87% and leads to the best performance (7.942 mean reward and 0.048 std). Finally, the results demonstrate better automotive results for our proposed method than DDPG. Our proposed method, DDPG with safety filter in bounded exploration and adaptive learning under noisy input conditions, has a success rate of 100% under different traffic densities for the simulation environment used in this paper and our assumptions. The proposed method’s automotive results are shown for a braking scenario to avoid collision with other road users.

Anomaly detection has become an indispensable tool for modern society, applied in a wide range of applications, from detecting fraudulent transactions to malignant brain tumours. Over time, many anomaly detection techniques have been introduced. However, in general, they all suffer from the same problem: a lack of data that represents anomalous behaviour. As anomalous behaviour is usually costly (or dangerous) for a system, it is difficult to gather enough data that represents such behaviour. This, in turn, makes it difficult to develop and evaluate anomaly detection techniques. Recently, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have attracted a great deal of attention in anomaly detection research, due to their unique ability to generate new data. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review of the applications of GANs in anomaly detection, covering 128 papers on the subject. The goal of this review paper is to analyze and summarize: (1) which anomaly detection techniques can benefit from certain types of GANs, and how, (2) in which application domains GAN-assisted anomaly detection techniques have been applied, and (3) which datasets and performance metrics have been used to evaluate these techniques. Our study helps researchers and practitioners to find the most suitable GAN-assisted anomaly detection technique for their application. In addition, we present a research roadmap for future studies in this area., Comment: 34 pages,5 figures

As is the case in many big data mining scenarios with a large scale of samples, the heavy computation cost hinders the application of machine learning, which has to iteratively compute by passing over the whole dataset without considering the roles of different samples in training computation. However, we argue that most of the samples dominating computation resources contribute little to the gradient-based model update, particularly when the model is close to convergence. We define this observation as the Sample Contribution Pattern (SCP) in machine learning. This paper proposes two approaches to exploit SCP by detecting gradient characteristics and triggering the reuse of outdated gradients. In particular, this paper reports research results in (1) the definition and description of SCP to reveal an intrinsic gradient contribution pattern of different samples; (2) a novel SCP-based optimizing algorithm (SCPOA) that outperforms alternative tested algorithms in terms of computation overhead; (3) a variant of SCPOA that incorporates discarding-recovering mechanisms to carefully tradeoff between model accuracy and computation cost; (4) the implementation and evaluation of two algorithms based on popular distributed big data mining platforms running typical sample-sets; (5) intuitive convergence proof of the algorithms. Our experimental results illustrate that the proposed approaches can significantly reduce the computation cost with competitive accuracy.

In recent years, a variety of supervised manifold learning techniques have been proposed to outperform their unsupervised alternative versions in terms of classification accuracy and data structure capturing. Some dissimilarity measures have been used in these techniques to guide the dimensionality reduction process. Their good performance was empirically demonstrated; however, the relevant analysis is still missing. This paper contributes to a theoretical analysis on a) how dissimilarity measures affect maintaining manifold neighbourhood structure and b) how supervised manifold learning techniques could contribute to the reduction of classification error. This paper also provides a cross-comparison between supervised and unsupervised manifold learning approaches in terms of structure capturing using Kendall’s Tau coefficients and co-ranking matrices. Four different metrics (including three dissimilarity measures and Euclidean distance) have been considered along with manifold learning methods such as Isomap, ${t}$ -Stochastic Neighbour Embedding ( ${t}$ -SNE), and Laplacian Eigenmaps (LE), in two datasets: Breast Cancer and Swiss-Roll. This paper concludes that although the dissimilarity measures used in the manifold learning techniques can reduce classification error, they do not learn well or preserve the structure of the hidden manifold in the high dimensional space, but instead, they destroy the structure of the data. Based on the findings of this paper, it is advisable to use supervised manifold learning techniques as a pre-processing step in classification. In addition, it is not advisable to apply supervised manifold learning for visualization purposes since the two-dimensional representation using supervised manifold learning does not improve the preservation of data structure.

The epidemic increase in online reviews’ growth made the sentiment classification a fascinating domain in academic and industrial research. The reviews assist several domains, which is complicated to gather annotated training data. Several sentiment classification methodologies are devised for performing the sentiment analysis, but retrieval of information is not accurately performed, less effective, and less convergence speed. In this paper, we propose a sentiment paper proposes a sentiment classification model, namely Spider Monkey Crow Optimization algorithm (SMCA), for training the deep recurrent neural network (DeepRNN). In this method, the telecom review is employed to remove stop words and stemming to eliminate inappropriate data to minimize user’s seeking time. Meanwhile, the feature extraction is performed using SentiWordNet to derive the sentiments from the reviews. The extracted SentiWordNet features and other features, like elongated words, punctuation, hashtag, and numerical values, are employed in the DeepRNN for classifying sentiments. To retrieve the required review, the Fuzzy K-Nearest neighbor (Fuzzy-KNN) is employed to retrieve the review based on a distance measure. With rigorous assessments and experimentation, it is observed that the proposed SMCA-based DeepRNN performs better in terms of accuracy of 97.7%, precision of 95.5%, recall of 94.6%, and F1-score 96.7%, respectively.

