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There is increasing focus on applying deep learning methods to electrocardiograms (ECGs), with recent studies showing that neural networks (NNs) can predict future heart failure or atrial fibrillation from the ECG alone. However, large numbers of ECGs are needed to train NNs, and many ECGs are currently only in paper format, which are not suitable for NN training. We developed a fully-automated online ECG digitisation tool to convert scanned paper ECGs into digital signals. Using automated horizontal and vertical anchor point detection, the algorithm automatically segments the ECG image into separate images for the 12 leads and a dynamical morphological algorithm is then applied to extract the signal of interest. We then validated the performance of the algorithm on 515 digital ECGs, of which 45 were printed, scanned and redigitised. The automated digitisation tool achieved 99.0% correlation between the digitised signals and the ground truth ECG (n = 515 standard 3-by-4 ECGs) after excluding ECGs with overlap of lead signals. Without exclusion, the performance of average correlation was from 90 to 97% across the leads on all 3-by-4 ECGs. There was a 97% correlation for 12-by-1 and 3-by-1 ECG formats after excluding ECGs with overlap of lead signals. Without exclusion, the average correlation of some leads in 12-by-1 ECGs was 60–70% and the average correlation of 3-by-1 ECGs achieved 80–90%. ECGs that were printed, scanned, and redigitised, our tool achieved 96% correlation with the original signals. We have developed and validated a fully-automated, user-friendly, online ECG digitisation tool. Unlike other available tools, this does not require any manual segmentation of ECG signals. Our tool can facilitate the rapid and automated digitisation of large repositories of paper ECGs to allow them to be used for deep learning projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue contains six revised and extended versions of tool papers that appeared in the proceedings of TACAS 2021, the 27th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems. The issue is dedicated to the realization of algorithms in tools and the studies of the application of these tools for analysing hard- and software systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work describes the log-MAP (BCJR) algorithm implementation of a close to capacity dirty paper coding CODEC. The CODEC consists of eight deep pipeline processors. It decodes blocks of 975 bits in 26.9 ms using less than 9.7% of low-cost FPGA (and no DSP blocks). Two pipelines, for alpha and beta, calculate the values of gamma (of the BCJR) to reduce the storage requirements. The final log-likelihood ratio (LLR) is calculated together with alpha, reusing intermediate results. The number of bits used by the different signals of the processor is easily configurable. It was set to six bits to the channel measure signals and eight bits to log of probability signals like alpha, beta, and others. The CODEC clock was 100 MHz. The achieved bit rate is 36.2 Kbps per CODEC, but multiple CODECs can be fit into a single chip. The CODEC is 3.49 dB from the channel capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper "Well-behaved Online Load Balancing Against Strategic Jobs" by Li, Li and Wu considers a truthful online load-balancing problem with the objective of the makespan minimization on related machines. The 2019 workshop on models and algorithms for planning and scheduling problems was held in Renesse (The Netherlands). [Extracted from the article]

Achieving community immunity against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) depends on vaccinating the largest number of people within a specific period while taking all precautionary measures. To address this problem, this paper presents a smart parking system that will help the health crisis management committee to vaccinate the largest number of people with the minimum period of time while ensuring that all precautionary measures are followed, through a set of algorithms. These algorithms seek to ensure a uniform distribution of persons in parking. This paper proposes a novel complex system for smart parking and nine algorithms to address the NP-hard problem. The experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithms in terms of gap and time. Applying these algorithms to smart cities to ensure precautionary measures against COVID-19 can help fight against this pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of Software Tools for Technology Transfer comprises extended versions of selected papers from the 26th edition of the International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS 2020). The focus of this conference series is tools and algorithms for the rigorous analysis of software and hardware systems, and the papers in this special cover the spectrum of current work in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are useful tools for many applications. However, autonomous path planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in unfamiliar environments is a challenging problem when facing a series of problems such as poor consistency, high influence by the native controller of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. In this paper, we investigate reinforcement learning-based autonomous local path planning methods for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with high autonomous decision-making capability and locally high portability. We propose an autonomous local path planning algorithm based on the TD3 strategy to solve the problem of local obstacle avoidance and path planning in unfamiliar environments using autonomous decision-making of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The simulation results on Gazebo show that our method can effectively realize the autonomous local path planning task for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, the success rate of path planning with our method can reach 93% under the interference of no obstacles, and 92% in the environment with obstacles. Finally, our method can be used for autonomous path planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in unfamiliar environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In industry, the task of defect classification and defect localization is an important part of defect detection system. However, existing studies only focus on one task and it is difficult to ensure the accuracy of both tasks. This paper proposes a defect detection system based on improved Yolo_v4, which greatly improves the detection ability of minor defects. For K_Means algorithm clustering prianchors question with strong subjectivity, the paper proposes the Density Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) algorithm to determine the number of Anchors. To solve the problem of low detection rate of small targets caused by insufficient reuse rate of low-level features in CSPDarknet53 feature extraction network, this paper proposes an ECA-DenseNet-BC-121 feature extraction network to improve it. And the Dual Channel Feature Enhancement (DCFE) module is proposed to improve the local information loss and gradient propagation obstruction caused by quad chain convolution in PANet networks to improve the robustness of the model. The experimental results on the fabric surface defect detection datasets show that the mAP of the improved Yolo_v4 is 98.97%, which is 7.67% higher than SSD, 3.75% higher than Faster_RCNN, 