title: Promoting Diversity in Content Based Recommendation Using Feature Weighting and LSH

text: This work proposes an efficient Content-Based (CB) product recommendation methodology that promotes diversity. A heuristic CB approach incorporating feature weighting and Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) is used, along with the TF-IDF method and functionality of tuning the importance of product features to adjust its logic to the needs of various e-commerce sites. The problem of efficiently producing recommendations, without compromising similarity, is addressed by approximating product similarities via the LSH technique. The methodology is evaluated on two sets with real e-commerce data. The evaluation of the proposed methodology shows that the produced recommendations can help customers to continue browsing a site by providing them with the necessary “next step”. Finally, it is demonstrated that the methodology incorporates recommendation diversity which can be adjusted by tuning the appropriate feature weights.


title: Fingerprints Recognition System-Based on Mobile Device Identification Using Circular String Pattern Matching Techniques

text: As fingerprint recognition systems have become increasingly adopted within a range of technology applications over the last decade, so too has their attention within emerging research. However, although this increased attention has led to an enhancement of the software and algorithms behind this recognition process, the majority of research has still not addressed the issues of incorrect rotation or proximity between the finger and the device. Current systems assume that the direction of the imprinted finger will align with that of the target fingerprint image; this decreases the accuracy of fingerprint recognition across a variety of finger orientations and scenarios. In response to this use-case dilemma, this paper proposes a new technique of pattern matching that can account for this natural range of fingerprint orientations. This is achieved first through a preliminary stage of orientation identification, whereby the fingerprint image can be stored under multiple permutations by using approximate circular string-matching algorithms. This enables the database of images for each approximate permutation of orientation to be stored in advance. It can then be matched against the strong information of the fingerprint at its exact relative rotation of input. The improved accuracy of recognition demonstrated through the results of this study may enable the functionality of fingerprint recognition to adapt to challenging device form-factors and provide the accuracy needed for military and medical applications.


title: Automated MeSH Indexing of Biomedical Literature Using Contextualized Word Representations

text: Appropriate indexing of resources is necessary for their efficient search, discovery and utilization. Relying solely on manual effort is time-consuming, costly and error prone. On the other hand, the special nature, volume and broadness of biomedical literature pose barriers for automated methods. We argue that current word embedding algorithms can be efficiently used to support the task of biomedical text classification. Both deep- and shallow network approaches are implemented and evaluated. Large datasets of biomedical citations and full texts are harvested for their metadata and used for training and testing. The ontology representation of Medical Subject Headings provides machine-readable labels and specifies the dimensionality of the problem space. These automated approaches are still far from entirely substituting human experts, yet they can be useful as a mechanism for validation and recommendation. Dataset balancing, distributed processing and training parallelization in GPUs, all play an important part regarding the effectiveness and performance of proposed methods.


title: A Framework to Support the 5G Densification

text: 5G networks are shaping a new ecosystem necessitating various transformations of the existing network infrastructures combined with the use of network softwarization and programmability, so as to satisfy the needs of all the involved stakeholders (telecom/service providers, infrastructure owners, tenants, vertical industries, end-users, etc.), while a wide range of issues have to be addressed spanning from technology to business domains. The 5G-PPP project 5G-PHOS [1] proposes a novel framework to allow telecom operators and service providers to overcome 5G densification issues while supporting the stringent 5G requirements in a flexible and cost efficient manner to allow for commercialization. This paper aims at providing indicative architectural instantiations of the 5G-PHOS solution, depicting the way the technology supports the 5G requirements and the stakeholders’ needs along with the functionalities and the deployment feasibility of an ambitious 5G fronthaul/backhaul network solution.


title: A Two-Levels Data Anonymization Approach

text: The amount of devices gathering and using personal data without the person’s approval is exponentially growing. The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came following the requests of individuals who felt at risk of personal privacy breaches. Consequently, privacy preservation through machine learning algorithms were designed based on cryptography, statistics, databases modeling and data mining. In this paper, we present two-levels data anonymization methods. The first level consists of anonymizing data using an unsupervised learning protocol, and the second level is anonymization by incorporating the discriminative information to test the effect of labels on the quality of the anonymized data. The results show that the proposed approaches give good results in terms of utility what preserves the trade-off between data privacy and its usefulness.


title: An Innovative Graph-Based Approach to Advance Feature Selection from Multiple Textual Documents

text: This paper introduces a novel graph-based approach to select features from multiple textual documents. The proposed solution enables the investigation of the importance of a term into a whole corpus of documents by utilizing contemporary graph theory methods, such as community detection algorithms and node centrality measures. Compared to well-tried existing solutions, evaluation results show that the proposed approach increases the accuracy of most text classifiers employed and decreases the number of features required to achieve ‘state-of-the-art’ accuracy. Well-known datasets used for the experimentations reported in this paper include 20Newsgroups, LingSpam, Amazon Reviews and Reuters.


title: Mining and Analysis of Air Quality Data to Aid Climate Change

text: The data science and AI community has gathered around the world to support tackling the climate change problem in different domains. This research aims to work on the air quality through emissions and pollutant concentration data along with vegetation information. Authorities especially in urban cities like London have been very vigilant in monitoring these different aspects of air quality and reliable sources of big data are available in this domain. This study aims to mine and collate this information spread all over the place in different formats into usable knowledge base on which further data analysis and powerful Machine Learning approaches can be built to extract strong evidences useful in building better policies around climate change.


title: Network Aggregation to Enhance Results Derived from Multiple Analytics

text: The more complex data are, the higher the number of possibilities to extract partial information from those data. These possibilities arise by adopting different analytic approaches. The heterogeneity among these approaches and in particular the heterogeneity in results they produce are challenging for follow-up studies, including replication, validation and translational studies. Furthermore, they complicate the interpretation of findings with wide-spread relevance. Here, we take the example of statistical epistasis networks derived from genome-wide association studies with single nucleotide polymorphisms as nodes. Even though we are only dealing with a single data type, the epistasis detection problem suffers from many pitfalls, such as the wide variety of analytic tools to detect them, each highlighting different aspects of epistasis and exhibiting different properties in maintaining false positive control. To reconcile different network views to the same problem, we considered 3 network aggregation methods and discussed their performance in the context of epistasis network aggregation. We furthermore applied a latent class method as best performer to real-life data on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and highlighted its benefits to increase our understanding about IBD underlying genetic architectures.


title: Cross-Domain Authorship Attribution Using Pre-trained Language Models

text: Authorship attribution attempts to identify the authors behind texts and has important applications mainly in cyber-security, digital humanities and social media analytics. An especially challenging but very realistic scenario is cross-domain attribution where texts of known authorship (training set) differ from texts of disputed authorship (test set) in topic or genre. In this paper, we modify a successful authorship verification approach based on a multi-headed neural network language model and combine it with pre-trained language models. Based on experiments on a controlled corpus covering several text genres where topic and genre is specifically controlled, we demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves very promising results. We also demonstrate the crucial effect of the normalization corpus in cross-domain attribution.


title: Business Aspects of the Neutral Host Model: The Immersive Video Services Case

text: The introduction of novel approaches that cause a paradigm shift on a technological level can become the driver of innovative business models that benefit from capabilities that may have emerged. Such is the case for 5G which offers an entirely new way of delivering services that affects consumers and even more fundamentally the providers. The introduction of network slicing and the ability to provide individually configurable parts of the network to providers offer unique opportunities and solutions particularly when it comes to solving the known issue of overlapping infrastructure investments from various stakeholders. In this paper, the scenario of a single wholesale 5G network provider – the Neutral Host – operating in the City of Lucca is examined. Some remarks about the impact of the NH model on Barcelona superblock urbanistic model are also provided.


title: On the Reusability of Sentiment Analysis Datasets in Applications with Dissimilar Contexts

text: The main goal of this paper is to evaluate the usability of several algorithms on various sentiment-labeled datasets. The process of creating good semantic vector representations for textual data is considered a very demanding task for the research community. The first and most important step of a Natural Language Processing (NLP) system, is text preprocessing, which greatly affects the overall accuracy of the classification algorithms. In this work, two vector space models are created, and a study consisting of a variety of algorithms, is performed on them. The work is based on the IMDb dataset which contains movie reviews along with their associated labels (positive or negative). The goal is to obtain the model with the highest accuracy and the best generalization. To measure how well these models generalize in other domains, several datasets, which are further analyzed later, are used.


title: A New Approach to 5G and MEC Integration

text: This paper presents a concept of integration of MEC into the 5G network slicing architecture. Three variants of the architecture have been proposed, which incorporate: individual MEP/MEPM for each slice, shared ones for multiple network slices and Distributed Autonomous Slice Management and Orchestration (DASMO) approach. Each variant is focused on efficient integration of 5G Core and MEC solutions and utilizing additional functionalities of both components, including MEC APIs and 5G Control Plane exposure capabilities. Finally, main issues of 5G-MEC implementation have been discussed, which include the aspects of MEC service APIs, MEC Apps mobility in demanding use cases, challenges of service continuity in roaming scenarios as well as the role and availability of 5G enablers.