Hyperspectral and multispectral information processing systems and technologies have demonstrated its usefulness for the improvement of agricultural productivity and practices by providing useful information to farmers and crop managers on the factors affecting crop status and growth. These technologies are widely used in a range of agriculture applications such as crop management, crop yield forecasting, crop disease detection, and the monitoring of agriculture land usage, water, and soil conditions. Hyperspectral information sensing can acquire several hundred spectral bands that cover the electromagnetic spectrum of an observational scene in a single acquisition. The resulting hyperspectral data cube contains a large volume of spatial and spectral information. The hyperspectral sequence of images or video further increases the data generation velocity and volume which lead to the Big data challenges particularly in agricultural remote sensing applications. This paper is structured to first give a comprehensive review of representative studies to provide insights into significant research efforts in agriculture using Big data, machine learning and deep learning with the focus on frameworks or architectures, information processing and analytics with hyperspectral and multispectral data. The potential for utilizing Big data, machine learning and deep learning for hyperspectral and multispectral data in agriculture is very promising. The paper then further explores the potential of using ensemble machine learning and scalable parallel discriminant analysis which takes into consideration the spatial and spectral components for Big data in agriculture. To the best of our knowledge, no similar review study on agriculture with Big data, machine learning and deep learning for hyperspectral and multispectral information processing has been reported. Furthermore, the potential of ensemble machine learning and scalable parallel discriminant analysis has not been explored in agriculture information processing. Experiments and data analytics have been performed on hyperspectral data from agriculture for validation. The results have shown the good performance of our approach.

As Blockchain innovation picks up popularity in many areas, it is frequently hailed as a sound innovation. Because of the decentralization and encryption, many imagine that data put away in a Blockchain is and will consistently be protected. Among various abstraction layers of Blockchain architecture, the consensus layer is the core component behind the performance and security measures of the Blockchain network. Consensus mechanisms are a critical component of a Blockchain system’s long-term stability. Consensus forms the core of blockchain technology. Therefore, a range of consensus protocols has been introduced to maximize Blockchain systems’ efficiency and meet application domains’ individual needs. This research paper describes the layered architecture of Blockchain. A comprehensive review of mainstream consensus protocols mainly Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), Proof of Activity (PoA) is presented in the paper. These mainstream consensus protocols have been explained and detailed performance analysis of these consensus protocols has been done. We have proposed a performance matrix of these consensus protocols based on different parameters like Degree of decentralization, Latency, Fault Tolerance Rate, Scalability, etc. Consensus protocols being the core of a strong fault-tolerant secured blockchain system, the proposed work intends to help inappropriate protocol selection and further research on strengthening trust and ownership in the technology. Depending upon different parameters like decentralization which is low in POA compared to other protocols, whereas POW is non-scalable, so depending on the priority of a particular performance parameter, the paper will help in the selection of a specific protocol.

Dyslexia is a neurological disorder that is characterized by imprecise comprehension of words and generally poor reading performance. It affects a significant population of school-age children, with more occurrences in males, thus, putting them at risk of poor academic performance and low self-esteem for a lifetime. The long-term hope is to have a dyslexia diagnostic method that is informed by neural-biomarkers. In this regard, large numbers of machine learning methods and, more recently, deep learning methods have been implemented across various types of dataset with the above-chance classification accuracy. However, attainment of clinical acceptability of these state-of-the-art methods is bedeviled by certain challenges including lack of biologically-interpretable biomarkers, privacy of dataset and classifiers, hyper-parameter selection/optimization, and overfitting problem among others. This review paper critically analyzes recent machine learning methods for detecting dyslexia and its biomarkers and discusses challenges that require proper attentions from the users of deep learning methods in order to enable them to attain clinically relevance and acceptable level. The review is conducted within the premise of implementation and experimental outcomes for each of the 22 selected articles using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic review and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol, with a view to outlining some critical challenges for achieving high accuracy and reliability of the state-of-the-art machine learning methods. As an evidence-based protocol for reporting in systematic reviews and meta-analyses, PRISMA helps to ensure clarity and transparency of this paper by showing a four-phase flow diagram of the selection process for articles used in this review. It is therefore, envisaged that higher classification performance of clinical relevance can be achieved using deep learning models for dyslexia and its biomarkers by addressing identified potential challenges.

Several hypovigilance detection systems (HDx) were developed to avoid road-side accidents due to driver fatigue. They have suffered from several limitations. Notably many of these are focused on center-head position to define an area of interest (often referred to as PERCLOS (percentage eye closure)) without considering the face occlusion problem, light illumination, and suffer poor response time. These HDx systems mostly depend on image processing, vision-based, and multisensor-based features. To address these problems, the author utilized vision, sensors, environmental, and vehicular-based features that integrated together by fusion to predict multistage of HDx. Lately, few studies have utilized the combination of multimodal features and deep learning (DL) architectures. Those multimodal-based features (M-HDx) were feasible to predict stages of driver fatigue (multi-stage). However, there is a need to critically measure the performance of these M-HDx by carrying out a comparative analysis to recognize multi-stage of fatigue in terms of hardware-based benchmarks. Moreover, it is important to evaluate the M-HDx systems using different features-set with respect to traditional and advanced machine learning techniques. Therefore, the primary aim of this work is in algorithm and feature modeling, then compare the advantages and differences with other work. In this paper, a different study is conducted compare to state-of-the-art survey articles by statistically measuring the performance. After experiments on M-HDx systems, this paper concludes that there is still a research gap to real-time development of multistage M-HDx systems. In the end, the paper summarizes the directions, challenges, and applications in the development of HDx systems to assist other researchers for further research.