10.82% higher than Yolo_v4 tiny, and 5.35% higher than Yolo_v4, and the detection speed reaches 39.4 fps. It can meet the real-time monitoring needs of industrial sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, an improved moth-flame optimization algorithm is proposed to alleviate the problems of premature convergence and convergence to local minima. From the perspective of diversity, an inertia weight of diversity feedback control is introduced in the moth-flame optimization to balance the algorithm's exploitation and global search abilities. Furthermore, a small probability mutation after the position update stage is added to improve the optimization performance. The performance of the proposed algorithm is extensively evaluated on a suite of CEC'2014 series benchmark functions and four constrained engineering optimization problems. The results of the proposed algorithm are compared with the ones of other improved algorithms presented in literatures. It is observed that the proposed method has a superior performance to improve the convergence ability of the algorithm. In addition, the proposed algorithm assists in escaping the local minima. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to propose a table tennis target detection (TD) method based on deep learning (DL) and multi-scale feature fusion (MFF) to improve the detection accuracy of the ball in table tennis competition, optimize the training process of athletes, and improve the technical level. In this paper, DL technology is used to improve the accuracy of table tennis TD through MFF guidance. Initially, based on the FAST Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (FAST R-CNN), the TD is carried out in the table tennis match. Then, through the method of MFF guidance, different levels of feature information are fused, which improves the accuracy of TD. Through the experimental verification on the test set, it is found that the mean Average Precision (mAP) value of the target detection algorithm (TDA) proposed here reaches 87.3%, which is obviously superior to other TDAs and has higher robustness. The DL TDA combined with the proposed MFF can be applied to various detection fields and can help the application of TD in real life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privacy preserving utility mining (PPUM) aims to solve the problem of sensitive information leakage in utility pattern mining. In recent years, researchers have proposed algorithms to solve the privacy-preserving problem. However, these algorithms have high side effects, long sanitization time, and computational complexity. Although the FPUTT algorithm reduces the number of database scans, tree construction and traversal still take much time. The paper proposes a fast utility-list dictionary algorithm (FULD). The utility-list dictionary consists of all sensitive items. Through dictionary lookup, sensitive items can be found and modified. In addition, the novel concepts of SINS and tns are proposed to reduce the side effects of the algorithm. In this paper, the experiments show that the FULD algorithm has good performance, such as running time and side effects. The running time of the FULD is 15–20 times shorter than the FPUTT algorithm. It performs well both on sparse and dense datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has focused on applying blockchain technology to solve security-related problems in Internet of Things (IoT) networks. However, the inherent scalability issues of blockchain technology become apparent in the presence of a vast number of IoT devices and the substantial data generated by these networks. Therefore, in this paper, we use a lightweight consensus algorithm to cater to these problems. We propose a scalable blockchain-based framework for managing IoT data, catering to a large number of devices. This framework utilizes the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus algorithm to ensure enhanced performance and efficiency in resource-constrained IoT networks. DPoS being a lightweight consensus algorithm leverages a selected number of elected delegates to validate and confirm transactions, thus mitigating the performance and efficiency degradation in the blockchain-based IoT networks. In this paper, we implemented an Interplanetary File System (IPFS) for distributed storage, and Docker to evaluate the network performance in terms of throughput, latency, and resource utilization. We divided our analysis into four parts: Latency, throughput, resource utilization, and file upload time and speed in distributed storage evaluation. Our empirical findings demonstrate that our framework exhibits low latency, measuring less than 0.976 ms. The proposed technique outperforms Proof of Stake (PoS), representing a state-of-the-art consensus technique. We also demonstrate that the proposed approach is useful in IoT applications where low latency or resource efficiency is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to address the challenges of identifying, detecting, and tracking moving objects in video surveillance, this paper emphasizes image-based dynamic entity detection. It delves into the complexities of numerous moving objects, dense targets, and intricate backgrounds. Leveraging the You Only Look Once (YOLOv3) algorithm framework, this paper proposes improvements in image segmentation and data filtering to address these challenges. These enhancements form a novel multi-object detection algorithm based on an improved YOLOv3 framework, specifically designed for video applications. Experimental validation demonstrates the feasibility of this algorithm, with success rates exceeding 60% for videos such as "jogging", "subway", "video 1", and "video 2". Notably, the detection success rates for "jogging" and "video 1" consistently surpass 80%, indicating outstanding detection performance. Although the accuracy slightly decreases for "Bolt" and "Walking2", success rates still hover around 70%. Comparative analysis with other algorithms reveals that this method's tracking accuracy surpasses that of particle filters, Discriminative Scale Space Tracker (DSST), and Scale Adaptive Multiple Features (SAMF) algorithms, with an accuracy of 0.822. This indicates superior overall performance in target tracking. Therefore, the improved YOLOv3-based multi-object detection and tracking algorithm demonstrates robust filtering and detection capabilities in noise-resistant experiments, making it highly suitable for various detection tasks in practical applications. It can address inherent limitations such as missed detections, false positives, and imprecise localization. These improvements significantly enhance the efficiency and accuracy of target detection, providing valuable insights for researchers in the field of object detection, tracking, and recognition in video surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flocking cohesion is critical for maintaining a group's aggregation and integrity. Designing a potential function to maintain flocking cohesion unaffected by social distance is challenging due to the uncertainty of real-world conditions and environments that cause changes in agents' social distance. Previous flocking research based on potential functions has primarily focused on agents' same social distance and the attraction–repulsion of the potential function, ignoring another property affecting flocking cohesion: well depth, as well as the effect of changes in agents' social distance on well depth. This paper investigates