title: Threat Landscape of Next Generation IoT-Enabled Smart Grids

text: The Smart Grids (SGs) consist of an emerging paradigm that pave the way for the power grids’ modernization and seek novel techniques for improving the transmittion and distribution of power to consumers, as well as achieving end- to-end real-time governance. Thus, the prospect of SGs are to behave intelligently, through the deployment of advanced technologies, applications and standards. A subset of such technologies and applications consists of Software Defined Netowrks (SDNs), Cloud Computing (CC), Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, Big Data applications, Internet-of-Things (IoT), 5G and wireless standards such as IEEE 802.15.4g and IEEE 802.16.1. The SGs, the CC and the IoT paradigms’ convergence lie on satisfying the clients’ needs, improving efficiency and in the same time maintaining overall control. However, the coupling of diverse technologies under a unified architecture raise multiple interdependencies which pose new challenges, ranging from the reliability of the whole power system to novel cyber-security risks. This paper sheds new light in the overall definition of the threat landscape that emerges by the convergence of CC and IoT in a SG.


title: A Deep Learning Approach to Aspect-Based Sentiment Prediction

text: Sentiment analysis is a vigorous research area, with many application domains. In this work, aspect-based sentiment prediction is examined as a component of a larger architecture that crawls, indexes and stores documents from a wide variety of online sources, including the most popular social networks. The textual part of the collected information is processed by a hybrid bi-directional long short-term memory architecture, coupled with convolutional layers along with an attention mechanism. The extracted textual features are then combined with other characteristics, such as the number of repetitions, the type and frequency of emoji ideograms in a fully-connected, feed-forward artificial neural network that performs the final prediction task. The obtained results, especially for the negative sentiment class, which is of particular importance in certain cases, are encouraging, underlying the robustness of the proposed approach.


title: Manifold Learning for Innovation Funding: Identification of Potential Funding Recipients

text: finElink is a recommendation system that provides guidance to French innovative companies with regard to their financing strategy through public funding mechanisms. Analysis of financial data from former funding recipients partially feeds the recommendation system. Financial company data from a representative French population are reduced and projected onto a two-dimensional space with Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection, a manifold learning algorithm. Former French funding recipients’ data are projected onto the two-dimensional space. Their distribution is non-uniform, with data concentrating in one region of the projection space. This region is identified using Density-based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise. Applicant companies which are projected within this region are labeled potential funding recipients and will be suggested the most competitive funding mechanisms.


title: Knowledge-Based Management and Reasoning on Cultural and Natural Touristic Routes

text: There is great potential in interdisciplinary traveling platforms mingling knowledge about cultural heritage aspects, such as places with schedules providing visits or even containing augmented reality features also, along with environmental concerns to enhance personalized tourist experience and tripping avocation. For an ontological framework to support and nominate trip detours of targeted interests according to end-users, it should incorporate and unify as much heterogeneous information, deriving either from web sources or wherever there are ubiquitously available such as sensors or open databases. A plethora of qualitatively diverse data along with adequate quantities of them escalate the contingent results in terms of conferring a plurality of relevant options which can be utterly manifested through involving axioms with rule-based reasoning functionalities upon properties considered to be irrelevant to each other at first glance. Thus, managing to import predefined concepts from other ontologies, such as temporality or spatiality, and combine them with new defined concepts to tourist assets, such as points of interest, results in novel meaningful relationships never established before. Apart from the utilization of pre-existent resources and logic towards automatic detouring suggestions, a wide-spectrum modeling enables a suitable problem statement relevant to the e-Tracer framework and comprehension of the issues, providing the opportunity of statistical analysis of knowledge when adequate amounts amassed.


title: The Random Neural Network in Price Predictions

text: Everybody likes to make a good prediction, in particular, when some sort of personal investment is involved in terms of finance, energy or time. The difficulty is to make a prediction that optimises the reward obtained from the original contribution; this is even more important when investments are the core service offered by a business or pension fund generated by monthly contributions. The complexity of finance is that the human predictor may have other interests or bias than the human investor, the trust between predictor and investor will never be completely established as the investor will never know if the predictor has generated, intentionally or unintentionally, the optimum possible reward. This paper presents the Random Neural Network in recurrent configuration that makes predictions on time series data, specifically, prices. The biological model inspired by the brain structure and neural interconnections makes predictions entirely on previous data from the time series rather than predictions based on several uncorrelated inputs. The model is validated against the property, stock and Fintech market: 1) UK property prices, 2) stock markets indice prices, 3) cryptocurrency prices. Experimental results show that the proposed method makes accurate predictions on different investment portfolios.


title: Combined 5G-Based Video Production and Distribution in a Crowded Stadium Event

text: Based upon the scope of the original 5G ESSENCE research effort and by considering the related fundamental architecture, we develop a dedicated scenario for the implementation and demonstration of a setup for a 5G edge network acceleration in the context of a sport event, taking place in a stadium. Specifically, we demonstrate a combined 5G-based video production and video distribution scenario towards delivering benefits to both media producers/content providers and mobile operators, with those being able to offer enriched event experience to their subscribers. The production/distribution of locally generated content through the respective platform, coupled with value-added services and rich user context, enables secure, high-quality and resilient transmission in real-time, thus ensuring minimal latency. In the selected scenario, massive data traffic does not affect nor overload the backhaul connection as it is produced, processed and consumed just locally, aligned to the 5G 3GPP specifications. We also discuss details about the proposed services and functionalities of the use case, together with an approach for a potential projection to the market.


title: An Adaptive Approach on Credit Card Fraud Detection Using Transaction Aggregation and Word Embeddings

text: Due to the surge of interest in online retailing, the use of credit cards has been rapidly expanded in recent years. Stealing the card details to perform online transactions, which is called fraud, has also seen more frequently. Preventive solutions and instant fraud detection methods are widely studied due to critical financial losses in many industries. In this work, a Gradient Boosting Tree (GBT) model for the real-time detection of credit card frauds on the streaming Card-Not-Present (CNP) transactions is investigated with the use of different attributes of card transactions. Numerical, hand-crafted numerical, categorical and textual attributes are combined to form a feature vector to be used as a training instance. One of the contributions of this work is to employ transaction aggregation for the categorical values and inclusion of vectors from a character level word embedding model which is trained on the merchant names of the transactions. The other contribution is introducing a new strategy for training dataset generation employing the sliding window approach in a given time frame to adapt to the changes on the trends of fraudulent transactions. In the experiments, the feature engineering strategy and the automated training set generation methodology are evaluated on the real credit card transactions.


title: A Sentiment-Based Hotel Review Summarization Using Machine Learning Techniques

text: With the advent of social media, there is a data abundance so that analytics can be reliably designed for ultimately providing valuable information towards a given product or service. In this paper, we examine the problem of classifying hotel critiques using views expressed in users’ reviews. There is a massive development of opinions and reviews on the web, which invariably include assessments of products and services, and beliefs about events and persons. In this study, we aim to face the problem of the forever increasing amount of opinionated data that is published in a variety of data sources. The intuition is the extraction of meaningful services despite the lack of sufficient existing architectures. Another important aspect that needs to be taken into consideration when dealing with brand monitoring, relates to the rapid heterogeneous data processing, which is vital to be implemented in real-time in order for the business to react in a more immediate way.


title: Transfer Learning Using Convolutional Neural Network Architectures for Brain Tumor Classification from MRI Images

text: Brain tumor classification is very important in medical applications to develop an effective treatment. In this paper, we use brain contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance images (CE-MRI) benchmark dataset to classify three types of brain tumor (glioma, meningioma and pituitary). Due to the small number of training dataset, our classification systems evaluate deep transfer learning for feature extraction using nine deep pre-trained convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) architectures. The objective of this study is to increase the classification accuracy, speed the training time and avoid the overfitting. In this work, we trained our architectures involved minimal pre-processing for three different epoch number in order to study its impact on classification performance and consuming time. In addition, the paper benefits acceptable results with small number of epoch in limited time. Our interpretations confirm that transfer learning provides reliable results in the case of small dataset. The proposed system outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and achieve 98.71% classification accuracy.


title: An Advanced Deep Learning Model for Short-Term Forecasting U.S. Natural Gas Price and Movement

text: Natural gas constitutes one of the most actively traded energy commodity with a significant impact on many financial activities of the world. The accurate natural gas price prediction and the direction of price changes are considered essential since these forecasts are utilized in energy sustainability planning, commodity trading and decision making, covering both the supply and demand side of natural gas market. In this research, a new deep learning prediction model is proposed for short-term forecasting natural gas price and movement. The proposed forecasting model exploits the ability of convolutional layers for providing a deep insight in natural gas data and the efficiency of LSTM layers for learning short-term and long-term dependencies. Additionally, a significant advantage of the proposed model is its abilities to predict the price of natural gas on the following day (regression) and also to predict if the price on the next day will increase, decrease or stay stable (classification) with respect to today’s price. The conducted series of experiments demonstrated that the proposed model considerably outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning and machine learning models.