DNA microarray data analysis is infamous due to a massive number of features, imbalanced class distribution, and limited available samples. In this paper, we focus on high-dimensional multi-class imbalanced problems. The high dimensional and multi-class imbalanced problem has posed acute challenges for the conventional classifiers to effectively perform classification tasks on both the minority and majority classes. Numerous efforts have been devoted to addressing either high dimensionality dataset or class imbalance problems. Nonetheless, few methods have been proposed to address the intersection of multi-class imbalanced and high-dimensional problems concurrently due to their intricate interactions. This paper presents novel hybrid algorithms for feature selection with the high dimensional multi-class imbalanced problem using multiple filter-based rankers (MFR) and hybrid Grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA). The Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm is incorporated into GOA. SA is used to enhance the best solution found by the GOA algorithm. The aim of using the SA here is to tackle the slow convergence and improve the exploitation by searching the high-quality regions found by the GOA. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed methods in improving the classification performance in terms of area under the curve (AUC) compared to other well-known methods, which guarantees the ability of the proposed methods in searching the feature space and identifying very robust and discriminative features that best predict the minority class.

Recently, development in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) requires the input of various kinds of data in real-time and from multiple sources, which imposes additional research and application challenges. Ongoing studies on Data Fusion (DF) have produced significant improvement in ITS and manifested an enormous impact on its growth. This paper reviews the implementation of DF methods in ITS to facilitate traffic flow analysis (TFA) and solutions that entail the prediction of various traffic variables such as driving behavior, travel time, speed, density, incident, and traffic flow. It attempts to identify and discuss real-time and multi-sensor data sources that are used for various traffic domains, including road/highway management, traffic states estimation, and traffic controller optimization. Moreover, it attempts to associate abstractions of data level fusion, feature level fusion, and decision level fusion on DF methods to better understand the role of DF in TFA and ITS. Consequently, the main objective of this paper is to review DF methods used for real-time and multi-sensor (heterogeneous) TFA studies. The review outcomes are (i) a guideline of constructing DF methods which involve preprocessing, filtering, decision, and evaluation as core steps, (ii) a description of the recent DF algorithms or methods that adopt real-time and multi-sensor sources data and the impact of these data sources on the improvement of TFA, (iii) an examination of the testing and evaluation methodologies and the popular datasets and (iv) an identification of several research gaps, some current challenges, and new research trends.

In a smart urban environment, providing accurate information about human activities is an important task. It is a trend to implement human activity recognition (HAR) algorithms and applications on smart phones, including health monitoring, self-management system, health tracking and so on. However, human activity recognition(HAR) is very complex, and it is important to use the best technology and machine learning to understand human activities. One of the main problems of the existing HAR strategies is that the classification accuracy is relatively low, and in order to improve the accuracy, it needs high computational overhead. The purpose of this paper is to use an exploratory data analysis method to deal with HAR, after the implementation of different data mining techniques, the results of dimensionality reduction and visualization are obtained. The HAR method based on smart phone and EDA proposed in this paper is a high precision method. Compared with other classifiers, its accuracy is 96.56%. This article will discuss computational prediction activities and the computational limitations of using exploratory data to analyze (EDA) on 564 feature data frames. The experimental results show that HAR-based exploratory data analysis is a common sensory signal processing technology. The GridSearchCV and LinearSVC algorithm can provide accurate automatic human activity recognition (HAR), for elderly and disabled patients in need of continuous care, and it is a decision-making tool to support sports coaches to make plans.

Near Field Communication (NFC) is a prominent short-range, contact-less communication technology, which is rapidly getting popular in modern smart devices. For communication between two active devices via NFC, applications generally choose the peer-to-peer operation mode. In this paper, we exploit the possibility of using the NFC read/write mode, designed primarily for unidirectional data transfer from an active NFC reader to a passive NFC tag, for bi-directional half-duplex communication between two active NFC devices. The advantages of using the NFC read/write mode include low protocol overhead and permitting different data formats. However, the challenges are avoiding the reader collision problem, maintaining a secure session, and completing all transactions in an acceptable time frame. In this paper, we address the above challenges and propose a methodology for efficient communication between active NFC devices using NFC read/write mode. To evaluate the scheme, we design a secure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) system that requires bi-directional communication for mutually authenticating two NFC devices. The proposed methodology is experimentally verified using NFC-enabled Android smartphones and a Kerberos server as the third-party authenticator.

The standardization and digitalization of nine constitutions of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) have promoted the development of TCM automation. The keys to constitution identification are tongue diagnosis and consultation diagnosis. In this paper, a tongue detection method based on the combination of the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) and the support vector machine (SVM) is proposed. To separate the tongue body and tongue coating, a k-means segmentation method based on the Lab color space is proposed. Based on the clustering analysis of the difference between the color components of the tongue body and tongue coating in the Lab color space, the separation is realized. Thus, the relationship between the tongue image and constitution can be analyzed. The method for consultation diagnosis is divided into a questionnaire scale and a question answering system. The questionnaire includes 29 quantified items with corresponding weights and answer scores, so the final score of each type of constitution is calculated. The final constitution type is determined on the basis of the scores of both diagnoses. In addition, the key of question answering system is text similarity calculation. First, a sentence similarity calculation method combining the n-gram language model and word2vec is proposed. Then, a multifeature fusion sentence similarity calculation method combining the Word Mover’s Distance (WMD) and editing distance is proposed. Finally, the experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method, and a constitution identification application is developed based on the content of this paper.