the effect of potential function well depths and agent's social distances on the multi-agent flocking cohesion. Through the analysis, proofs, and classification of these potential functions, we have found that the potential function well depth is proportional to the flocking cohesion. Moreover, we observe that the potential function well depth varies with the agents' social distance changes. Therefore, we design a segmentation potential function and combine it with the flocking control algorithm in this paper. It enhances flocking cohesion significantly and has good robustness to ensure the flocking cohesion is unaffected by variations in the agents' social distance. Meanwhile, it reduces the time required for flocking formation. Subsequently, the Lyapunov theorem and the LaSalle invariance principle prove the stability and convergence of the proposed control algorithm. Finally, this paper adopts two subgroups with different potential function well depths and social distances to encounter for simulation verification. The corresponding simulation results demonstrate and verify the effectiveness of the flocking control algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper thoroughly explores the role of object detection in smart cities, specifically focusing on advancements in deep learning-based methods. Deep learning models gain popularity for their autonomous feature learning, surpassing traditional approaches. Despite progress, challenges remain, such as achieving high accuracy in urban scenes and meeting real-time requirements. The study aims to contribute by analyzing state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms, identifying accurate models for smart cities, and evaluating real-time performance using the Average Precision at Medium Intersection over Union (IoU) metric. The reported results showcase various algorithms' performance, with Dynamic Head (DyHead) emerging as the top scorer, excelling in accurately localizing and classifying objects. Its high precision and recall at medium IoU thresholds signify robustness. The paper suggests considering the mean Average Precision (mAP) metric for a comprehensive evaluation across IoU thresholds, if available. Despite this, DyHead stands out as the superior algorithm, particularly at medium IoU thresholds, making it suitable for precise object detection in smart city applications. The performance analysis using Average Precision at Medium IoU is reinforced by the Average Precision at Low IoU (APL), consistently depicting DyHead's superiority. These findings provide valuable insights for researchers and practitioners, guiding them toward employing DyHead for tasks prioritizing accurate object localization and classification in smart cities. Overall, the paper navigates through the complexities of object detection in urban environments, presenting DyHead as a leading solution with robust performance metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensor network (WSN) location is a significant research area. In complex environments like forests, inaccurate signal intensity ranging is a major challenge. To address this issue, this paper presents a reliable WSN distance measurement-positioning algorithm for forest environments. The algorithm divides the positioning area into several sub-regions based on the discrete coefficient of the collected signal strength. Then, using the fitting method based on the signal intensity value of each sub-region, the algorithm derives the reference points of the logarithmic distance path loss model and path loss index. Finally, the algorithm locates target nodes using anchor nodes in different regions. Additionally, to enhance the positioning accuracy, weight values are assigned to the positioning result based on the discrete coefficient of the signal intensity in each sub-region. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed WSN algorithm has high precision in forest environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, highway accidents occur frequently, the main reason is that there is always foreign body invasion on the highway, which makes people unable to respond to emergencies in time. In order to reduce the occurrence of highway incidents, an object detection algorithm for highway intrusion was proposed in this paper. Firstly, a new feature extraction module was proposed to better preserve the main information. Secondly, a new feature fusion method was proposed to improve the accuracy of object detection. Finally, a lightweight method was proposed to reduce the computational complexity. We compare the algorithm in this paper with existing algorithms, the experimental results showed that: On the Visdrone dataset (small size targets), (a) the CS-YOLO was 3.6% more accurate than the YOLO v8. (b) The CS-YOLO was 1.2% more accurate than the YOLO v8 on the Tinypersons dataset (minimal size targets). (c) CS-YOLO was 1.4% more accurate than YOLO v8 on VOC2007 data set (normal size). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ranking the significance of scientific publications is a long-standing challenge. The network-based analysis is a natural and common approach for evaluating the scientific credit of papers. Although the number of citations has been widely used as a metric to rank papers, recently some iterative processes such as the well-known PageRank algorithm have been applied to the citation networks to address this problem. In this paper, we introduce nonlinearity to the PageRank algorithm when aggregating resources from different nodes to further enhance the effect of important papers. The validation of our method is performed on the data of American Physical Society (APS) journals. The results indicate that the nonlinearity improves the performance of the PageRank algorithm in terms of ranking effectiveness, as well as robustness against malicious manipulations. Although the nonlinearity analysis is based on the PageRank algorithm, it can be easily extended to other iterative ranking algorithms and similar improvements are expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

YOLOv5 is one of the most popular object detection algorithms, which is divided into multiple series according to the control of network depth and width. To realize the deployment of mobile devices or embedded devices, the paper proposes a lightweight aerial image object detection algorithm (LAI-YOLOv5s) based on the improvement of YOLOv5s with a relatively small amount of calculation and parameter and relatively fast reasoning speed. Firstly, to better detect small objects, the paper replaces the minimum detection head with the maximum detection head and proposes a new feature fusion method, DFM-CPFN(Deep Feature Map Cross Path Fusion Network), to enrich the semantic information of deep features. Secondly, the paper designs a new module based on VoVNet to improve the feature extraction ability of the backbone network. Finally, based on the idea of ShuffleNetV2, the paper makes the network more lightweight without affecting detection accuracy. Based on the VisDrone2019 dataset, the detection accuracy of LAI-YOLOv5s on the mAP@0.5 index is 8.3% higher than that of the original algorithm. Compared with other series of YOLOv5 and YOLOv3 algorithms, LAI-YOLOv5s has the advantages of low computational cost and high detection accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cryptographic technology can effectively defend against malicious attackers to attack sensitive and private information. The core