title: On the Prediction of Future User Connections Based on Historical Records in Wireless Networks

text: Recent developments of data monitoring and analytics technologies in the context of wireless networks will boost the capacity to extract knowledge about the network and the users. On the one hand, the obtained knowledge can be useful for running more efficient network management tasks related to network reconfiguration and optimization. On the other hand, the extraction of knowledge related to user needs, user mobility patterns and user habits and interests can also be useful to provide a more personalized service to the clients. Focusing on user mobility, this paper presents a methodology that predicts the future Access Point (AP) that the user will be connected to in a Wi-Fi Network. The prediction is based on the historical data related to the previous APs which the user connected to. Different approaches are proposed, according to the data that is used for prediction, in order to capture weekly, daily and hourly user activity-based behaviours. Two prediction algorithms are compared, based on Neural Networks (NN) and Random Forest (RF). The methodology has been evaluated in a large Wi-Fi network deployed in a University Campus.


title: Arbitrary Scale Super-Resolution for Brain MRI Images

text: Recent attempts at Super-Resolution for medical images used deep learning techniques such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to achieve perceptually realistic single image Super-Resolution. Yet, they are constrained by their inability to generalise to different scale factors. This involves high storage and energy costs as every integer scale factor involves a separate neural network. A recent paper has proposed a novel meta-learning technique that uses a Weight Prediction Network to enable Super-Resolution on arbitrary scale factors using only a single neural network. In this paper, we propose a new network that combines that technique with SRGAN, a state-of-the-art GAN-based architecture, to achieve arbitrary scale, high fidelity Super-Resolution for medical images. By using this network to perform arbitrary scale magnifications on images from the Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge (BraTS) dataset, we demonstrate that it is able to outperform traditional interpolation methods by up to 20[Formula: see text] on SSIM scores whilst retaining generalisability on brain MRI images. We show that performance across scales is not compromised, and that it is able to achieve competitive results with other state-of-the-art methods such as EDSR whilst being fifty times smaller than them. Combining efficiency, performance, and generalisability, this can hopefully become a new foundation for tackling Super-Resolution on medical images.


title: Task-Projected Hyperdimensional Computing for Multi-task Learning

text: Brain-inspired Hyperdimensional (HD) computing is an emerging technique for cognitive tasks in the field of low-power design. As an energy-efficient and fast learning computational paradigm, HD computing has shown great success in many real-world applications. However, an HD model incrementally trained on multiple tasks suffers from the negative impacts of catastrophic forgetting. The model forgets the knowledge learned from previous tasks and only focuses on the current one. To the best of our knowledge, no study has been conducted to investigate the feasibility of applying multi-task learning to HD computing. In this paper, we propose Task-Projected Hyperdimensional Computing (TP-HDC) to make the HD model simultaneously support multiple tasks by exploiting the redundant dimensionality in the hyperspace. To mitigate the interferences between different tasks, we project each task into a separate subspace for learning. Compared with the baseline method, our approach efficiently utilizes the unused capacity in the hyperspace and shows a 12.8% improvement in averaged accuracy with negligible memory overhead.


title: Optimizing Self-organizing Lists-on-Lists Using Transitivity and Pursuit-Enhanced Object Partitioning

text: The study of Self-organizing lists deals with the problem of lowering the average-case asymptotic cost of a list data structure receiving query accesses in Non-stationary Environments (NSEs) with the so-called “locality of reference” property. The de facto schemes for Adaptive lists in such Environments are the Move To Front (MTF) and Transposition (TR) rules. However, significant drawbacks exist in the asymptotic accuracy and speed of list re-organization for the MTF and TR rules. This paper improves on these schemes using the design of an Adaptive list data structure as a hierarchical data “sub”-structure. In this framework, we employ a hierarchical Singly-Linked-Lists on Singly-Linked-Lists (SLLs-on-SLLs) design, which divides the list data structure into an outer and inner list context. The inner-list context is itself a SLLs containing sub-elements of the list, while the outer-list context contains these sublist partitions as its primitive elements. The elements belonging to a particular sublist partition are determined using reinforcement learning schemes from the theory of Learning Automata. In this paper, we show that the Transitivity Pursuit-Enhanced Object Migration Automata (TPEOMA) can be used in conjunction with the hierarchical SLLs-on-SLLs as the dependence capturing mechanism to learn the probabilistic distribution of the elements in the Environment. The idea of Transitivity builds on the Pursuit concept that injects a noise filter into the EOMA to filter divergent queries from the Environment, thereby increasing the likelihood of training the Automaton to approximate the “true” distribution of the Environment. By taking advantage of the Transitivity phenomenon based on the statistical distribution of the queried elements, we can infer “dependent” query pairs from non-accessed elements in the transitivity relation. The TPEOMA-enhanced hierarchical SLLs-on-SLLs schemes results in superior performances to the MTF and TR schemes as well as to the EOMA-enhanced hierarchical SLLs-on-SLLs schemes in NSEs. However, the results are observed to have superior performances to the PEOMA-enhanced hierarchical schemes in Environments with a Periodic non-stationary distribution but were inferior in Markovian Switching Environments.


title: Α Benchmarking of IBM, Google and Wit Automatic Speech Recognition Systems

text: As the requirements for automatic speech recognition are continually increasing, the demand for accuracy and efficiency is also of particular interest. In this paper, we present most of the well-known Automated Speech Recognition systems (ASR), and we benchmark three of them, namely the IBM Watson, Google, and Wit, using the WER, Hper, and Rper error metrics. The experimental results show that Google’s automatic speech recognition performs better among the three systems. We intend to extend the benchmarking both to include most of the available Automated Speech Recognition systems and increase our test data.


title: Using Twitter to Predict Chart Position for Songs

text: With the advent of social media, concepts such as forecasting and now casting became part of the public debate. Past successes include predicting election results, stock prices and forecasting events or behaviors. This work aims at using Twitter data, related to songs and artists that appeared on the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 charts, performing sentiment analysis on the collected tweets, to predict the charts in the future. Our goal was to investigate the relation between the number of mentions of a song and its artist, as well as the semantic orientation of the relevant posts and its performance on the subsequent chart. The problem was approached via regression analysis, which estimated the difference between the actual and predicted positions and moderated results. We also focused on forecasting chart ranges, namely the top 5, 10 and 20. Given the accuracy and F-score achieved compared to previous research, our findings are deemed satisfactory, especially in predicting the top 20.


title: The MuseLearn Platform: Personalized Content for Museum Visitors Assisted by Vision-Based Recognition and 3D Pose Estimation of Exhibits

text: MuseLearn is a platform that enhances the presentation of the exhibits of a museum with multimedia-rich content that is adapted and recommended for certain visitor profiles and playbacks on their mobile devices. The platform consists mainly of a content management system that stores and prepares multimedia material for the presentation of exhibits; a recommender system that monitors objectively the visitor’s behavior so that it can further adapt the content to their needs; and a pose estimation system that identifies an exhibit and links it to the additional content that is prepared for it. We present the systems and the initial results for a selected set of exhibits in Herakleidon Museum, a museum holding temporary exhibitions mainly about ancient Greek technology. The initial evaluation that we presented is encouraging for all systems. Thus, the plan is to use the developed systems for all museum exhibits as well as to enhance their functionality.


title: Machine Learning for Cognitive Load Classification – A Case Study on Contact-Free Approach

text: The most common ways of measuring Cognitive Load (CL) is using physiological sensor signals e.g., Electroencephalography (EEG), or Electrocardiogram (ECG). However, these signals are problematic in situations e.g., in dynamic moving environments where the user cannot relax with all the sensors attached to the body and it provides significant noises in the signals. This paper presents a case study using a contact-free approach for CL classification based on Heart Rate Variability (HRV) collected from ECG signal. Here, a contact-free approach i.e., a camera-based system is compared with a contact-based approach i.e., Shimmer GSR+ system in detecting CL. To classify CL, two different Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, mainly, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and k-Nearest-Neighbor (k-NN) have been applied. Based on the gathered Inter-Beat-Interval (IBI) values from both the systems, 13 different HRV features were extracted in a controlled study to determine three levels of CL i.e., S0: low CL, S1: normal CL and S2: high CL. To get the best classification accuracy with the ML algorithms, different optimizations such as kernel functions were chosen with different feature matrices both for binary and combined class classifications. According to the results, the highest average classification accuracy was achieved as 84% on the binary classification i.e. S0 vs S2 using k-NN. The highest F(1) score was achieved 88% using SVM for the combined class considering S0 vs (S1 and S2) for contact-free approach i.e. the camera system. Thus, all the ML algorithms achieved a higher classification accuracy while considering the contact-free approach than contact-based approach.


title: Using Classification for Traffic Prediction in Smart Cities

text: Smart cities emerge as highly sophisticated bionetworks, providing smart services and ground-breaking solutions. This paper relates classification with Smart City projects, particularly focusing on traffic prediction. A systematic literature review identifies the main topics and methods used, emphasizing on various Smart Cities components, such as data harvesting and data mining. It addresses the research question whether we can forecast traffic load based on past data, as well as meteorological conditions. Results have shown that various models can be developed based on weather data with varying level of success.