Watermarking is an important technique for protecting sensitive e-multimedia data and intellectual property. Watermarking techniques are used for many applications such as ownership protection, which is a popular area of research as compared to others such as authentication and local temper localization. There are many image watermarking schemes that have been recently published based on the frequency domain as it can fulfill watermarking requirements such as high robustness and imperceptibility. Singular-value decomposition (SVD) is one of them and is used in many frequency transform-based image watermarking schemes due to its stability and mathematical simplicity. However, there are many schemes that lack robustness against malicious cyberattacks, whereby the watermarks are easy to detect and destroy. Consequently, the proposed watermarking schemes became more complicated and cannot resist various geometric and non-geometric attacks. Thus, there are many existing hybrid SVD-based image watermarking schemes found be insecure. As there is also a lack of in-depth reviews in this domain, the focus of this paper is the analysis of the state-of-the-art in hybrid SVD-based image watermarking. We perform efficiency comparisons to highlight various security problems, open issues, and research gaps. Based on our findings, we additionally provide some recommendations for the development of more robust schemes in the future. This paper provides essential information for researchers and practitioners alike to advance the field of image watermarking.

Stress is an escalated psycho-physiological state of the human body emerging in response to a challenging event or a demanding condition. Environmental factors that trigger stress are called stressors. In case of prolonged exposure to multiple stressors impacting simultaneously, a person’s mental and physical health can be adversely affected which can further lead to chronic health issues. To prevent stress-related issues, it is necessary to detect them in the nascent stages which are possible only by continuous monitoring of stress. Wearable devices promise real-time and continuous data collection, which helps in personal stress monitoring. In this paper, a comprehensive review has been presented, which focuses on stress detection using wearable sensors and applied machine learning techniques. This paper investigates the stress detection approaches adopted in accordance with the sensory devices such as wearable sensors, Electrocardiogram (ECG), Electroencephalography (EEG), and Photoplethysmography (PPG), and also depending on various environments like during driving, studying, and working. The stressors, techniques, results, advantages, limitations, and issues for each study are highlighted and expected to provide a path for future research studies. Also, a multimodal stress detection system using a wearable sensor-based deep learning technique has been proposed at the end.

This paper presents an overview of device identification techniques and the Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) standard used for the Internet of things to reduce the IoT attack surface. The ongoing diversity and the sheer increase in the number of connected IoT devices have crumpled security efforts. There is a need to reconsider and redesign the underlying concept of developing security systems to resolve IoT security challenges. In this backdrop, device profiling and identification have emerged as an exciting technique that helps to reduce IoT device attack surface. One of the known approaches for device identification is to fingerprint a device. There are many ways to fingerprint the device, mostly using device network flows or device local attributes. The device identification ensures the authenticity of the device attached to the network, like user authentication. Since IoT devices mostly work using machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, this requires identifying each device properly. But there is no unified approach for device identification for the ever-growing world of IoT devices and applications. One of the major steps forward in this direction is the development of the Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) standard that defines the role of a device within the network. It limits the device to execute the primary task only, which will help to reduce the attack surface. Since the inception of MUD, many security frameworks use this standard for IoT security. However, there is a need to scrutinize the security frameworks based on the MUD, to find out the claimed effectiveness of the standard in IoT security. This paper initially identifies and classifies the potential vulnerabilities in IoT devices. Then, the study provides an overview of the research that focuses on device identification techniques and analyzes their role in IoT security. Finally, the research presents an overview of MUD technology, its implementation scenarios, the limitation of the latest MUD standard, and its applications in the industry. The prime aim of this work is to examine the MUD benefits in IoT security along with the weaknesses and challenges while implementing this standard along with future directions.

Context: User stories have been widely accepted as artifacts to capture the user requirements in agile software development. They are short pieces of texts in a semi-structured format that express requirements. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques offer a potential advantage in user story applications. Objective: Conduct a systematic literature review to capture the current state-of-the-art of NLP research on user stories. Method: The search strategy is used to obtain relevant papers from SCOPUS, ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, SpringerLink, and Google Scholar. Inclusion and exclusion criteria are applied to filter the search results. We also use the forward and backward snowballing techniques to obtain more comprehensive results. Results: The search results identified 718 papers published between January 2009 to December 2020. After applying the inclusion/exclusion criteria and the snowballing technique, we identified 38 primary studies that discuss NLP techniques in user stories. Most studies used NLP techniques to extract aspects of who, what, and why from user stories. The purpose of NLP studies in user stories is broad, ranging from discovering defects, generating software artifacts, identifying the key abstraction of user stories, and tracing links between model and user stories. Conclusion: NLP can help system analysts manage user stories. Implementing NLP in user stories has many opportunities and challenges. Considering the exploration of NLP techniques and rigorous evaluation methods is required to obtain quality research. As with NLP research in general, the ability to understand a sentence’s context continues to be a challenge.

The advantages of IoT are incontrovertible; however, significant risks and uncertainties over the protection of best practices and their related costs prevent many companies from adopting the technology. Also, users are aware of the consequences of breaches of IoT protection. Recent research indicates that 90% of consumers lack confidence in the safety of IoT devices. IoT defense has been described as one of the weakest areas. In this respect, significant efforts have been made, often through traditional cryptographic methods, to overcome security and privacy issues in IoT systems. The list of security issues (confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and availability) must be addressed to secure IoT devices from attack. IoT nodes’ specific features do not adequately protect the whole security spectrum of IoT networks through existing solutions. This paper aims to provide security to the IoT devices using nature-inspired Gravitational Search-guided artificial neural key. In this paper, artificial neural synchronization is used to create a neural key exchange protocol between two IoT devices over a public channel for cryptographic purposes. This proposed technique has many benefits, such as 1) it provides an optimized design of the neural network that facilitates the development and establishment of a neural key between the two approved IoT devices. 2) It offers the sharing of the private neural key over the public channel via artificial neural synchronization 3)Three hidden layers of the neural network contribute to the deep internal design. So, it’s going to be hard for the intruder to infer the internal layout. 4) The increase in the weight spectrum of the neural network raises the complexity of an effective attack exponentially, but the effort to create a neural key decreases over polynomial time. Various parametric experiments have been conducted out on the proposed methodology. The simulations of the procedure demonstrate efficacy in terms of the findings cited in the paper.