of cryptographic technology is cryptographic algorithm, and the cryptographic algorithm identification is the premise of in-depth analysis of cryptography. In the cryptanalysis of unknown cryptographic algorithm, the primary task is to identify the cryptographic algorithm used in the encryption and then carry out targeted analysis. With the rapid growth of Internet data, the increasing complexity of communication environment, and the increasing number of cryptographic algorithms, the single-layer identification scheme of cryptographic algorithm faces great challenges in terms of identification ability and stability. To solve these problems, on the basis of existing identification schemes, this paper proposes a new cluster division scheme CMSSBAM-cluster, and then proposes a multi-layer composite identification scheme of cryptographic algorithm using a composite structure. The scheme adopts the method of cluster division and single division to identify various cryptographic algorithms. Based on the idea of ensemble, the scheme uses the hybrid random forest and logistic regression (HRFLR) model for training, and conducts research on a data set consisting of 1700 ciphertext files encrypted by 17 cryptographic algorithms. In addition, two ensemble learning models, hybrid gradient boosting decision tree and logistic regression (HGBDTLR) model and hybrid k-neighbors and random forest (HKNNRF) model are used as controls to conduct controlled experiments in this paper. The experimental results show that multi-layer composite identification scheme of cryptographic algorithm based on HRFLR model has an accuracy rate close to 100% in the cluster division stage, and the identification results are higher than those of the other two models in both the cluster division and single division stages. In the last layer of cluster division, the identification accuracy of ECB and CBC encryption modes in block cryptosystem is significantly higher than that of the other two classification models by 35.2% and 36.1%. In single division, the identification accuracy is higher than HGBDTLR with a maximum of 9.8%, and higher than HKNNRF with a maximum of 7.5%. At the same time, the scheme proposed in this paper has significantly improved the identification effect compared with the single division identification accuracy of 17 cryptosystem directly and the 17 classification accuracy of 5.9% compared with random classification, which indicates that multi-layer composite identification scheme of cryptographic algorithm based on HRFLR model has significant advantages in the accuracy of identifying multiple cryptographic algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The real-time path planning of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in dynamic environments with moving threats is a difficult problem. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a time-based rapidly exploring random tree (time-based RRT*) algorithm, called the hierarchical rapidly exploring random tree algorithm based on potential function lazy planning and low-cost optimization (HPO-RRT*). The HPO-RRT* algorithm can guarantee path homotopy optimality and high planning efficiency. This algorithm uses a hierarchical architecture comprising a UAV perception system, path planner, and path optimizer. After the UAV perception system predicts moving threats and updates world information, the path planner obtains the heuristic path. First, the path planner uses the bias sampling method based on the artificial potential field function proposed in this paper to guide sampling to improve the efficiency and quality of sampling. Then, the tree is efficiently extended by the improved time-based lazy collision checking RRT* algorithm to obtain the heuristic path. Finally, a low-cost path optimizer quickly optimizes the heuristic path directly to optimize the path while avoiding additional calculations. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the three existing advanced algorithms in terms of addressing the real-time path-planning problem of UAVs in a dynamic environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A series of recent papers raises worries about the manipulative potential of algorithmic transparency (to wit, making visible the factors that influence an algorithm’s output). But while the concern is apt and relevant, it is based on a fraught understanding of manipulation. Therefore, this paper draws attention to the ‘indifference view’ of manipulation, which explains better than the ‘vulnerability view’ why algorithmic transparency has manipulative potential. The paper also raises pertinent research questions for future studies of manipulation in the context of algorithmic transparency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collecting and analyzing data from all devices to improve the efficiency of business processes is an important task of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). In the age of data explosion, extensive text data generated by the IIoT have given birth to a variety of text representation methods. The task of text representation is to convert the natural language to a form that computer can understand with retaining the original semantics. However, these methods are difficult to effectively extract the semantic features among words and distinguish polysemy in natural language. Combining the advantages of convolutional neural network (CNN) and variational autoencoder (VAE), this paper proposes an intelligent CNN-VAE text representation algorithm as an advanced learning method for social big data within next-generation IIoT, which help users identify the information collected by sensors and perform further processing. This method employs the convolution layer to capture the local features of the context and uses the variational technique to reconstruct feature space to make it conform to the normal distribution. In addition, the improved word2vec model based on topical word embedding (TWE) is utilized to add topical information to word vectors to distinguish polysemy. This paper takes the social big data as an example to illustrate the way of the proposed algorithm applied in the next-generation IIoT and utilizes Cnews dataset to verify the performance of proposed method with four evaluating metrics (i.e., recall, accuracy, precision, and F1-score). Experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms word2vec-avg and CNN-AE in K-nearest neighbor (KNN), random forest (RF), and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers and distinguishes polysemy effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automated techniques and tools for the construction and analysis of systems are inevitable to manage the complexity of the current systems. Such techniques and tools are the subject of interest of the International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems—TACAS. This special issue of Software Tools for Technology Transfer presents extended versions of five selected papers from the 25th edition of TACAS that took place in 2019. All of the papers included into this special issue aim at various aspects of automated design and formal verification and hence contribute to development of more reliable computer systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classical moving target segmentation (MTS) algorithm in a video can segment the moving targets out by calculating frame by frame, but the algorithm encounters a real-time problem as the data increases. Recently, the