Laughter is one of the most important nonverbal sound that human generates. It is a means for expressing his emotions. The acoustic and contextual features of this specific sound are different from those of speech and many difficulties arise during their modeling process. During this work, we propose an audio laughter generation system based on unsupervised generative models: the autoencoder (AE) and its variants. This procedure is the association of three main sub-process, (1) the analysis which consist of extracting the log magnitude spectrogram from the laughter database, (2) the generative models training, (3) the synthesis stage which incorporate the involvement of an intermediate mechanism: the vocoder. To improve the synthesis quality, we suggest two hybrid models (LSTM-VAE, GRU-VAE and CNN-VAE) that combine the representation learning capacity of variational autoencoder (VAE) with the temporal modelling ability of a long short-term memory RNN (LSTM) and the CNN ability to learn invariant features. To figure out the performance of our proposed audio laughter generation process, objective evaluation (RMSE) and a perceptual audio quality test (listening test) were conducted. According to these evaluation metrics, we can show that the GRU-VAE outperforms the other VAE models.

Failures frequently occurred in manufacturing machines due to complex and changeable manufacturing environments, increasing the downtime and maintenance costs. This manuscript develops a novel deep learning-based method named Multi-Domain Convolutional Neural Network (MDCNN) to deal with this challenging task with vibration signals. The proposed MDCNN consists of time-domain, frequency-domain, and statistical-domain feature channels. The Time-domain channel is to model the hidden patterns of signals in the time domain. The frequency-domain channel uses Discrete Wavelet Transformation (DWT) to obtain the rich feature representations of signals in the frequency domain. The statistic-domain channel contains six statistical variables, which is to reflect the signals' macro statistical-domain features, respectively. Firstly, in the proposed MDCNN, time-domain and frequency-domain channels are processed by CNN individually with various filters. Secondly, the CNN extracted features from time, and frequency domains are merged as time-frequency features. Lastly, time-frequency domain features are fused with six statistical variables as the comprehensive features for identifying the fault. Thereby, the proposed method could make full use of those three domain-features for fault diagnosis while keeping high distinguishability due to CNN's utilization. The authors designed massive experiments with 10-folder cross-validation technology to validate the proposed method's effectiveness on the CWRU bearing data set. The experimental results are calculated by ten-time averaged accuracy. They have confirmed that the proposed MDCNN could intelligently, accurately, and timely detect the fault under the complex manufacturing environments, whose accuracy is nearly 100%.

Owing to the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, the pharmaceutical industry has attracted considerable attention, spurred by the widespread expectation of vaccine development. In this study, we collect relevant topics from news articles related to COVID-19 and explore their links with two South Korean pharmaceutical indices, the Drug and Medicine index of the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) and the Korean Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (KOSDAQ) Pharmaceutical index. We use generalized Dirichlet-multinomial regression (g-DMR) to reveal the dynamic topic distributions over metadata of index values. The results of our analysis, obtained using g-DMR, reveal that a greater focus on specific news topics has a significant relationship with fluctuations in the indices. We also provide practical and theoretical implications based on this analysis.

In view of the low accuracy of the traditional FunkSVD algorithm, and in order to improve the computational efficiency of the algorithm, this paper proposes a parallel algorithm of improved FunkSVD based on Spark (SP-FD). Using RMSProp algorithm to improve the traditional FunkSVD algorithm. The improved FunkSVD algorithm can not only solve the problem of decreased accuracy caused by iterative oscillations but also alleviate the impact of data sparseness on the accuracy of the algorithm, thereby achieving the effect of improving the accuracy of the algorithm. And using the Spark big data computing framework to realize the parallelization of the improved algorithm, to use RDD for iterative calculation, and to store calculation data in the iterative process in distributed memory to speed up the iteration. The Cartesian product operation in the improved FunkSVD algorithm is divided into blocks to realize parallel calculation, thereby improving the calculation speed of the algorithm. Experiments on three standard data sets in terms of accuracy, execution time, and speedup show that the SP-FD algorithm not only improves the recommendation accuracy, shortens the calculation interval compared to the traditional FunkSVD and several other algorithms but also shows good parallel performance in a cluster environment with multiple nodes. The analysis of experimental results shows that the SP-FD algorithm improves the accuracy and parallel computing capability of the algorithm, which is better than the traditional FunkSVD algorithm.