title: A Novel Learning Automata-Based Strategy to Generate Melodies from Chordal Inputs

text: This paper deals with the automated composition of music. Although music within the field of AI has been studied relatively extensively, the arena in which we operate is, to the best of our knowledge, unexplored. When it concerns computer composition, a noteworthy piece of research has involved the automated generation of the chordal notes when the underlying melody is specified. The chordal notes and beats have been generated based on models of well-known composers like Bach, Beethoven, and so on. The problem we study is the converse. We assume that the system is provided with the chords of some unknown melody. Our task is to generate a melody that flows with the given chords and which is also aesthetically and musically fitting. As far as we know, there is no research that has been reported to solve this problem and in that sense, although we have merely provided “baby steps”, our work is pioneering.


title: Robust 3D Detection in Traffic Scenario with Tracking-Based Coupling System

text: Autonomous driving is conducted in complex scenarios, which requires to detect 3D objects in real time scenarios as well as accurately track these 3D objects in order to get such information as location, size, trajectory, velocity. MOT (Multi-Object Tracking) performance is heavily dependent on object detection. Once object detection gives false alarms or missing alarms, the multi-object tracking would be automatically influenced. In this paper, we propose a coupling system which combines 3D object detection and multi-object tracking into one framework. We use the tracked objects as a reference in 3D object detection, in order to locate objects, reduce false or missing alarms in a single frame, and weaken the impact of false and missing alarms on the tracking quality. Our method is evaluated on kitti dataset and is proved effective.


title: STDP Plasticity in TRN Within Hierarchical Spike Timing Model of Visual Information Processing

text: We investigated age related synaptic plasticity in thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) as a part of visual information processing system in the brain. Simulation experiments were performed using a hierarchical spike timing neural network model in NEST simulator. The model consists of multiple layers starting with retinal photoreceptors through thalamic relay, primary visual cortex layers up to the lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP) responsible for decision making and preparation of motor response. All synaptic inter- and intra-layer connections of our model are structured according to the literature information. The present work extends the model with spike timing dependent plastic (STDP) synapses within TRN as well as from visual cortex to LIP area. Synaptic strength changes were forced by teaching signal typical for three different age groups (young, middle and elderly) determined experimentally from eye movement data collected by eye tracking device from human subjects preforming a simplified simulated visual navigation task.


title: Demand Forecasting of Short Life Cycle Products Using Data Mining Techniques

text: Products with short life cycles are becoming increasingly common in many industries due to higher levels of competition, shorter product development time and increased product diversity. Accurate demand forecasting of such products is crucial as it plays an important role in driving efficient business operations and achieving a sustainable competitive advantage. Traditional forecasting methods are inappropriate for this type of products due to the highly uncertain and volatile demand and the lack of historical sales data. It is therefore critical to develop different forecasting methods to analyse the demand trend of these products. This paper proposes a new data mining approach based on the incremental k-means clustering algorithm and the RULES-6 rule induction classifier for forecasting the demand of short life cycle products. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated using real data from one of the leading Egyptian companies in IT ecommerce and retail business, and results show that it has the capability to accurately forecast demand trends of new products with no historical sales data.


title: Towards a Smart Port: The Role of the Telecom Industry

text: Transformation is not only today’s trend but also a reality. Ports could not be excluded from that change. A transformation process has been initiated in order to change their operational structure, and the services they offer. Artificial Intelligent and Data oriented services push the services’s landscape beyond the traditional ones that are currently used. The scope of this paper is to analyze and scrutinize the opportunities that are risen for Telecommunications/Information and Communication Technology (ICT) providers at ports. These opportunities are the stepping stone towards the transformation of ports for the future. This work in progress is under the DataPorts project that is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No. 871493.


title: Fake News Detection Regarding the Hong Kong Events from Tweets

text: The rapid development of network services has led to the exponential growth of online information and the increasing number of social media users. These services are exploited by malicious accounts that spread fake news and propaganda in vast user networks. Consequently, an automated solution for fake news and deception detection is required. This paper introduces a new data set consisting of 2,366 tweets written in English, regarding the Hong Kong events (August, 2019), and a well-defined method for fake news detection that uses both linguistic and network features. Our approach is tested with experiments using 2 machine learning models, achieving high performance compared to previous research.


title: k-means Cluster Shape Implications

text: We present a novel justification why k-means clusters should be (hyper)ball-shaped ones. We show that the clusters must be ball-shaped to attain motion-consistency. If clusters are ball-shaped, one can derive conditions under which two clusters attain the global optimum of k-means. We show further that if the gap is sufficient for perfect separation, then an incremental k-means is able to discover perfectly separated clusters. This is in conflict with the impression left by an earlier publication by Ackerman and Dasgupta. The proposed motion-transformations can be used to the new labeled data for clustering from existent ones.


title: Joint Multi-object Detection and Segmentation from an Untrimmed Video

text: In this paper, we present a novel method for jointly detecting and segmenting multiple objects from an untrimmed video. Unlike most existing video object segmentation methods that can only handle a trimmed video in which all video frames contain the target objects, we address a more practical and difficult problem, i.e., joint multi-object detection and segmentation from an untrimmed video where the target objects do not always appear per frame. In particular, our method consists of two modules, i.e., object decision module and object segmentation module. The object decision module is used to detect the objects and decide which target objects need to be separated out from video. As there are usually two or more target objects and they do not always appear in the whole video, we introduce the data association into object decision module to identify their correspondences among frames. The object segmentation module aims to separate the target objects identified by object decision module. In order to extensively evaluate the proposed method, we introduce a new dataset named UNVOSeg dataset, in which [Formula: see text] of the video frames do not contain objects. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms most of the state-of-the-art approaches.


title: Programmable Edge-to-Cloud Virtualization for 5G Media Industry: The 5G-MEDIA Approach

text: To ensure high Quality of Experience (QoE) for end users, many media applications require significant quantities of computing and network resources, making their realization challenging in resource constrained environments. In this paper, we present the approach of the 5G-MEDIA project, providing an integrated programmable service platform for the development, design and operations of media applications in 5G networks, facilitating media service management across the service life cycle. The platform offers tools to service developers for efficient development, testing and continuous correction of services. One step further, it provides a service virtualization platform offering horizontal services, such as a Media Service Catalogue and accounting services, as well as optimization mechanisms to flexibly adapt service operations to dynamic conditions with efficient use of infrastructure resources. The paper outlines three use cases where the platform was tested and validated.


title: Protocol Deployment for Employing Honeypot-as-a-Service

text: The YAKSHA project aims at reinforcing EU-ASEAN cooperation and building partnerships in cybersecurity domain by developing a solution tailored to specific national needs leveraging EU know-how and local knowledge. YAKSHA enhances cybersecurity readiness levels for its end-users, helps better prevent cyber-attacks, reduces cyber-risks and better governs the whole cybersecurity process. The EU-ASEAN cooperation also helps to mitigate some of the weaknesses identified in the cybersecurity ecosystem. In this paper, we consider the protocol deployment process for employing honeypot-as-a-service, with focus on the Internet of Things (IoT) use case.


title: Pandemic Parliaments: Canadian Legislatures in a Time of Crisis

text: Canadian legislatures’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have raised questions about whether and how parliaments should continue to meet during the pandemic (Reid, 2020; Thomas, 2020a). The purpose of this research note is twofold: (1) to document how Canadian legislatures have changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and (2) to assess the effect of these responses on legislatures’ ability to fulfill their core functions. Through an analysis of parliamentary records from all elected federal, provincial and territorial legislatures in Canada, we find that the role of parliaments as sites of citizen representation has suffered the most, whereas the scrutinizing and legislative functions of parliaments have tended to be preserved, albeit in a significantly truncated form. We argue that patterns in legislatures' varied responses to the pandemic reveal which aspects of parliamentary functioning these bodies de facto prioritize and which are at risk of being eroded.


title: Intelligent Orchestration of End-to-End Network Slices for the Allocation of Mission Critical Services over NFV Architectures

text: The challenge of deploying mission critical services upon virtualised shared network models is the allocation of both radio and cloud resources to the critical actors who require prioritized and high-quality services. This paper describes the design and deployment of an intelligent orchestration cycle to manage end-to-end slices on a NFV architecture. This novel tool includes the monitoring of the network elements at different levels and the processing of the gathered data to produce the corresponding alert mitigation actions.


title: Ontological Foundations of Modelling Security Policies for Logical Analytics

text: Modelling of knowledge and actions in AI has advanced over the years but it is still a challenging topic due to the infamous frame problem, the inadequate formalization and the lack of automation. Some problems in cyber security such as logical vulnerability, risk assessment, policy validation etc. still require formal approach. In this paper we present the foundations of a new formal framework to address these challenges. Our approach is based on three-level formalisation: ontological, logical and analytical levels. Here we are presenting the first two levels which allow to model the security policies and provide a practical solution to the frame problem by efficient utilization of parameters as side effects. Key concepts are the situations, actions, events and rules. Our framework has potential use for analysis of a wide range of transactional systems within the financial, commercial and business domains and further work will include analytical level where we can perform vulnerability analysis of the model.