benefits of quantum computing in video processing have been demonstrated, but it is still scarce for MTS. In this paper, a quantum moving target segmentation algorithm for grayscale video based on background difference method is proposed, which can simultaneously model the background of all frames and perform background difference to segment the moving targets. In addition, a feasible quantum subtractor is designed to perform the background difference operation. Then, several quantum units, including quantum cyclic shift transformation, quantum background modeling, quantum background difference, and quantum binarization, are designed in detail to establish the complete quantum circuit. For a video containing 2 m frames (every frame is a 2 n × 2 n image with q grayscale levels), the complexity of our algorithm is O (n + q) . This is an exponential speedup over the classical algorithm and also outperforms the existing quantum algorithms. Finally, the experiment on IBM Q demonstrates the feasibility of our algorithm in this noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of a multi-population structure in differential evolution (DE) algorithm has been proven to be an effective way to achieve algorithm adaptation and multi-strategy integration. However, in existing studies, the mutation strategy selection of each subpopulation during execution is fixed, resulting in poor self-adaptation of subpopulations. To solve this problem, a dynamic multi-strategy integrated differential evolution algorithm based on reinforcement learning (RLDMDE) is proposed in this paper. By employing reinforcement learning, each subpopulation can adaptively select the mutation strategy according to the current environmental state (population diversity). Based on the population state, this paper proposes an individual dynamic migration strategy to "reward" or "punish" the population to avoid wasting individual computing resources. Furthermore, this paper applies two methods of good point set and random opposition-based learning (ROBL) in the population initialization stage to improve the quality of the initial solutions. Finally, to evaluate the performance of the RLDMDE algorithm, this paper selects two benchmark function sets, CEC2013 and CEC2017, and six engineering design problems for testing. The results demonstrate that the RLDMDE algorithm has good performance and strong competitiveness in solving optimization problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To address the issues of poor detection accuracy and the large number of target detection model parameters in existing AGV monocular vision location detection algorithms, this paper presents an AGV vision location method based on Gaussian saliency heuristic. The proposed method introduces a fast and accurate AGV visual detection network called GAGV-net. In the GAGV-net network, a Gaussian saliency feature extraction module is designed to enhance the network's feature extraction capability, thereby reducing the required output for model fitting. To improve the accuracy of target detection, a joint multi-scale classification and detection task header are designed at the stage of target frame regression to classification. This header utilizes target features of different scales, thereby enhancing the accuracy of target detection. Experimental results demonstrate a 12% improvement in detection accuracy and a 27.38 FPS increase in detection speed compared to existing detection methods. Moreover, the proposed detection network significantly reduces the model's size, enhances the network model's deployability on AGVs, and greatly improves detection accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about the opposite of judgement and calculation. This opposition has been a traditional anchor of critiques concerned with the rise of AI decision making over human judgement. Contrary to these approaches, it is argued that human judgement is not and cannot be replaced by calculation, but that it is human judgement that contextualises computational structures and gives them meaning and purpose. The article focuses on the epistemic structure of algorithms and artificial neural networks to find that they always depend on human judgement to be related to real life objects or purposes. By introducing the philosophical concept of judgement, it becomes clear that the property of judgement to provide meaning and purposiveness is based on the temporality of human life and the ambiguity of language, which quantitative processes lack. A juxtaposition shows that calculations and clustering can be used and referred to in more or less prejudiced and reflecting as well as opaque and transparent ways, but thereby always depend on human judgement. The paper clearly asserts that the transparency of AI is necessary for their autonomous use. This transparency requires the explicitness of the judgements that constitute these computational structures, thereby creating an awareness of the conditionality of such epistemic entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global competition forces the process industries to continuously optimize plant operation. One of the latest trends in efficiency and plant availability improvement is to set up fault diagnosis and maintenance systems for online industrial use. This paper presents a methodology for developing industrial fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) systems. Since model- or data-based diagnosis of all components cannot be achieved online on a large-scale basis, the focus must be narrowed down to the most likely faulty components responsible for abnormal process behavior. One of the key elements here is fault analysis. The paper describes and briefly discusses also other development phases, process decomposition and the selection of FDD methods. The paper ends with an FDD case study of a large-scale industrial board machine including a description of the fault analysis and FDD algorithms for the resulting focus areas. Finally, the testing and validation results are presented and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image stitching is a fundamental pillar of computer vision, and its effectiveness hinges significantly on the quality of the feature descriptors. However, the existing feature descriptors face several challenges, including inadequate robustness to noise or rotational transformations and limited adaptability during hardware deployment. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a set of feature descriptors for image stitching named Lightweight Multi-Feature Descriptors (LMFD). Based on the extensive extraction of gradients, means, and global information surrounding the feature points, feature descriptors are generated through various combinations to enhance the image stitching process. This endows the algorithm with formidable rotational invariance and noise resistance, thereby improving its accuracy and reliability. Furthermore, the feature descriptors take the form of binary matrices consisting of 0s and 1s, not only facilitating more efficient hardware deployment but also enhancing computational efficiency. The utilization of binary matrices significantly reduces the computational complexity of the algorithm while preserving its efficacy. To validate the effectiveness of LMFD, rigorous experimentation was conducted on the Hpatches and 2D-HeLa datasets. The results demonstrate that LMFD outperforms state-of-the-art image matching algorithms in terms of accuracy. This empirical evidence solidifies the superiority of LMFD and substantiates its potential for practical applications in various domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The optimal operation of reservoir groups is a strongly constrained, multi-stage, and high-dimensional optimization problem. In response to this issue, this article couples the standard Pelican optimization algorithm with adaptive ε constraint methods, and further improves the optimization performance of the algorithm by initializing the population with a good point set, reverse differential evolution, and optimal individual t-distribution perturbation strategy. Based on this, an improved Pelican algorithm coupled with adaptive ε constraint method is proposed (ε-IPOA). The performance of the algorithm was tested through 24 constraint testing functions to find the optimal ability and solve constraint optimization problems. The results showed that the algorithm has strong optimization ability and stable performance. In this paper, we select Sanmenxia and Xiaolangdi reservoirs as the research objects, establish the maximum peak-cutting model of terrace reservoirs, apply the ε-IPOA algorithm to solve the model, and compare it with the ε-POA (Pelican algorithm coupled with adaptive ε constraint method) and ε-DE (Differential Evolution Algorithm) algorithms, the results indicate that ε. The peak flow rate of the Huayuankou control point solved by the IPOA algorithm is 12,319 m3/s, which is much lower than the safe overflow flow rate of 22,000 m3/s at the Huayuankou control point, with a peak shaving rate of 44%, and other algorithms do not find effective solutions meeting the constraint conditions. This paper provides a new idea for solving the problem of flood control optimal operation of cascade reservoirs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Channel pruning has recently become a widely used model compression method. However, most existing channel pruning methods only prune to decrease the model size, such as the number of parameters or FLOPs, and hence the decrease in model size does not effectively lead to an improvement in inference performance. To address this problem, this paper proposes a latency-optimized channel pruning method for CNN inference acceleration on GPU platforms by latency stair-step discrimination, two-stage benefit assessment and latency-sharing channel pruning. Compared with recent state-of-the-art model compression methods, it can achieve significant improvements in inference performance with comparable compression rates and model accuracy. The contributions of this paper include the following: first, a three-point latency stair-step discrimination method is proposed for determining the candidate prunable coordinates with the best latency performance adapted to the current hardware. Then, a two-stage benefit assessment method based on interlayer dependencies is proposed for determining the optimal channel pruning rate of each layer in the network. Finally, a latency-sharing channel pruning framework is proposed to accelerate the model pruning adaptation process. The method proposed in this paper can significantly reduce the model inference latency on multiple types of GPU platforms. To verify the effectiveness, we use three general-purpose GPU platforms and two embedded GPU platforms to evaluate the algorithm performance. The experimental results show that for recent state-of-the-art CNNs, the proposed method can achieve a 22.0–6.6% latency reduction and a 1.3 –3.0 inference performance improvement as well as a 1.2–4.3 pruning adaptation speedup with high model accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine learning is frequently being leveraged to tackle problems in the health sector including utilization for clinical decision-support. Its use has historically been focused on single modal data. Attempts to improve prediction and mimic the multimodal nature of clinical expert decision-making has been met in the biomedical field of machine learning by fusing disparate data. This review was conducted to summarize the current studies in this field and identify topics ripe for future research. We conducted this review in accordance with the PRISMA extension for Scoping Reviews to characterize multi-modal data fusion in health. Search strings were established and used in databases: PubMed, Google Scholar, and IEEEXplore from 2011 to 2021. A final set of 128 articles were included in the analysis. The most common health areas utilizing multi-modal methods were neurology and oncology. Early fusion was the most common data merging strategy. Notably, there was an improvement in predictive performance when using data fusion. Lacking from the papers were clear clinical deployment strategies, FDA-approval, and analysis of how using multimodal approaches from diverse sub-populations may improve biases and healthcare disparities. These findings provide a summary on multimodal data fusion as applied to health diagnosis/prognosis problems. Few papers compared the outputs of a multimodal approach with a unimodal prediction. However, those that did achieved an average increase of 6.4% in predictive accuracy. Multi-modal machine learning, while more robust in its estimations over unimodal methods, has drawbacks in its scalability and the time-consuming nature of information concatenation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This special section is devoted to a selection of papers that appeared originally in the Proceedings of TACAS 2001, the 7th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems [1] which took place in Genova, Italy in April 2001 as a constituent event of the European joint conferences on theory and Practice of Software. All papers present approaches, tools and algorithms that aim at extending the scope of formal techniques (coverage of systems specifications, data structures, size, and their trade-offs) for validation, verification, and testing of software systems. They are by no means a complete account of the numerous ways in which real software and software systems may become subject to rigorous investigation, but they provide an interesting sampling of novel approaches towards scalability of formal methods-based validation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at the intrinsic aspect that the weak features of the early fault information of rolling bearings are not easy to extract, a parameter Adaptive Variational Modal Decomposition (AVMD) based algorithm is proposed for bearing fault signal feature extraction. Since the number of Variational Modal Decomposition (VMD) decomposition and penalty factor play an important role in VMD decomposition effect, the irregularities in the selection of these two influencing parameters are analyzed. We exploit the stronger global search capability of the improved sparrow search algorithm (LSSA) for adaptive parameter selection of the VMD algorithm. In this paper, the Levy flight algorithm is introduced and chaos is added to initialize sparrow population position to prevent sparrow from falling into the disadvantage of local optimum in the search process. In addition, this paper also combines the maximum kurtosis index, the minimum envelope entropy index and the number of iterations of VMD to form the objective function of the LSSA. The VMD algorithm with optimized parameters decomposes the signal to be measured, the decomposed IMFs was reconstructed, finally the validity of the model was verified by calculating 20 features (time domain and frequency