The red line of Permanent Basic Farmland is the most important part in the "three-line" demarcation of China's national territorial development plan. The scientific and reasonable delineation of the red line is a major strategic measure being taken by China to improve its ability to safeguard the practical interests of farmers and guarantee national food security. The delineation of Permanent Basic Farmland zoning (DPBFZ) is essentially a multi-objective optimization problem. However, the traditional method of demarcation does not take into account the synergistic development goals of conservation of cultivated land utilization, ecological conservation, or urban expansion. Therefore, this research introduces the idea of artificial immune optimization and proposes a multi-objective model of DPBFZ red line delineation based on a clone selection algorithm. This research proposes an objective functional system consisting of these three sub-objectives: optimal quality of cropland, spatially concentrated distribution, and stability of cropland. It also takes into consideration constraints such as the red line of ecological protection, topography, and space for major development projects. The mathematical formal expressions for the objectives and constraints are given in the paper, and a multi-objective optimal decision model with multiple constraints for the DPBFZ problem is constructed based on the clone selection algorithm. An antibody coding scheme was designed according to the spatial pattern of DPBFZ zoning. In addition, the antibody-antigen affinity function, the clone mechanism, and mutation strategy were constructed and improved to solve the DPBFZ problem with a spatial optimization feature. Finally, Tongxu County in Henan province was selected as the study area, and a controlled experiment was set up according to different target preferences. The results show that the model proposed in this paper is operational in the work of delineating DPBFZ. It not only avoids the adverse effects of subjective factors in the delineation process but also provides multiple scenarios DPBFZ layouts for decision makers by adjusting the weighting of the objective function.

Precipitation prediction during flood season has been a key task of climate prediction for a long time. This type of prediction is linked with the national economy and people's livelihood, and is also one of the difficult problems in climatology. At present, there are some precipitation forecast models for the flood season, but there are also some deviations from these models, which makes it difficult to forecast accurately. In this paper, based on the measured precipitation data from the flood season from 1993 to 2019 and the precipitation return data of CWRF, ANN cycle modeling and a weighted integration method is used to correct the CWRF used in today's operational systems. The MAE and TCC of the precipitation forecast in the flood season are used to check the prediction performance of the proposed algorithm model. The results demonstrate a good correction effect for the proposed algorithm. In particular, the MAE error of the new algorithm is reduced by about 50%, while the time correlation TCC is improved by about 40%. Therefore, both the generalization of the correction results and the prediction performance are improved.

In the advent of the twenty-first century, human beings began to closely interact with technology. Today, technology is developing, and as a result, the world wide web (www) has a very important place on the Internet and the significant task is fulfilled by Web services. A lot of Web services are available on the Internet and, therefore, it is difficult to find matching Web services among the available Web services. The recommendation systems can help in fixing this problem. In this paper, our observation was based on the recommended method such as the collaborative filtering (CF) technique which faces some failure from the data sparsity and the cold-start problems. To overcome these problems, we first applied an ontology-based clustering and then the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm for each separate cluster group that effectively increased the data density using the past user interests. Then, user ratings were predicted based on the model-based approach, such as singular value decomposition (SVD) and the predictions used for the recommendation. The evaluation results showed that our proposed approach has a less prediction error rate with high accuracy after analyzing the existing recommendation methods.

Three-dimensional (3D) video scenes are complex and difficult to control, especially when scene switching occurs. In this paper, we propose two algorithms based on an incremental proportional-integral-derivative (PID) algorithm and a similarity analysis between views to improve the method of bit allocation for multi-view high efficiency video coding (MV-HEVC). Firstly, an incremental PID algorithm is introduced to control the buffer "liquid level" to reduce the negative impact on the target bit allocation of the view layer and frame layer owing to the fluctuation of the buffer "liquid level". Then, using the image similarity between views is used to establish, a bit allocation calculation model for the multi-view video main viewpoint and non-main viewpoint is established. Then, a bit allocation calculation method based on hierarchical B frames is proposed. Experimental simulation results verify that the algorithm ensures a smooth transition of image quality while increasing the coding efficiency, and the PSNR increases by 0.03 to 0.82dB while not significantly increasing the calculation complexity.