title: A Graph-Based Extension for the Set-Based Model Implementing Algorithms Based on Important Nodes

text: The purpose of this paper is the expansion of the set-based model, namely an information retrieval model, with the use of graphs. The indexing process implements a graphical representation, while the querying and document representation are based on the classical set-based model. The root of the set-based model corresponds to the use of term sets to complete the querying process based on the terms of the query. However, in the weighting process, this paper presents a wholly different approach elaborating on algorithms that may clearly benefit the process based on the k-core decomposition of each single graph. The main focus will finally be the estimation and presentation of the most important nodes belonging to each graph. These intend to be regarded as keywords presenting the evaluation of their major influence.


title: Graph Neural Networks to Advance Anticancer Drug Design

text: Predicting the activity of chemical compounds against cancer is a crucial task. Active chemical compounds against cancer help pharmaceutical drugs producers in the conception of anticancer medicines. Still the innate way of representing chemical compounds is by graphs, the machine learning algorithms can not handle directly the anticancer activity prediction problems. Dealing with data defined on a non-Euclidean domain gave rise to a new field of research on graphs. There has been many proposals over the years, that tried to tackle the problem of representation learning on graphs. In this work, we investigate the representation power of Node2vec for embedding learning over graphs, by comparing it to the theoretical framework Graph Isomorphism Network (GIN). We prove that GIN is a deep generalization of Node2vec. We then exert the two models Node2vec and GIN to extract regular representations from chemical compounds and make predictions about their activity against lung and ovarian cancer.


title: Knowledge-Based Fusion for Image Tampering Localization

text: In this paper we introduce a fusion framework for image tampering localization, that moves towards overcoming the limitation of available tools by allowing a synergistic analysis and multiperspective refinement of the final forensic report. The framework is designed to combine multiple state-of-the-art techniques by exploiting their complementarities so as to produce a single refined tampering localization output map. Extensive evaluation experiments of state-of-the-art methods on diverse datasets have resulted in a modular framework design where candidate methods go through a multi-criterion selection process to become part of the framework. Currently, this includes a set of five passive tampering localization methods for splicing localization on JPEG images. Our experimental findings on two different benchmark datasets showcase that the fused output achieves high performance and advanced interpretability by managing to leverage the correctly localized outputs of individual methods, and even detecting cases that were missed by all individual methods.


title: Dynamic Resource Allocation and Computation Offloading for Edge Computing System

text: In this work, we propose a dynamic optimization scheme for an edge computing system with multiple users, where the radio and computational resources, and offloading decisions, can be dynamically allocated with the variation of computation demands, radio channels and the computation resources. Specifically, with the objective to minimize the energy consumption of the considered system, we propose a joint computation offloading, radio and computational resource allocation algorithm based on Lyapunov optimization. Through minimizing the derived upper bound of the Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty function, the main problem is divided into several sub-problems at each time slot and are addressed separately. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.


title: The Converging Triangle of Cultural Content, Cognitive Science, and Behavioral Economics

text: How online cultural content is chosen based on conscious or subconscious criteria is an central question across a broad spectrum of sciences and for the entertainment industry, including content providers and distributors. To this end, a number of tailored analytics forming the backbone of recommendation engines specialized for retrieving cultural content are proposed. Their strength derives directly from well-established principles of cognitive science and behavioral economics, both scientific fields exploring aspects of human decision making. Another novel contribution of this conference paper is that these analytics are implemented in Neo4j expressed as Cypher queries. Various aspects of the cultural content and digital consumers can be naturally represented by appropriately configured vertices, whereas edges represent various connections indicating content delivery preferences. Early experiments conducted over a synthetic dataset mimicking the distributions of preferences and ratings of well-known movie datasets are encouraging as the proposed analytics outperformed the baseline of a multilayer feedforward neural network of various configurations. The synthetic dataset contains enriched preferences of mobile digital consumers of cultural content regarding literature of the Greek region of Ionian Islands.


Urinuntersuchung zur Früherkennung schwerer COVID-19-Verläufe?


Corona mortis


Kein SARS-CoV-2 im Sperma nachweisbar


Corona, nichts als Corona - oder?


Weniger Corona-Infektionen unter ADT?


title: Ethical rationale for better coordination of clinical research on COVID-19

text: Hundreds of clinical trials of potential treatments and vaccines for the “coronavirus 19 disease” (COVID-19) have been set up in record time. This is a remarkable reaction to the global pandemic, but the absence of a global coordination of clinical research efforts raises serious ethical concerns. Some COVID-19 patients might carry the burden of clinical trial involvement even though their trial cannot be completed as researchers are competing for patients. A shortage of medicines can occur when existing drugs are diverted for clinical trials. Research ethics committees are overburdened with multiple applications. A multitude of trials can also overstretch medical staff and risk neglecting non-COVID-19 patients. And finally, conflicting conclusions from a multitude of heterogeneous trials might lead to delays in public health decisions about life-saving issues. These challenges are made worse by the unpredictable evolution of epidemics, the active involvement of political decision-makers in scientific issues and the pressure of social media globally. While freedom to conduct research must be safeguarded, global health emergency situations would greatly benefit from effective international coordination mechanisms for clinical research.


When Public Health Beats a Full House


title: Hong Kong Protests: Using Natural Language Processing for Fake News Detection on Twitter

text: The automation of fake news detection is the focus of a great deal of scientific research. With the rise of social media over the years, there has been a strong preference for users to be informed using their social media account, leading to a proliferation of fake news through them. This paper evaluates the veracity of politically-oriented news and in particular the tweets about the recent event of Hong Kong protests, with the aid of a dataset recently published by Twitter. From this dataset, Chinese tweets are translated into English, which are kept along with originally English tweets. By utilizing a language-independent filtering process, relevant tweets are identified. To complete the dataset, tweets originating from valid sources are used as the real portion, with journalists rather than news agencies being considered, which constitutes a novel aspect of the methodology. Well-known Machine Learning algorithms are used to classify tweets, which are represented by a feature value vector that is extracted, selected and preprocessed from the datasets and mainly revolves around language use, with word entropy being a novel feature. The results derived from these algorithms highlight morphological, lexical and vocabulary differences between tweets spreading fake and real news, which are for the most part in accordance with past related work.


title: Predicting Physical Properties of Woven Fabrics via Automated Machine Learning and Textile Design and Finishing Features

text: This paper presents a novel Machine Learning (ML) approach to support the creation of woven fabrics. Using data from a textile company, two CRoss-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) iterations were executed, aiming to compare three input feature representation strategies related with fabric design and finishing processes. During the modeling stage of CRISP-DM, an Automated ML (AutoML) procedure was used to select the best regression model among six distinct state-of-the-art ML algorithms. A total of nine textile physical properties were modeled (e.g., abrasion, elasticity, pilling). Overall, the simpler yarn representation strategy obtained better predictive results. Moreover, for eight fabric properties (e.g., elasticity, pilling) the addition of finishing features improved the quality of the predictions. The best ML models obtained low predictive errors (from 2% to 7%) and are potentially valuable for the textile company, since they can be used to reduce the number of production attempts (saving time and costs).


title: Investigating the Problem of Cryptocurrency Price Prediction: A Deep Learning Approach

text: In last decade, cryptocurrency has emerged in financial area as a key factor in businesses and financial market opportunities. Accurate predictions can assist cryptocurrency investors towards right investing decisions and lead to potential increased profits. Additionally, they can also support policy makers and financial researchers in studying cryptocurrency markets behavior. Nevertheless, cryptocurrency price prediction is considered a very challenging task, due to its chaotic and very complex nature. In this study we evaluate some of the most successful and widely used deep learning algorithms forecasting cryptocurrency prices. The results obtained, provide significant evidence that deep learning models are not able to solve this problem efficiently and effectively. Conducting detailed experimentation and results analysis, we conclude that it is essential to invent and incorporate new techniques, strategies and alternative approaches such as: more sophisticated prediction algorithms, advanced ensemble methods, feature engineering techniques and other validation metrics.


title: Acoustic Resonance Testing of Glass IV Bottles

text: In this paper, acoustic resonance testing on glass intravenous (IV) bottles is presented. Different machine learning methods were applied to distinguish acoustic observations of bottles with defects from the intact ones. Due to the very limited amount of available specimens, the question arises whether the deep learning methods can achieve similar or even better detection performance compared with traditional methods. The results from the binary classification experiments are presented and compared in terms of Balanced Accuracy Rate, F1-score, Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve and Matthews Correlation Coefficient metrics. The presented feature analysis and the employed classifiers achieved solid results, despite the rather small and imbalanced dataset with a highly inconsistent class population.