domain) of the reconstructed signal as the input vector of the SVM classifier. Finally, the feasibility of this model in fault diagnosis of rolling bearing is verified using simulation and example experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of blind phase offset recovery of low density parity-check (LDPC)-coded systems is considered in this paper. We propose a new algorithm of phase offset estimation that involves the computation and maximization of a likelihood difference (LD)-based cost function calculated from the parity-check matrix of the code. We show in this paper that the new cost function has a simplified form compared to another algorithm proposed in the literature and presents similar estimation performance. Mean squared error (MSE) curves show very good performance of the proposed phase offset estimation algorithm, even at low signal-to-noise ratios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article announces that the paper "Blow Cost Sparse Multiband Signal Characterization Using Asynchronous Multi-Rate Sampling: Algorithms and Hardware" has recieved the Best Paper Award, appeared in the periodical "Journal of Electronic Testing: Theory and Applications," along with an abstract.

The ridge beast is a beast placed on the ridge of the roof of ancient Chinese buildings, not only has a decorative function, and has a strict hierarchical meaning, the number and form of the ridge beast placed on different levels of buildings are strictly limited. The detection technology of ridge beast decorative parts has important application value in the fields of fine 3D reconstruction of ancient buildings, historical dating and cultural and tourism services. Aiming at the problem of poor detection performance of traditional detection algorithms due to high texture similarity and poor discrimination of ridge beast, this paper proposed an improved YOLOv3 based detection algorithm for ridge beast decorative pieces. In terms of basic network improvement, local features are aggregated to the deep separable convolution internal embedding summation layer, and point convolution is used to connect the channel information of original features and aggregated features, so as to expand the receptive field and learn more diverse features. The residual structure of the feature extraction network was constructed by using the convolution, and the extraction effect of the model on the fine-grained features of the ridge beast was optimized, so that the detection accuracy was improved. In the prediction head improvement of the model, the original linear structure was reconstructed, and the extrusion and excitation modules were introduced to model the channel relationship of multi-scale feature map, which suppressed the response of interference signals and made the feature more directivity. The parallel 1 × 1 and 3 × 3 convolution are used to construct a multi-size convolution structure, which enhances the semantic information extraction ability of the model and further improves the detection effect. Experiments were conducted on the constructed ridge-beast dataset, and the results showed that the mAP of the improved algorithm can reach 86.48%, which is 3.05% higher than YOLO-v3, and the model parameters are reduced by 70%, which has a better detection performance and can provide a reference for the automated detection of ancient building components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software usability is usually used in reference to the hierarchical software usability model by researchers and is an important aspect of user experience and software quality. Thus, evaluation of software usability is an essential parameter for managing and regulating a software. However, it has been difficult to establish a precise evaluation method for this problem. A large number of usability factors have been suggested by many researchers, each covering a set of different factors to increase the degree of user friendliness of a software. Therefore, the selection of the correct determining features is of paramount importance. This paper proposes an innovative metaheuristic algorithm for the selection of most important features in a hierarchical software model. A hierarchy-based usability model is an exhaustive interpretation of the factors, attributes, and its characteristics in a software at different levels. This paper proposes a modified version of grey wolf optimisation algorithm (GWO) termed as modified grey wolf optimization (MGWO) algorithm. The mechanism of this algorithm is based on the hunting mechanism of wolves in nature. The algorithm chooses a number of features which are then applied to software development life cycle models for finding out the best among them. The outcome of this application is also compared with the conventional grey wolf optimization algorithm (GWO), modified binary bat algorithm (MBBAT), modified whale optimization algorithm (MWOA), and modified moth flame optimization (MMFO). The results show that MGWO surpasses all the other relevant optimizers in terms of accuracy and produces a lesser number of attributes equal to 8 as compared to 9 in MMFO and 12 in MBBAT and 19 in MWOA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fog computing aims to mitigate data communication delay by deploying fog nodes to provide servers in the proximity of users and offload resource-hungry tasks that would otherwise be sent to distant cloud servers. In this paper, we propose an effective fog device deployment algorithm based on a new metaheuristic algorithm–search economics–to solve the optimization problem for the deployment of fog computing systems. The term "effective" in this paper refers to that the developed algorithm can achieve better performance in terms of metrics such as lower latency and less resource usage. Compared with conventional metaheuristic algorithms, the proposed algorithm is unique in that it first divides the solution space into a set of regions to increase search diversity of the search and then allocates different computational resources to each region according to its potential. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, we compare it with several classical fog computing deployment algorithms. The simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm provides lower network latency and higher quality of service than the other deployment algorithms evaluated in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For solving the problem of quality detection in the production and processing of stuffed food, this paper suggests a small neighborhood clustering algorithm to segment the frozen dumpling image on the conveyor belt, which can effectively improve the qualified rate of food quality. This method builds feature vectors by obtaining the image's attribute parameters. The image is segmented by a distance function between categories using a small neighborhood clustering algorithm based on sample feature vectors to calculate the cluster centers. Moreover, this paper gives the selection of optimal segmentation points and sampling rate, calculates the optimal sampling rate, suggests a search method for optimal sampling rate, as well as a validity judgment function for segmentation. Optimized small neighborhood clustering (OSNC) algorithm uses the fast frozen dumpling image as a sample for continuous image target segmentation experiments. The experimental results show the accuracy of defect detection of OSNC algorithm is 95.9%. Compared with other existing segmentation