Since correlation filter appeared in the field of object tracking, it plays an increasingly vital role due to its excellent performance. Although many sophisticated trackers have been successfully applied to track the object accurately, very few of them attaches importance to the scale and rotation estimation. In order to address the above limitation, we propose a novel method combined with Fourier-Mellin transform and confidence evaluation strategy for robust object tracking. In the first place, we construct a correlation filter to locate the target object precisely. Then, a log-polar technique is used in the Fourier-Mellin transform to cope with the rotation and scale changes. In order to achieve subpixel accuracy, we come up with an efficient surface fitting mechanism to obtain the optimal calculation result. In addition, we introduce a confidence evaluation strategy modeled on the output response, which can decrease the impact of image noise and perform as a criterion to evaluate the target model stability. Experimental experiments on OTB100 demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves superior capability in success plots and precision plots of OPE, which is 10.8% points and 8.6% points than those of KCF. Besides, our method performs favorably against the others in terms of SRE and TRE validation schemes, which shows the superiority of our proposed algorithm in scale and rotation evaluation.

An image with infrared features and visible details is obtained by processing infrared and visible images. In this paper, a fusion method based on Laplacian pyramid and generative adversarial network is proposed to obtain high quality fusion images, termed as Laplacian-GAN. Firstly, the base and detail layers are obtained by decomposing the source images. Secondly, we utilize the Laplacian pyramid-based method to fuse these base layers to obtain more information of the base layer. Thirdly, the detail part is fused by a generative adversarial network. In addition, generative adversarial network avoids the manual design complicated fusion rules. Finally, the fused base layer and fused detail layer are reconstructed to obtain the fused image. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain state-of-the-art fusion performance in both visual quality and objective assessment. In terms of visual observation, the fusion image obtained by Laplacian-GAN algorithm in this paper is clearer in detail. At the same time, in the six metrics of MI, AG, EI, MS_SSIM, Q_abf and SCD, the algorithm presented in this paper has improved by 0.62%, 7.10%, 14.53%, 12.18%, 34.33% and 12.23%, respectively, compared with the best of the other three algorithms.

Document image binarization is an important pre-processing step in document analysis and archiving. The state-of-the-art models for document image binarization are variants of encoder-decoder architectures, such as FCN (fully convolutional network) and U-Net. Despite their success, they still suffer from three limitations: (1) reduced feature map resolution due to consecutive strided pooling or convolutions, (2) multiple scales of target objects, and (3) reduced localization accuracy due to the built-in invariance of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). To overcome these three challenges, we propose an improved semantic segmentation model, referred to as DP-LinkNet, which adopts the D-LinkNet architecture as its backbone, with the proposed hybrid dilated convolution (HDC) and spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) modules between the encoder and the decoder. Extensive experiments are conducted on recent document image binarization competition (DIBCO) and handwritten document image binarization competition (H-DIBCO) benchmark datasets. Results show that our proposed DP-LinkNet outperforms other state-of-the-art techniques by a large margin. Our implementation and the pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/beargolden/DP-LinkNet.

This paper proposes a positive experience design approach for Internet of Things (IoT) intelligent products to improve users' subjective well-being in the fields of artificial intelligence and big data. First, the authors selected six target users and taking the Xiaomi IoT intelligent products for the research objects and conducted a thorough observation on how the target users used IoT intelligent products in their own homes over two weeks via a home-visiting interview, group diary, and focus group. Second, they constructed an individual activities table for the participants' IoT intelligent product experience using a hierarchical task analysis (HTA). Third, two researchers sorted out the sub-tasks of happiness in the HTA table. Finally, the authors found the positive experience design approach of IoT intelligent products. The positive experience design approach of IoT intelligent products is proposed from focusing on the personal pleasure experience to individual life meaningful design and group social relationship design, including individual pleasure experience, personal goal realization, group needs satisfaction and the harmony of group relations. The paper uses the two design examples of an interactive kettle and a harmonious chair to further discuss the feasibility of the design approach. In the era of big data, it is helpful for designers to use this design approach to improve the users' sense of sustainable pleasure, achievement perception of their future goal realization, and the well-being of the group's social relationships.