title: Towards Fashion Recommendation: An AI System for Clothing Data Retrieval and Analysis

text: Nowadays, the fashion industry is moving towards fast fashion, offering a large selection of garment products in a quicker and cheaper manner. To this end, the fashion designers are required to come up with a wide and diverse amount of fashion products in a short time frame. At the same time, the fashion retailers are oriented towards using technology, in order to design and provide products tailored to their consumers’ needs, in sync with the newest fashion trends. In this paper, we propose an artificial intelligence system which operates as a personal assistant to a fashion product designer. The system’s architecture and all its components are presented, with emphasis on the data collection and data clustering subsystems. In our use case scenario, datasets of garment products are retrieved from two different sources and are transformed into a specific format by making use of Natural Language Processes. The two datasets are clustered separately using different mixed-type clustering algorithms and comparative results are provided, highlighting the usefulness of the clustering procedure in the clothing product recommendation problem.


title: Deepbots: A Webots-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Robotics

text: Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is increasingly used to train robots to perform complex and delicate tasks, while the development of realistic simulators contributes to the acceleration of research on DRL for robotics. However, it is still not straightforward to employ such simulators in the typical DRL pipeline, since their steep learning curve and the enormous amount of development required to interface with DRL methods significantly restrict their use by researchers. To overcome these limitations, in this work we present an open-source framework that combines an established interface used by DRL researchers, the OpenAI Gym interface, with the state-of-the-art Webots robot simulator in order to provide a standardized way to employ DRL in various robotics scenarios. Deepbots aims to enable researchers to easily develop DRL methods in Webots by handling all the low-level details and reducing the required development effort. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated through code examples, as well as using three use cases of varying difficulty.


title: An Overview of Chatbot Technology

text: The use of chatbots evolved rapidly in numerous fields in recent years, including Marketing, Supporting Systems, Education, Health Care, Cultural Heritage, and Entertainment. In this paper, we first present a historical overview of the evolution of the international community’s interest in chatbots. Next, we discuss the motivations that drive the use of chatbots, and we clarify chatbots’ usefulness in a variety of areas. Moreover, we highlight the impact of social stereotypes on chatbots design. After clarifying necessary technological concepts, we move on to a chatbot classification based on various criteria, such as the area of knowledge they refer to, the need they serve and others. Furthermore, we present the general architecture of modern chatbots while also mentioning the main platforms for their creation. Our engagement with the subject so far, reassures us of the prospects of chatbots and encourages us to study them in greater extent and depth.


title: Overlap-Based Undersampling Method for Classification of Imbalanced Medical Datasets

text: Early diagnosis of some life-threatening diseases such as cancers and heart is crucial for effective treatments. Supervised machine learning has proved to be a very useful tool to serve this purpose. Historical data of patients including clinical and demographic information is used for training learning algorithms. This builds predictive models that provide initial diagnoses. However, in the medical domain, it is common to have the positive class under-represented in a dataset. In such a scenario, a typical learning algorithm tends to be biased towards the negative class, which is the majority class, and misclassify positive cases. This is known as the class imbalance problem. In this paper, a framework for predictive diagnostics of diseases with imbalanced records is presented. To reduce the classification bias, we propose the usage of an overlap-based undersampling method to improve the visibility of minority class samples in the region where the two classes overlap. This is achieved by detecting and removing negative class instances from the overlapping region. This will improve class separability in the data space. Experimental results show achievement of high accuracy in the positive class, which is highly preferable in the medical domain, while good trade-offs between sensitivity and specificity were obtained. Results also show that the method often outperformed other state-of-the-art and well-established techniques.


title: On the Learnability of Concepts: With Applications to Comparing Word Embedding Algorithms

text: Word Embeddings are used widely in multiple Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. They are coordinates associated with each word in a dictionary, inferred from statistical properties of these words in a large corpus. In this paper we introduce the notion of “concept” as a list of words that have shared semantic content. We use this notion to analyse the learnability of certain concepts, defined as the capability of a classifier to recognise unseen members of a concept after training on a random subset of it. We first use this method to measure the learnability of concepts on pretrained word embeddings. We then develop a statistical analysis of concept learnability, based on hypothesis testing and ROC curves, in order to compare the relative merits of various embedding algorithms using a fixed corpora and hyper parameters. We find that all embedding methods capture the semantic content of those word lists, but fastText performs better than the others.


title: Introducing an Edge-Native Deep Learning Platform for Exergames

text: The recent advancements in the areas of computer vision and deep learning with the development of convolutional neural networks and the profusion of highly accurate general purpose pre-trained models, create new opportunities for the interaction of humans with systems and facilitate the development of advanced features for all types of platforms and applications. Research, consumer and industrial applications increasingly integrate deep learning frameworks into their operational flow, and as a result of the availability of high performance hardware (Computer Boards, GPUs, TPUs) also for individual consumers and home use, this functionality has been moved closer to the end-users, at the edge of the network. In this work, we exploit the aforementioned approaches and tools for the development of an edge-native platform for exergames, which includes innovative gameplay and features for the users. A prototype game was created using the platform that was deployed in the real-world scenario of a rehabilitation center. The proposed approach provides advanced user experience based on the automated, real-time pose and gesture detection, and in parallel maintains low-cost to enable wide adoption in multiple applications across domains and usage scenarios.


title: Applying an Intelligent Personal Agent on a Smart Home Using a Novel Dialogue Generator

text: Nowadays, Intelligent Personal Agents include Natural Language Understanding (NLU) modules, that utilize Machine Learning (ML), which can be included in different kind of applications in order to enable the translation of users’ input into different kinds of actions, as well as ML modules that handle dialogue. This translation is attained by the matching of a user’s sentence with an intent contained in an Agent. This paper introduces the first generation of the CERTH Intelligent Personal Agent (CIPA) which is based on the RASA (https://rasa.com/) framework and utilizes two machine learning models for NLU and dialogue flow classification. Besides the architecture of CIPA—Generation A, a novel dialogue-story generator that is based on the idea of adjacency pairs is introduced. By utilizing on this novel-generator, the agent is able to create all the possible dialog trees in order to handle conversations without training on existing data in contrast with the majority of the current alternative solutions. CIPA supports multiple intents and it is capable of classifying complex sentences consisting of two user’s intents into two automatic operations from the part of the agent. The introduced CIPA—Generation A has been deployed and tested in a real-world scenario at Centre’s of Research & Technology Hellas (CERTH) nZEB Smart Home (https://smarthome.iti.gr/) in two different domains, energy and health domain.


title: A Machine Learning Model to Detect Speech and Reading Pathologies

text: This work addresses the problem of helping speech therapists in interpreting results of tachistoscopes. These are instruments widely employed to diagnose speech and reading disorders. Roughly speaking, they work as follows. During a session, some strings of letters, which may or not correspond to existing words, are displayed to the patient for an amount of time set by the therapist. Next, the patient is asked for typing the read string. From the machine learning point of view, this raise an interesting problem of analyzing the sets of input and output words to evaluate the presence of a pathology.


title: The Ethos of Artificial Intelligence as a Legal Personality in a Globalized Space: Examining the Overhaul of the Post-liberal Technological Order

text: The categorical ethos of artificial intelligence is influenced by its basic structure, which defines its due purpose as a legal personality, challenging the conventional standards of law and justice in a globalized world. Recent developments show a precedential growth in the need-perspective of the AI industry, thereby influencing governance and corporate operations and their legal side in cross-cultural avenues. The determinant outlining of artificial intelligence as a legal personality rests on its probabilistic nature, which yet can be limited to the jurisprudential scope of AI-based on the ethos of the utilitarian approach involving the anthropocentric innovations for artificial intelligence. The dynamic nature of AI, however, in the proposition, is capable of a full-fledged and anthropomorphic legal representation and interpretation, which is hard to find in D9 and certain developing countries, which poses special risks to the generic legal infrastructure of a democratic polity to understand the dynamic and self-transformative nature of artificial intelligence in the age of globalization. The paper is thus based on the proposition that the ethos involving the legal infrastructure and persona of artificial intelligence is traceable and easier in deterministic mechanisms by regarding and extending stable & constitutive approaches to dissect the legal challenges connected with the redemptions implicated with the lack of a full-fledged regard and scope of the legal personality of AI. The approaches in due proposition are (a) anthropomorphisation; (b) naturalization; (c) techno-socialization; and (d) enculturation. Further, the paper analyses on the challenges to determine the problematic implications awaited by the influence of populism, protectionism, data-centred digital colonialism and technology distancing and proposes suggestions based on the four approaches to counter the minimal effects of the implications. The conclusions of the paper rest on the argument that in the case of a post-liberal order, the ethos of AI can be protected and diversified by adapting with the appreciation of the ethos of globalization, giving adequate, constitutive and reasonable space to the identity-led implications of national identity & diluting the monopolistic influence of the utilitarian approach to artificial intelligence.


title: Greek Lyrics Generation

text: This paper documents the efforts in implementing lyric generation machine learning models in the Greek language for the genre of Éntekhno music. To accomplish this, we used three different Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network approaches. The first method utilizes word-level bi-directional network models, the second method expands on the first by learning the word embeddings on the initial layer of the network, while the last method is based on a char-level network model. Our experimental procedure, which utilized a high sample of human judges, shows that texts of lyrics generated by our models are of high quality and are not that easily distinguishable from actual lyrics.


title: Trustworthy AI Needs Unbiased Dictators!