Semantic segmentation is a task that covers most of the perception needs of intelligent vehicles in an unified way. Recent studies witnessed that attention mechanisms achieve impressive performance in computer vision task. Current attention mechanisms based segmentation methods differ with each other in position and form of the attention mechanism, and perform differently in practice. This paper firstly introduces the effectiveness of multi-scale context features and attention mechanisms in segmentation tasks. We find that multi-scale and channel attention can play a vital role in constructing effective context features. Based on this analysis, this paper proposes an efficient attention pyramid network (EAPNet) for semantic segmentation. Specifically, to efficient handle the problem of segmenting objects at multiple scales, we design efficient channel attention pyramid (ECAP) which employ atrous convolution with channel attention in cascade or in parallel to capture multi-scale context by using multiple atrous rates. Furthermore, we propose a residual attention fusion block (RAFB), whose purpose is to simultaneously focus on meaningful low-level feature maps and spatial location information. At the same time, we will explore different channel attention modules and spatial attention modules, and describe their impact on network performance. We empirically evaluate our EAPNet on two semantic segmentation datasets, including PASCAL VOC 2012 and Cityscapes datasets. Experimental results show that without MS COCO pre-training and any post-processing, EAPNet achieved 81.7% mIoU on the PASCAL VOC 2012 validation set. With deeplabv3+ as the benchmark, EAPNet improve the model performance of more than 1.50% mIoU.

Recognizing the current weather conditions from a single image is of great theoretical significance. It also has potential practical value for daily life and traffic scheduling. To achieve that, typical weather recognition methods focus on learning a general weather description, e.g., sunny, cloudy, foggy, rainy and snowy etc, for the overall weather condition. However, it is far away from being sufficient for many tasks especially traffic management and control. To solve this key problem, this paper proposes a Global-Similarity Local-Salience Network (abbreviated as GSLSNet) for traffic weather recognition. Specifically, a simple but effective Global-Similarity Module (GSM) is proposed to recognize the overall weather condition and a Local-Salience Module (LSM) is presented to restrict the network to focus on road weather details. Besides, this paper also provides a new traffic weather dataset, named TWData, which is the first fine categorized dataset especially for highway weather recognition. Experimental results compared with state-of-the-art methods on both public datasets and TWData demonstrate the superiority of the proposed GSLSNet.

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack represents a major threat to service providers. More specifically, a DDoS attack aims to disrupt and deny services to legitimate users by overwhelming the target with a massive number of malicious requests. A cyberattack of this kind is likely to result in tremendous economic losses for businesses and service providers due to increasing both operating and financial costs. In recent years, machine learning (ML) techniques have been widely used to prevent DDoS attacks. Indeed, many defense systems have been transformed into smart and intelligent systems through the use of ML techniques, which allow them to defeat DDoS attacks. This paper analyzes recent studies concerning DDoS detection methods that have adapted single and hybrid ML approaches in modern networking environments. Additionally, the paper discusses different DDoS defense systems based on ML techniques that make use of a virtualized environment, including cloud computing, software-defined network, and network functions virtualization environments. As the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has been the subject of significant research attention in recent years, the paper also discusses ML approaches as security solutions against DDoS attacks in IoT environments. Furthermore, the paper recommends a number of directions for future research. This paper is intended to assist the research community with the design and development of effective defense systems capable of overcoming different types of DDoS attacks.

A detection model of Internet of Things encrypted traffic based on edge intelligence is proposed in the paper, which can reduce the communication times of distributed Internet of Things gateways in the process of edge intelligence as well as the encrypted traffic detection model establishment time, in order to solve the problems that it is difficult to carry out efficient classification and accurate identification of the encrypted traffic of Internet of Things. In this paper, four new classification and identification methods for encrypted traffic are put forward, namely time-sequence behavior analysis, dynamic behavior analysis, key behavior analysis and two-round filtering analysis. The experimental results show that when the sample size is 1600, the encrypted traffic detection model establishment time is less than 100 seconds, and the accuracy of all the four new traffic classification methods is more than 92% and the recall rates of them are more than 83%.

This paper attempts to analyze the Korean sentence classification system. Sentence classification is the task of classifying an input sentence based on predefined categories. However, spelling or space error contained in the input sentence causes problems in morphological analysis and tokenization. This paper proposes a novel approach of Integrated Eojeol (Korean syntactic word separated by space) Embedding to reduce the effect of poorly analyzed morphemes on sentence classification. The paper also proposes two noise insertion methods that further improve classification performance. Our evaluation results indicate that by applying the proposed methods on the existing sentence classifiers, the sentence classification accuracy on erroneous sentences is increased by 8% to 15%.