Low-light image enhancement is a key technique to overcome the quality degradation of photos taken under scotopic vision illumination conditions. The degradation includes low brightness, low contrast, and outstanding noise, which would seriously affect the vision of the human eye recognition ability and subsequent image processing. In this paper, we propose an approach based on deep learning and Retinex theory to enhance the low-light image, which includes image decomposition, illumination prediction, image reconstruction, and image optimization. The first three parts can reconstruct the enhanced image that suffers from low-resolution. To reduce the noise of the enhanced image and improve the image quality, a super-resolution algorithm based on the Laplacian pyramid network is introduced to optimize the image. The Laplacian pyramid network can improve the resolution of the enhanced image through multiple feature extraction and deconvolution operations. Furthermore, a combination loss function is explored in the network training stage to improve the efficiency of the algorithm. Extensive experiments and comprehensive evaluations demonstrate the strength of the proposed method, the result is closer to the real-world scene in lightness, color, and details. Besides, experiments also demonstrate that the proposed method with the single low-light image can achieve the same effect as multi-exposure image fusion algorithm and no ghost is introduced.

Transient faults occur in computation units of a processor, which can cause control flow errors (CFEs) and compromise system reliability. The software-based methods perform illegal control flow detection by inserting redundant instructions and monitoring signature. However, the existing methods not only have drawbacks in terms of performance overhead, but also lack of configurability. We propose a configurable approach CCFCA for detecting CFEs. The configurability of CCFCA is implemented by analyzing the criticality of each region and tuning the detecting granularity. For critical regions, program blocks are divided according to space-time overhead and reliability constraints, so that protection intensity can be configured flexibly. For other regions, signature detection algorithms are only used in the first basic block and last basic block. This helps to improve the fault-tolerant efficiency of the CCFCA. At the same time, CCFCA also has the function of solving confusion and instruction self-detection. Our experimental results show that CCFCA incurs only 10.61% performance overhead on average for several C benchmark program and the average undetected error rate is only 9.29%. CCFCA has high error coverage and low overhead compared with similar algorithms. This helps to meet different cost requirements and reliability requirements.

With the development of information and communication technologies, especially wireless networks and cell phones, the e-voting system becomes popular as its cost-effectiveness, swiftness, scalability, and ecological sustainability. However, the current e-voting schemes are faced with the problem of privacy leakage and further cause worse vote-buying and voter-coercion problems. Moreover, in large-scale voting, some previous e-voting system encryption scheme with pairing operation also brings huge overhead pressure to the voting system. Thus, it is a vital problem to design a protocol that can protect voter privacy and simultaneously has high efficiency to guarantee the effective implementation of e-voting. To address these problems, our paper proposes an efficient unidirectional proxy re-encryption scheme that provides the re-encryption of vote content and the verification of users' identity. This function can be exactly applied in the e-voting system to protect the content of vote and preserve the privacy of the voter. Our proposal is proven to be CCA secure and collusion resistant. The detailed analysis also shows that our scheme achieves higher efficiency in computation cost and ciphertext size than the schemes in related fields.

The transition toward a contactless society has been rapidly progressing owing to the recent COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, the IT environment of organizations and enterprises is changing rapidly; in particular, data security is expanding to the private sector. To adapt to these changes, organizations and companies have started to securely transfer confidential data to residential PCs and personally owned devices of employees working from home or from other locations. Therefore, organizations and companies are introducing streaming data services, such as the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or cloud services, to securely connect internal and external networks. These methods have the advantage of providing data without the need to download to a third terminal; however, while the data are being streamed, attacks such as screen shooting or capturing are performed. Therefore, there is an increasing interest in prevention techniques against screen capture threats that may occur in a contactless environment. In this study, we analyze possible screen capture methods in a PC and a mobile phone environment and present techniques that can protect the screens against specific attack methods. The detection and defense for screen capture of PC applications on Windows OS and Mac OS could be solved with a single agent using our proposed techniques. Screen capture of mobile devices can be prevented by applying our proposed techniques on Android and iOS.