text: EU Draft Ethics guidelines for Trustworthy AI [8] has been proposed to promote ethical, lawful and robust AI solutions. In this article, we entertain the systemic issues and challenges of any development of the proposed guidelines.


title: AI Based Real-Time Signal Reconstruction for Wind Farm with SCADA Sensor Failure

text: Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems used in wind turbines for monitoring the health and performance of a wind farm can suffer from data loss due to sensor failure, transmission link breakdown or network congestion. Sensory data is used for important control decisions and such data loss can make the failures harder to detect. This work proposes various solutions to reconstruct the lost information of important SCADA parameters using Linear and non-linear Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. It comprises of three major contributions; (1) signal reconstruction from other available SCADA parameters, (2) comparison of linear and non-linear AI models, and (3) generalization of the AI algorithms between turbines. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed methodologies for reconstruction of the lost information for valuable planning decisions.


title: Deep Echo State Networks in Industrial Applications

text: This paper analyzes the impact of reservoir computing, and, in particular, of Deep Echo State Networks, to the modeling of highly non-linear dynamical systems that can be commonly found in the industry. Several applications are presented focusing on forecasting models related to energy content of steelwork byproduct gasses. Deep Echo State Network models are trained, validated and tested by exploiting datasets coming from a real industrial context, with good results in terms of accuracy of the predictions.


title: Multi-omics Data and Analytics Integration in Ovarian Cancer

text: Cancer, which involves the dysregulation of genes via multiple mechanisms, is unlikely to be fully explained by a single data type. By combining different “omes”, researchers can increase the discovery of novel bio-molecular associations with disease-related phenotypes. Investigation of functional relations among genes associated with the same disease condition may further help to develop more accurate disease-relevant prediction models. In this work, we present an integrative framework called Data & Analytic Integrator (DAI), to explore the relationship between different omics via different mathematical formulations and algorithms. In particular, we investigate the combinatorial use of molecular knowledge identified from omics integration methods netDx, iDRW and SSL, by fusing the derived aggregated similarity matrices and by exploiting these in a semi-supervised learner. The analysis workflows were applied to real-life data for ovarian cancer and underlined the benefits of joint data and analytic integration.


title: SDN-Enabled IoT Anomaly Detection Using Ensemble Learning

text: Internet of Things (IoT) devices are inherently vulnerable due to insecure design, implementation, and configuration. Aggressive behavior change, due to increased attacker’s sophistication, and the heterogeneity of the data in IoT have proven that securing IoT devices is a making challenge. To detect intensive attacks and increase device uptime, we propose a novel ensemble learning model for IoT anomaly detection using software-defined networks (SDN). We use a deep auto-encoder to extract handy features for stacking into an ensemble learning model. The learned model is deployed in the SDN controller to detect anomalies or dynamic attacks in IoT by addressing the class imbalance problem. We validate the model with real-time testbed and benchmark datasets. The initial results show that our model has a better and more reliable performance than the competing models showcased in the relevant related work.


title: Forecasting Hazard Level of Air Pollutants Using LSTM’s

text: The South Asian countries have the most polluted cities in the world which has caused quite a concern in the recent years due to the detrimental effect it had on economy and on health of humans and crops. PM 2.5 in particular has been linked to cardiovascular diseases, pulmonary diseases, increased risk of lung cancer and acute respiratory infections. Higher concentration of surface ozone has been observed to have negatively impacted agricultural yield of crops. Due to its deleterious impact on human health and agriculture, air pollution cannot be brushed off as a trivial matter and measures must be taken to address the problem. Deterministic models have been actively used; but they fall short due to their complexity and inability to accurately model the problem. Deep learning models have however shown potential when it comes to modeling time series data. This article explores the use of recurrent neural networks as a framework for predicting the hazard levels in Lahore, Pakistan with 95.0% accuracy and Beijing, China with 98.95% using the time series data of air pollutants and meteorological parameters. Forecasting air quality index (AQI) and Hazard levels would help the government take appropriate steps to enact policies to reduce the pollutants and keep the citizens informed about the statistics.


title: Real-Time Surf Manoeuvres’ Detection Using Smartphones’ Inertial Sensors

text: Surfing is currently one of the most popular water sports in the world, both for recreational and competitive level surfers. Surf session analysis is often performed with commercially available devices. However, most of them seem insufficient considering the surfers’ needs, by displaying a low number of features, being inaccurate, invasive or not adequate for all surfer levels. Despite the fact that performing manoeuvres is the ultimate goal of surfing, there are no available solutions that enable the identification and characterization of such events. In this work, we propose a novel method to detect manoeuvre events during wave riding periods resorting solely to the inertial sensors embedded in smartphones. The proposed method was able to correctly identify over 95% of all the manoeuvres in the dataset (172 annotated manoeuvres), while achieving a precision of up to 80%, using a session-independent validation approach. These findings demonstrate the suitability and validity of the proposed solution for identification of manoeuvre events in real-world conditions, evidencing a high market potential.


title: An Intelligent Cloud-Based Platform for Effective Monitoring of Patients with Psychotic Disorders

text: The therapy of patients with psychotic disorders (i.e., bipolar disorder and schizophrenia) could benefit from the constant monitoring of their physiological and motor parameters. In this paper, we present an innovative and advanced cloud based platform that facilitates the effective monitoring of such patients. A commodity smartwatch is used for biosignal and motion data collection at a 24/7 basis. The paper describes the technical details of the implemented application both on the smartwatch and the cloud server side. Technical challenges regarding the upload, the storage and the battery constraints of the smartwatch are also discussed, along with the initial results regarding data visualization and processing.


title: Autonomous Navigation for Drone Swarms in GPS-Denied Environments Using Structured Learning

text: Drone swarms are becoming a new tool for many tasks including surveillance, search, rescue, construction, and defense related activities. As their usage increases, so does the possibility of adversarial attacks on their contribution to these use cases. One possible avenue, whether deliberate or not, is to deny access to the position feedback offered by the Global Positioning System (GPS). Operating in these ‘GPS denied’ environments poses a new challenge; both in navigation, and in collision avoidance. This study proposes two novel concepts; a structural model of environmental deviance to aid in autonomous navigation, and a method to use the output of said model to implement a collision avoidance system. Both of these concepts are developed and tested in the framework of a simulated environment that mimics a GPS-denied scenario. Using data from hundreds of simulated swarm flights, this work shows structured learning can improve navigational accuracy without the need for externally provided position feedback.


title: Know Yourself: An Adaptive Causal Network Model for Therapeutic Intervention for Regaining Cognitive Control

text: Long term stress often causes depression and neuronal atrophies that in turn can lead to a variety of health problems. As a result of these cellular changes, also molecular changes occur. These changes, that include increase of glucocorticoids and decrease of the brain-derived neurotrophic factor, have the unfortunate effect that they decrease the cognitive abilities needed for the individual to solve the stressful situation. Such cognitive abilities like reappraisal and their adaptation mechanisms turn out to be substantially impaired while they are needed for regulation of the negative emotions. However, antidepressant treatments and some other therapies have proved to be quite effective for the strengthening of such cognitive abilities. This study introduces an adaptive causal network model for this phenomenon where a subject loses his or her cognitive abilities (negative metaplasticity) due to long-term stress and re-improve these cognitive abilities (positive metaplasticity) through mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT). Simulation results have been reported for demonstration of the phenomenon.


title: Innovative Deep Neural Network Fusion for Pairwise Translation Evaluation

text: A language independent deep learning (DL) architecture for machine translation (MT) evaluation is presented. This DL architecture aims at the best choice between two MT (S1, S2) outputs, based on the reference translation (Sr) and the annotation score. The outputs were generated from a statistical machine translation (SMT) system and a neural machine translation (NMT) system. The model applied in two language pairs: English - Greek (EN-EL) and English - Italian (EN-IT). In this paper, a variety of experiments with different parameter configurations is presented. Moreover, linguistic features, embeddings representation and natural language processing (NLP) metrics (BLEU, METEOR, TER, WER) were tested. The best score was achieved when the proposed model used source segments (SSE) information and the NLP metrics set. Classification accuracy has increased up to 5% (compared to previous related work) and reached quite satisfactory results for the Kendall τ score.


title: Regularized Evolution for Macro Neural Architecture Search

text: Neural Architecture Search is becoming an increasingly popular research field and method to design deep learning architectures. Most research focuses on searching for small blocks of deep learning operations, or micro-search. This method yields satisfactory results but demands prior knowledge of the macro architecture’s structure. Generally, methods that do not utilize macro structure knowledge perform worse but are able to be applied to datasets of completely new domains. In this paper, we propose a macro NAS methodology which utilizes concepts of Regularized Evolution and Macro Neural Architecture Search (DeepNEAT), and apply it to the Fashion-MNIST dataset. By utilizing our method, we are able to produce networks that outperform other macro NAS methods on the dataset, when the same post-search inference methods are used. Furthermore, we are able to achieve 94.46% test accuracy, while requiring considerably less epochs to fully train our network.