Wireless communication systems play a very crucial role in modern society for entertainment, business, commercial, health and safety applications. These systems keep evolving from one generation to next generation and currently we are seeing deployment of fifth generation (5G) wireless systems around the world. Academics and industries are already discussing beyond 5G wireless systems which will be sixth generation (6G) of the evolution. One of the main and key components of 6G systems will be the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for such wireless networks. Every component and building block of a wireless system that we currently are familiar with from our knowledge of wireless technologies up to 5G, such as physical, network and application layers, will involve one or another AI/ML techniques. This overview paper, presents an up-to-date review of future wireless system concepts such as 6G and role of ML techniques in these future wireless systems. In particular, we present a conceptual model for 6G and show the use and role of ML techniques in each layer of the model. We review some classical and contemporary ML techniques such as supervised and un-supervised learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Deep Learning (DL) and Federated Learning (FL) in the context of wireless communication systems. We conclude the paper with some future applications and research challenges in the area of ML and AI for 6G networks.

Sentiment Analysis is an important research direction of natural language processing, and it is widely used in politics, news and other fields. Word embeddings play a significant role in sentiment analysis. The existing sentiment embeddings methods directly embed the sentiment lexicons into traditional word representation. This sentiment representation methods can only differentiate the sentiment information of different words, not the same word in different contexts, so it cannot provide accurate sentiment information for word in different contexts. This paper proposes sentiment concept to solve the problem. First, we found the optimal sentiment concept of words in Microsoft Concept Graph according to the context of words. Then we obtained the sentiment information of words under optimal sentiment concept from the multi-semantics sentiment intensity lexicon which we constructed in this paper to achieve accurate embedding of sentiment information and provide more accurate semantics and sentiment representation for words. Finally, we combined two refined word embeddings methods to achieve a more comprehensive word representation. Compared with traditional and sentiment embeddings methods on six representative datasets, the validity of the word embeddings method based on sentiment concept proposed in this paper is verified.

Motivation: The localization of objects in images is a longstanding objective within the field of image processing. Most current techniques are based on machine learning approaches, which typically require careful annotation of training samples in the form of expensive bounding box labels. The need for such large-scale annotation has only been exacerbated by the widespread adoption of deep learning techniques within the image processing community: deep learning is notoriously data-hungry. Method: In this work, we attack this problem directly by providing a new method for learning to localize objects with limited annotation: most training images can simply be annotated with their whole image labels (and no bounding box), with only a small fraction marked with bounding boxes. The training is driven by a novel loss function, which is a continuous relaxation of a well-defined discrete formulation of weakly supervised learning. Care is taken to ensure that the loss is numerically well-posed. Additionally, we propose a neural network architecture which accounts for both patch dependence, through the use of Conditional Random Field layers, and shift-invariance, through the inclusion of anti-aliasing filters. Results: We demonstrate our method on the task of localizing thoracic diseases in chest X-ray images, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the ChestX-ray14 dataset. We further show that with a modicum of additional effort our technique can be extended from object localization to object detection, attaining high quality results on the Kaggle RSNA Pneumonia Detection Challenge. Conclusion: The technique presented in this paper has the potential to enable high accuracy localization in regimes in which annotated data is either scarce or expensive to acquire. Future work will focus on applying the ideas presented in this paper to the realm of semantic segmentation.

Machine learning (ML) is becoming an integral part of networks security arsenal, where Internet of Things (IoT) structures play an increasingly important role. However, IoT networks have many specific requirements, mostly due to limited energy availability and stringent computing resources. This results in limitations for traditional ML approaches to security, in particular for anomaly detection. Consequently, new focuses for solutions that range from architectural to data processing ones are necessary. Therefore, appropriate lightweight ML algorithms have to be designed and deployed in appropriate architectural settings, which is the main contribution of this paper. In addition, insights into ML functioning are needed to better understand the observed anomalies. To enable these insights (and support a wider applicability of ML based approaches), the results have to be as explainable as possible. The research presented in this paper addresses this problem through the functional and data transparency of ML applications, tailored to the specifics of anomaly detection in IoT networks. To tackle accordingly also the architectural issues, the presented approach builds on the well-established layering principle from computer communications reference models. This principle not only supports flexibility but also increases security in these new environments of growing importance.

Design defects affect project quality and hinder development and maintenance. Consequently, experts need to minimize these defects in software systems. A promising approach is to apply the concepts of refactoring at higher level of abstraction based on UML diagrams instead of code level. Unfortunately, we find in literature many defects that are described textually and there is no consensus on how to decide if a particular design violates model quality. Defects could be quantified as metrics based rules that represent a combination of software metrics. However, it is difficult to find manually the best threshold values for these metrics. In this paper, we propose a new approach to identify design defects at the model level using the ID3 decision tree algorithm. We aim to create a decision tree for each defect. We experimented our approach on four design defects: The Blob, Data class, Lazy class and Feature Envy defect, using 15 Object-Oriented metrics. The rules generated using decision tree give a very promising detection results for the four open source projects tested in this paper. In Lucene 1.4 project, we found that the precision is 67% for a recall of 100%. In general, the accuracy varies from 49%, reaching for Lucene 1.4 project 80%.