Cyber deception defense mitigates Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) with deploying deceptive entities, such as the Honeyfile. The Honeyfile distracts attackers from valuable digital documents and attracts unauthorized access by deliberately exposing fake content. The effectiveness of distraction and trap lies in the enticement of fake content. However, existing studies on the Honeyfile focus less on this perspective. In this work, we seek to improve the enticement of fake text content through enhancing its readability, indistinguishability, and believability. Hence, an enticing deceptive-content generator, EDGE, is presented. The EDGE is constructed with three steps: extracting key concepts with a semantics-aware K-means clustering algorithm, searching for candidate deceptive concepts within the Word2Vec model, and generating deceptive text content under the Integrated Readability Index (IR). Furthermore, the readability and believability performance analyses are undertaken. The experimental results show that EDGE generates indistinguishable deceptive text content without decreasing readability. In all, EDGE proves effective to generate enticing deceptive text content as deception defense against APTs.

At present, the Colombian government shares information on threats or vulnerabilities in the area of cybersecurity and cyberdefense, from other government agencies or departments, on an ad-hoc basis but not in real time, with the surveillance entities of the Government of the Republic of Colombia such as the Joint Command of Cybernetic Operations (CCOCI) and the Cybernetic Emergencies Response Team of Colombia (ColCERT). This research presents the MS-CSIRT (Management System Computer Security Incident Response Teams) methodology, that is used to unify the guidelines of a CSIRT towards a joint communication command in cybersecurity for the surveillance of Information Technology (IT), Technological Operations (TO), Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) or Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures. This methodology evaluates the level of maturity, by means of a roadmap, to establish a CSIRT as a reference framework for government entities and as a guide for the areas of information security, IT and TO to strengthen the growth of the industry 4.0. This allows the organizations to draw a line of cybersecurity policy with scope, objectives, controls, metrics, procedures and use cases for the correct coordination between ColCERT and CCOCI, as support entities in cybersecurity, and the different companies (ICS, IoT, gas and energy, mining, maritime, agro-industrial, among others) or government agencies that use this methodology.

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication based on the wide bandwidth of >28 GHz is one of the key technologies for cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The selection of mmWave beams in such cellular-connected UAVs is challenging and critical, especially when downlink transmissions toward aerial user equipment (UE) suffer from poor signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) more often than their terrestrial counterparts. This study proposed a coordinated mmWave beam selection scheme using fingerprint for cellular-connected UAV. The scheme comprises fingerprint database configuration and coordinated beam selection. In the fingerprint database configuration, the best beam index from the serving cell and interference beam indexes from neighboring cells are stored. In the coordinated beam selection, the best and interference beams are determined using the fingerprint database information instead of performing an exhaustive search, and the coordinated beam transmission improves the SINR for aerial UEs. System-level simulations assess the UAV effect based on the third-generation partnership project-new radio mmWave and UAV channel models. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can reduce the overhead of exhaustive search and improve the SINR and spectral efficiency.

This paper considers a cellular two-way relay network with one base station (BS), one relay station (RS), and two users. The two users are far from the BS and no direct links exist, and the two users exchange messages with the BS via the RS. A non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and network coding (NC)-based decode-and-forward (DF) two-way relaying (TWR) scheme TWR-NOMA-NC is proposed, which is able to reduce the number of channel-uses to three from four in conventional time-division multiple access (TDMA) based TWR approaches. The achievable sum-rate performance of the proposed approach is analyzed, and a closed-form expression for the sum-rate upper bound is derived. Numerical results show that the analytical sum-rate upper bound is tight, and the proposed TWR-NOMA-NC scheme significantly outperforms the TDMA-based TWR and NOMA-based one-way relaying counterparts.