title: Harnessing Social Interactions on Twitter for Smart Transportation Using Machine Learning

text: Twitter is generating a large amount of real-time data in the form of microblogs that has potential knowledge for various applications like traffic incident analysis and urban planning. Social media data represents the unbiased actual insights of citizens’ concerns that may be mined in making cities smarter. In this study, a computational framework has been proposed using word embedding and machine learning model to detect traffic incidents using social media data. The study includes the feasibility of using machine learning algorithms with different feature extraction and representation models for the identification of traffic incidents from the Twitter interactions. The comprehensive proposed approach is the combination of following four steps. In the first phase, a dictionary of traffic-related keywords is formed. Secondly, real-time Twitter data has been collected using the dictionary of identified traffic related keywords. In the third step, collected tweets have been pre-processed, and the feature generation model is applied to convert the dataset eligible for a machine learning classifier. Further, a machine learning model is trained and tested to identify the tweets containing traffic incidents. The results of the study show that machine learning models built on top of right feature extraction strategy is very promising to identify the tweets containing traffic incidents from micro-blogs.


title: Versatile Internet of Things for Agriculture: An eXplainable AI Approach

text: The increase of the adoption of IoT devices and the contemporary problem of food production have given rise to numerous applications of IoT in agriculture. These applications typically comprise a set of sensors that are installed in open fields and measure metrics, such as temperature or humidity, which are used for irrigation control systems. Though useful, most contemporary systems have high installation and maintenance costs, and they do not offer automated control or, if they do, they are usually not interpretable, and thus cannot be trusted for such critical applications. In this work, we design Vital, a system that incorporates a set of low-cost sensors, a robust data store, and most importantly an explainable AI decision support system. Our system outputs a fuzzy rule-base, which is interpretable and allows fully automating the irrigation of the fields. Upon evaluating Vital in two pilot cases, we conclude that it can be effective for monitoring open-field installations.


title: Bridging the Gap Between AI and Healthcare Sides: Towards Developing Clinically Relevant AI-Powered Diagnosis Systems

text: Despite the success of Convolutional Neural Network-based Computer-Aided Diagnosis research, its clinical applications remain challenging. Accordingly, developing medical Artificial Intelligence (AI) fitting into a clinical environment requires identifying/bridging the gap between AI and Healthcare sides. Since the biggest problem in Medical Imaging lies in data paucity, confirming the clinical relevance for diagnosis of research-proven image augmentation techniques is essential. Therefore, we hold a clinically valuable AI-envisioning workshop among Japanese Medical Imaging experts, physicians, and generalists in Healthcare/Informatics. Then, a questionnaire survey for physicians evaluates our pathology-aware Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based image augmentation projects in terms of Data Augmentation and physician training. The workshop reveals the intrinsic gap between AI/Healthcare sides and solutions on Why (i.e., clinical significance/interpretation) and How (i.e., data acquisition, commercial deployment, and safety/feeling safe). This analysis confirms our pathology-aware GANs’ clinical relevance as a clinical decision support system and non-expert physician training tool. Our findings would play a key role in connecting inter-disciplinary research and clinical applications, not limited to the Japanese medical context and pathology-aware GANs.


title: Chemical Laboratories 4.0: A Two-Stage Machine Learning System for Predicting the Arrival of Samples

text: This paper presents a two-stage Machine Learning (ML) model to predict the arrival time of In-Process Control (IPC) samples at the quality testing laboratories of a chemical company. The model was developed using three iterations of the CRoss-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) methodology, each focusing on a different regression approach. To reduce the ML analyst effort, an Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) was adopted during the modeling stage of CRISP-DM. The AutoML was set to select the best among six distinct state-of-the-art regression algorithms. Using recent real-world data, the three main regression approaches were compared, showing that the proposed two-stage ML model is competitive and provides interesting predictions to support the laboratory management decisions (e.g., preparation of testing instruments). In particular, the proposed method can accurately predict 70% of the examples under a tolerance of 4 time units.


title: Exploring NLP and Information Extraction to Jointly Address Question Generation and Answering

text: Question Answering (QA) and Question Generation (QG) have been subjects of an intensive study in recent years and much progress has been made in both areas. However, works on combining these two topics mainly focus on how QG can be used to improve QA results. Through existing Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, we have implemented a tool that addresses these two topics separately. We further use them jointly in a pipeline. Thus, our goal is to understand how these modules can help each other. For QG, our methodology employs a detailed analysis of the relevant content of a sentence through Part-of-speech (POS) tagging and Named Entity Recognition (NER). Ensuring loose coupling with the QA task, in the latter we use Information Retrieval to rank sentences that might contain relevant information regarding a certain question, together with Open Information Retrieval to analyse the sentences. In its current version, the QG tool takes a sentence to formulate a simple question. By connecting QG with the QA component, we provide a means to effortlessly generate a test set for QA. While our current QA approach shows promising results, when enhancing the QG component we will, in the future, provide questions for which a more elaborated QA will be needed. The generated QA datasets contribute to QA evaluation, while QA proves to be an important technique for assessing the ambiguity of the questions.


Correction to: Transmission Cycle of SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2


title: Hypotheses Tests Using Non-asymptotic Fuzzy Estimators and Fuzzy Critical Values

text: In fuzzy hypothesis testing we use fuzzy test statistics produced by fuzzy estimators and fuzzy critical values. In this paper we use the non-asymptotic fuzzy estimators in fuzzy hypothesis testing. These are triangular shaped fuzzy numbers that generalize the fuzzy estimators based on confidence intervals in such a way that eliminates discontinuities and ensures compact support. Our approach is particularly useful in critical situations, where subtle fuzzy comparisons between almost equal statistical quantities have to be made. In such cases the hypotheses tests that use non-asymptotic fuzzy estimators give better results than the previous approaches, since they give us the possibility of partial rejection or not of [Formula: see text].


title: Preservation of the Exchange Principle via Lattice Operations on (S,N)– Implications

text: In this paper, we investigate a special case of an open problem that is related to the exchange principle, a property of fuzzy implications. We focus on the cases of (S,N)– implications and the preservation of the exchange principle via lattice operations. We present and prove some sufficient conditions such that the exchange principle is preserved under the join and meet operations if we use (S,N)– implications.


title: Applying Deep Learning to Predicting Dementia and Mild Cognitive Impairment

text: Dementia has a large negative impact on the global healthcare and society. Diagnosis is rather challenging as there is no standardised test. The purpose of this paper is to conduct an analysis on ADNI data and determine its effectiveness for building classification models to differentiate the categories Cognitively Normal (CN), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and Dementia (DEM), based on tuning three Deep Learning models: two Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP1 and MLP2) models and a Convolutional Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvBLSTM) model. The results show that the MLP1 and MLP2 models accurately distinguish the DEM, MCI and CN classes, with accuracies as high as 0.86 (SD 0.01). The ConvBLSTM model was slightly less accurate but was explored in view of comparisons with the MLP models, and for future extensions of this work that will take advantage of time-related information. Although the performance of ConvBLSTM model was negatively impacted by a lack of visit code data, opportunities were identified for improvement, particularly in terms of pre-processing.


title: An Introduction of FD-Complete Constraints

text: The performance of solving a constraint problem can often be improved by converting a subproblem into a single constraint (for example into a regular membership constraint or a table constraint). In the past, it stood out, that specialist constraint solvers (like simplex solver or SAT solver) outperform general constraint solvers, for the problems they can handle. The disadvantage of such specialist constraint solvers is that they can handle only a small subset of problems with special limitations to the domains of the variables and/or to the allowed constraints. In this paper we introduce the concept of fd-complete constraints and fd-complete constraint satisfaction problems, which allow combining both previous approaches. More accurately, we convert general constraint problems into problems which use only one, respectively one kind of constraint. The goal is it to interpret and solve the converted constraint problems with specialist solvers, which can solve the transformed constraint problems faster than the original solver the original constraint problems.


Living evidence in response to controversies about the use of antimalarials in COVID-19


POPCoRN One-Pagers: Educational Materials for Pediatric Providers Caring For Adults


title: Using Multimodal Contextual Process Information for the Supervised Detection of Connector Lock Events

text: The field of sound event detection is a growing sector which has mainly focused on the identification of sound classes from daily life situations. In most cases these sound detection models are trained on publicly available sound databases, up to now, however, they do not include acoustic data from manufacturing environments. Within manufacturing industries, acoustic data can be exploited in order to evaluate the correct execution of assembling processes. As an example, in this paper the correct plugging of connectors is analyzed on the basis of multimodal contextual process information. The latter are the connector’s acoustic properties and visual information recorded in form of video files while executing connector locking processes. For the first time optical microphones are used for the acquisition and analysis of connector sound data in order to differentiate connector locking sounds from each other respectively from background noise and sound events with similar acoustic properties. Therefore, different types of feature representations as well as neural network architectures are investigated for this specific task. The results from the proposed analysis show, that multimodal approaches clearly outperform unimodal neural network architectures for the task of connector locking validation by reaching maximal accuracy levels close to 85[Formula: see text]. Since in many cases there are no additional validation methods applied for the detection of correctly locked connectors in manufacturing industries, it is concluded that the proposed connector lock event detection framework is a significant improvement for the qualitative validation of plugging operations.