The popularity and usage of Cloud computing is increasing rapidly. Several companies are investing in this field either for their own use or to provide it as a service for others. One of the results of Cloud development is the emergence of various security problems for both industry and consumer. One of the ways to secure Cloud is by using Machine Learning (ML). ML techniques have been used in various ways to prevent or detect attacks and security gaps on the Cloud. In this paper, we provide a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of ML and Cloud security methodologies and techniques. We analyzed 63 relevant studies and the results of the SLR are categorized into three main research areas: (i) the different types of Cloud security threats, (ii) ML techniques used, and (iii) the performance outcomes. We have defined 11 Cloud security areas. Moreover, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and data privacy are the most common Cloud security areas, with a 16% level of use and 14%respectively. On the other hand, we found 30 ML techniques used, some used hybrid and others as standalone. The most popular ML used is SVM in both hybrid and standalone models. Furthermore, 60% of the papers compared their models with other models to prove the efficiency of their proposed model. Moreover, 13 different evaluation metrics were enumerated. The most applied metric is true positive rate and least used is training time. Lastly, from 20 datasets found, KDD and KDD CUP'99 are the most used among relevant studies.

The new “status quo” created by the emerging integration of Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) and Radio Access Network (RAN) infrastructures, combined with the openness of the 5G service market, have set new standards on how the multitude of 5G service domains should be incentivized and coordinated to comply with the performance requirements set on a per session basis. In this paper, we revisit the predominant offline contract-driven mobile data access model enabling users to gain access to the infrastructure of only a few network operators and propose a new blockchain-backed mobile data access model where the key 5G stakeholders can trade, share and consume mobile edge network assets (access to the internet, spectrum, processing, storage, local content etc.) in a fully decentralized, anonymous and highly-robust fashion. Blockchain-backed mobile data access should address critical practical challenges of blockchain decentralization, scalability and security in the context of 5G and Beyond networks. Accordingly, we provide a meticulous survey of existing solutions in the aforementioned three areas and present a comprehensive holistic framework of protocols to address the key challenges identified, including a delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) for distributed blockchain consensus over 5G and Beyond mobile data networks, a future-proof smart-contract enabled payment relay service enabling instant off-chain payments in a highly robust fashion as well as a hybrid mixing protocol that enables payment relays to act as anonymous payment hubs while addressing the unique challenges opposed by the joint blockchain and network level interaction of the 5G and Beyond service components. A wide range of practical implications and mitigation measures for dishonest operation of the blockchain nodes are investigated and sophisticated yet highly-robust incentive engineering mechanisms are derived. Detailed numerical results also accompany the paper, bringing to light the unique performance trade-offs and valuable design guidelines towards blockchain-backed mobile data access for 5G and Beyond mobile data networks.

In the text sentiment classification task, some words are seemingly unrelated to the classification task, but they have a direct impact on the performance of classification model. For example, in the sentences “I have terminal cancer” and “Cancer is a very common disease”, it can be clearly found that the word “cancer” has two different sentiment tendencies in the daily life domain and the medical domain. In the daily life domain, the word “cancer” shows an extremely negative sentiment tendency. While in the medical domain, the word “cancer” is just a simple term with a relatively neutral sentiment tendency. Although current deep learning models have already achieved good performance through their powerful feature learning capabilities, there are serious deficiencies in dealing with the above problem. Therefore, from a new perspective, this paper proposes the Graph Domain Adversarial Transfer Network (GDATN) based on the idea of adversarial learning, which uses the labeled source domain data to predict the sentiment label of unlabeled target domain data. Firstly, GDATN extracts feature representations through the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) Network and Graph Attention Network (GAT) successively. Then, GDATN introduces the domain classifier to capture the domain-shared text feature representation with the Gradient Reversal Layer (GRL). In addition, an auxiliary task named the projection mechanism is constructed to further capture the domain-specific text feature representation in response to the text domain problem. Extensive experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that GDATN proposed in this paper outperforms the other six benchmark sentiment classification models, and GDATN has a better stability on different cross-domain pairs.

An abundance of various segmentation techniques are available in the literature, that cater to wide range of image understanding applications. The paper proposes a unified way of systematic categorization of the research work on image segmentation called Multi-Faceted Hierarchical Image Segmentation Taxonomy (MFHIST), which consist of six facets presented in a hierarchical manner - scope, requirement, control, feature, image representation and approach specifications. Every scope is exemplified with research works from the literature for better understanding. The paper gives an illustration of populating MFHIST, to provide the reader a quick grasp of few important state-of-art image segmentation research works and their adaptations. As a case study, the illustrations display a limited version to uncover the journey of basic to modern adaptations in the areas region based segmentation approach, such as Markov Random Fields, Spectral Clustering, Active Contour Model, Mean Shift Clustering. The other segmentation approaches have not been considered here, owing to the enormous volume of works in the past four to five decades and limitation in articulating all of them using MFHIST. The performance analysis of the algorithms using quantitative metrics is not in the present scope and will be considered in future version of MFHIST.

Blockchain technology is becoming increasingly attractive to the next generation, as it is uniquely suited to the information era. Blockchain technology can also be applied to the Internet of Things (IoT). The advancement of IoT technology in various domains has led to substantial progress in distributed systems. Blockchain concept requires a decentralized data management system for storing and sharing the data and transactions in the network. This paper discusses the blockchain concept and relevant factors that provide a detailed analysis of potential security attacks and presents existing solutions that can be deployed as countermeasures to such attacks. This paper also includes blockchain security enhancement solutions by summarizing key points that can be exploited to develop various blockchain systems and security tools that counter security vulnerabilities. Finally, the paper discusses open issues relating to and future research directions of blockchain-IoT systems.