algorithms, OSNC algorithm has stronger anti-interference ability, faster segmentation speed as well as more efficiently saves key information ability. It can effectively improve some disadvantages of other segmentation algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at the problems of identifying storage pest tobacco pest beetles from images that have few object pixels and considerable image noise, and therefore suffer from lack of information and identifiable features, this paper proposes an automatic monitoring method of tobacco beetle based on Multi-scale Global residual Feature Pyramid Network and Dual-path Deformable Attention (MGrFPN-DDrGAM). Firstly, a Multi-scale Global residual Feature Pyramid Network (MGrFPN) is constructed to obtain rich high-level semantic features and more complete information on low-level features to reduce missed detection; Then, a Dual-path Deformable receptive field Guided Attention Module (DDrGAM) is designed to establish long-range channel dependence, guide the effective fusion of features and improve the localization accuracy of tobacco beetles by fitting the spatial geometric deformation features of and capturing the spatial information of feature maps with different scales to enrich the feature information in the channel and spatial. Finally, to simulate a real scene, a multi-scene tobacco beetle dataset is created. The dataset includes 28,080 images and manually labeled tobacco beetle objects. The experimental results show that under the framework of the Faster R-CNN algorithm, the detection precision and recall rate of this method can reach 91.4% and 98.4% when the intersection ratio (IoU) is 0.5. Compared with Faster R-CNN and FPN, when the intersection ratio (IoU) is 0.7, the detection precision is improved by 32.9% and 6.9%, respectively. The proposed method is superior to the current mainstream methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether a quantum computer can efficiently simulate the time evolution of the Schrödinger particle in a one-dimensional infinite potential well. In order to solve the Schrödinger equation in the quantum register, an algorithm based on the Quantum Discrete Sine Transform (QDST) is applied. The paper compares the results obtained in this way with the results given by the previous method (based on the QFT algorithm). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, UAV techniques are developing very fast, and UAVs are becoming more and more popular in both civilian and military fields. An important application of UAVs is rescue and disaster relief. In post-earthquake evaluation scenes where it is difficult or dangerous for human to reach, UAVs and sensors can form a wireless sensor network and collect environmental information. In such application scenarios, task allocation algorithms are important for UAVs to collect data efficiently. This paper firstly proposes an improved immune multi-agent algorithm for the offline task allocation stage. The proposed algorithm provides higher accuracy and convergence performance by improving the optimization operation. Then, this paper proposes an improved adaptive discrete cuckoo algorithm for the online task reallocation stage. By introducing adaptive step size transformation and appropriate local optimization operator, the speed of convergence is accelerated, making it suitable for real-time online task reallocation. Simulation results have proved the effectiveness of the proposed task allocation algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of AI and big data mining technologies, computerized medical decision-making has become increasingly prominent. The aim of high-utility pattern mining (HUPM) is to discover meaningful patterns in medical databases that contribute to maximizing the utility from the perspective of diagnosis. However, HUPM pays less attention to the interpretability and explainability of these patterns in medical decision-making scenarios. This paper proposes a novel algorithm called the Improved fuzzy high-utility pattern mining (IF-HUPM) to address this problem. First, the paper applies a fuzzy preprocessing method to divide the fuzzy intervals of a medical quantitative data set, which enhances the fuzziness and interpretability of the data. Next, in the process of IF-HUPM, both fuzzy tree and list structures are employed to calculate fuzzy high-utility values. By combining the characteristics of the one-stage and two-stage algorithms of HUPM, an adaptive-phase Fuzzy HUPM hybrid frame is proposed. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed IF-HUPM algorithm enhances both accuracy and efficiency and the mining process requires less time and space on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In mobile crowdsensing, the sensing platform recruits users to complete large-scale sensing tasks cooperatively. In order to guarantee the quality of sensing tasks, the platform needs to recommend suitable tasks to users. Existing task recommendation methods typically focus on unilateral factors, such as user preferences or task quality, leading to low platform utility and task acceptance rate respectively. To solve the above issue, this paper proposes a task recommendation method which takes both user preferences and user-task matching into consideration. Firstly, we apply the Deep Interest Network (DIN) in the context of mobile crowdsensing to recommend tasks according to user preferences. Secondly, the concept of user-task matching is introduced, in which both the task difficulty and the user reliability are taken into account. Finally, we propose task recommendation algorithms and conduct extensive experiments on a real dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed method can not only improve the utility of the platform significantly, but also improve the recommendation accuracy slightly under longer recommendation list. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event sequences are common types of data. Several episode mining algorithms have been developed to find episodes (subsequences of events) that appear frequently in an event sequence, with the aim of discovering useful knowledge for decision-making and predictions. However, most of these algorithms can only process simple event sequences (where, at most, one event occurs at each timestamp). In contrast, in many real-life applications, multiple events may occur at the same timestamp, resulting in complex event sequences. Moreover, numerous episode mining algorithms overestimate the frequency of episodes by counting the same events multiple times. As a solution, some algorithms have been designed to count only non-overlapping occurrences. Yet, it can be argued that this definition is too strict and discards many important events. To address these limitations, this paper presents an algorithm named EMDO (Episode Mining under Distinct Occurrences (EMDO) to find frequent episodes in a complex sequence by counting distinct occurrences. The proposed concept of distinct occurrences ensures that each event is not counted more than once but allows distinct occurrences to overlap. A second algorithm, called EMDO-P, is also presented in this paper to derive strong episode rules in event sequences from episodes found by EMDO. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on mining frequent episodes using a frequency definition based on distinct occurrences. The experimental results confirm that the proposed algorithms are efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]