During last two decades, Differential Evolution (DE) proved to be one of the most popular and successful evolutionary algorithms for solving global optimization problems over continuous space. Proposing new mutation strategies to improve the optimization performance of (DE) is considered a significant research study. In DE, mutation operation plays a vital role in the performance of the algorithm. Therefore, in this paper, comprehensive analysis of the contributions on basic and novel mutation strategies that were proposed between 1995 and 2020 is presented. A new taxonomy based on the structure of the novel mutations is proposed. Numerical experiments on a set of 30 test problems from the CEC2017 benchmark for 10, 30, 50 and 100 dimensions, including a comparison with classical DE schemes and recent mutations schemes are executed. Furthermore, theoretical, and empirical convergence behavior analysis of all mutations is discussed. The paper also presents many recommendations, guidelines, insights, and suggestions for experienced practitioners and interested researchers in designing and developing effective and efficient DE algorithms to address various optimization problems in different fields.

A new approach that drastically improves cross-modal retrieval performance in vision and language (hereinafter referred to as & x201C;vision and language retrieval & x201D;) is proposed in this paper. Vision and language retrieval takes data of one modality as a query to retrieve relevant data of another modality, and it enables flexible retrieval across different modalities. Most of the existing methods learn optimal embeddings of visual and lingual information to a single common representation space. However, we argue that the forced embedding optimization results in loss of key information for sentences and images. In this paper, we propose an effective utilization of representation spaces in a simple but robust vision and language retrieval method. The proposed method makes use of multiple individual representation spaces through text-to-image and image-to-text models. Experimental results showed that the proposed approach enhances the performance of existing methods that embed visual and lingual information to a single common representation space.

The use of the digital twin has been quickly adopted in industry in recent years and continues to gain momentum. The recent redefinition of the digital twin from the digital replica of a physical asset to the replica of a living or nonliving entity has increased its potential. The digital twin not only disrupts industrial processes, but also expands the domain of health and well-being towards fostering smart healthcare services in smart cities. In this paper, we propose an ISO/IEEE 11073 standardized digital twin framework architecture for health and well-being. This framework encompasses the process of data collection from personal health devices, the analysis of this data, and conveying the feedback to the user in a loop cycle. The framework proposes a solution to include not only X73 compliant devices, but also noncompliant health devices, by interfacing them with an X73 wrapper module as we explain in this paper. Besides, we propose a configurable X73 mobile application, designed to work with any X73 compliant device. We designed and implemented the proposed framework, and the X73 mobile app, and conducted an experiment as a proof of concept of the digital twin in the domain of health and well-being in smart cities. The experiment shows promising results and the potential of benefiting from the proposed framework, by gaining insights on the health and well-being of individuals, and providing feedback to the individual and caregiver.

With advanced development of Internet communication and ubiquitous computing, Social Networks are providing an important information channel for smart city construction. Therefore, analyzing Location-based Social Network is a very valuable work in achieving reasonable urban zoning. In Social Networks, a main purpose of prestige assessment is to extract influential users who are regarded as the key nodes for community detection from Onine Social Networks (OSNs). However, social relationships of users are rarely used to evaluate the popularity of physical locations and zone physical locations. In order to achieve urban area function zoning by evaluating the prestige of geographic regions based on user relationships in Location based Social Networks (LBSNs), this paper proposes a Prestige Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise algorithm (P-DBSCAN) by improving the existing DBSCAN algorithm. Specifically, the algorithm first calculates the centrality of users in the social network, and then converts the centrality of users into the location-centrality through the users’ check-in data. After the centrality of each location is obtained, the discrete locations are clustered according to four constraints of the given radius. After clustering, the result of urban area function zoning can be achieved. Extensive experiments are conducted for demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in this paper. In addition, the visualization results reveal the correctness of our proposed approach.

Recently, Deep Learning (DL) approaches have been applied to solve the Sentiment Classification (SC) problem, which is a core task in reviews mining or Sentiment Analysis (SA). The performances of these approaches are affected by different factors. This paper addresses these factors and classifies them into three categories: data preparation based factors, feature representation based factors and the classification techniques based factors. The paper is a comprehensive literature-based survey that compares the performance of more than 100 DL-based SC approaches by using 21 public datasets of reviews given by customers within three specific application domains (products, movies and restaurants). These 21 datasets have different characteristics (balanced/imbalanced, size, etc.) to give a global vision for our study. The comparison explains how the proposed factors quantitatively affect the performance of the studied DL-based SC approaches. Xunta de Galicia Agencia Estatal de Investigación | Ref. TEC2017-84197-C4-2-R

Understanding the peak time of popularity evolution can provide insights on recommendation systems and online advertising campaigns. Although popularity evolution has been largely studied, the problem of how to predict its peak time remains unexplored. Taking Twitter hashtags as case study, the goal of this study is to predict when popularity reaches the peak for Twitter hashtags, from the perspective of an online social network application, in the context of the Twitter social network. On the whole, this paper includes three research aspects. Firstly, this paper investigates how early popularity reaches its peaks. Then, it is found that popularity tends to peak in the early stage of its evolution. Secondly, this paper discusses when a peak time prediction should be triggered. Thirdly, this paper designs a multi-modal based deep learning method, where the state-of-art deep learning techniques, such as multi-modal embedding and attention mechanisms, are adopted. We find that in the early stage of popularity evolution, no matter which factor is used as the input, the prediction effect is poor. By contrast, the hashtag string factor has the weakest contribution to popularity prediction in the middle and late stages of popularity evolution. The overall performance of our proposed method is evaluated in terms of the minimum, quartiles, and maximum values of absolute errors. From the experimental results, the prediction method we designed is superior.