There is a long history of an effort made to explore musical elements with the entities and spaces around us, such as musique concr\`ete and ambient music. In the context of computer music and digital art, interactive experiences that concentrate on the surrounding objects and physical spaces have also been designed. In recent years, with the development and popularization of devices, an increasing number of works have been designed in Extended Reality to create such musical experiences. In this paper, we describe MR4MR, a sound installation work that allows users to experience melodies produced from interactions with their surrounding space in the context of Mixed Reality (MR). Using HoloLens, an MR head-mounted display, users can bump virtual objects that emit sound against real objects in their surroundings. Then, by continuously creating a melody following the sound made by the object and re-generating randomly and gradually changing melody using music generation machine learning models, users can feel their ambient melody "reincarnating".
Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) has become one of the essential tasks in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) as it is often included in several NLU benchmarks (Liang et al., 2020; Wilie et al., 2020). However, most MRC datasets only have answerable question type, overlooking the importance of unanswerable questions. MRC models trained only on answerable questions will select the span that is most likely to be the answer, even when the answer does not actually exist in the given passage (Rajpurkar et al., 2018). This problem especially remains in medium- to low-resource languages like Indonesian. Existing Indonesian MRC datasets (Purwarianti et al., 2007; Clark et al., 2020) are still inadequate because of the small size and limited question types, i.e., they only cover answerable questions. To fill this gap, we build a new Indonesian MRC dataset called I(n)don'tKnow- MRC (IDK-MRC) by combining the automatic and manual unanswerable question generation to minimize the cost of manual dataset construction while maintaining the dataset quality. Combined with the existing answerable questions, IDK-MRC consists of more than 10K questions in total. Our analysis shows that our dataset significantly improves the performance of Indonesian MRC models, showing a large improvement for unanswerable questions.
5th Generation Mobile Communication Technology (5G) utilizes Access Traffic Steering, Switching, and Splitting (ATSSS) rule to enable multi-path data transmission, which is currently being standardized. Recently, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) SA1 and SA2 have been working on multi-path solution for possible improvement from different perspectives. However, the existing 3GPP multi-path solution has some limitations on URLLC traffic in terms of reliability and latency requirements. In order to capture the potential gains of multi-path architecture in the context of URLLC services, this paper proposes a new traffic splitting technique which can more efficiently enjoy the benefit of multi-path architecture in reducing users' uplink (UL) End-to-End (E2E) latency. In particular, we formulate an optimization framework which minimizes the UL E2E latency of users via optimizing the ratio of traffic assigned to each path and corresponding transmit power. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated via well designed simulations.
The imminent impact of immersive technologies in society urges for active research in real-time and interactive physics simulation for virtual worlds to be realistic. In this context, realistic means to be compliant to the laws of physics. In this paper we present a method for computing the dynamic response of (possibly non-linear and dissipative) deformable objects induced by real-time user interactions in mixed reality using deep learning. The graph-based architecture of the method ensures the thermodynamic consistency of the predictions, whereas the visualization pipeline allows a natural and realistic user experience. Two examples of virtual solids interacting with virtual or physical solids in mixed reality scenarios are provided to prove the performance of the method.
Metaverse is expected to emerge as a new paradigm for the next-generation Internet, providing fully immersive and personalised experiences to socialize, work, and play in self-sustaining and hyper-spatio-temporal virtual world(s). The advancements in different technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, extended reality (XR), artificial intelligence (AI), and 5G/6G communication will be the key enablers behind the realization of AI-XR metaverse applications. While AI itself has many potential applications in the aforementioned technologies (e.g., avatar generation, network optimization, etc.), ensuring the security of AI in critical applications like AI-XR metaverse applications is profoundly crucial to avoid undesirable actions that could undermine users' privacy and safety, consequently putting their lives in danger. To this end, we attempt to analyze the security, privacy, and trustworthiness aspects associated with the use of various AI techniques in AI-XR metaverse applications. Specifically, we discuss numerous such challenges and present a taxonomy of potential solutions that could be leveraged to develop secure, private, robust, and trustworthy AI-XR applications. To highlight the real implications of AI-associated adversarial threats, we designed a metaverse-specific case study and analyzed it through the adversarial lens. Finally, we elaborate upon various open issues that require further research interest from the community.
The Smart Grid (SG) is a cornerstone of modern society, providing the energy required to sustain billions of lives and thousands of industries. Unfortunately, as one of the most critical infrastructures of our World, the SG is an attractive target for attackers. The problem is aggravated by the increasing adoption of digitalisation, which further increases the SG's exposure to cyberthreats. Successful exploitation of such exposure leads to entire countries being paralysed, which is an unacceptable -- but ultimately inescapable -- risk. This paper aims to mitigate this risk by elucidating the perspective of real practitioners on the cybersecurity of the SG. We interviewed 18 entities, operating in diverse countries in Europe and covering all domains of the SG -- from energy generation, to its delivery. Our analysis highlights a stark contrast between (a)research and practice, but also between (b) public and private entities. For instance: some threats appear to be much less dangerous than what is claimed in related papers; some technological paradigms have dubious utility for practitioners, but are actively promoted by literature; finally, practitioners may either under- or over-estimate their own cybersecurity capabilities. We derive four takeaways that enable future endeavours to improve the overall cybersecurity in the SG. We conjecture that most of the problems are due to an improper communication between researchers, practitioners and regulatory bodies -- which, despite sharing a common goal, tend to neglect the viewpoint of the other `spheres'.
Metaverse has rekindled human beings' desire to further break space-time barriers by fusing the virtual and real worlds. However, security and privacy threats hinder us from building a utopia. A metaverse embraces various techniques, while at the same time inheriting their pitfalls and thus exposing large attack surfaces. Blockchain, proposed in 2008, was regarded as a key building block of metaverses. it enables transparent and trusted computing environments using tamper-resistant decentralized ledgers. Currently, blockchain supports Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-fungible Tokens (NFT) for metaverses. However, the power of a blockchain has not been sufficiently exploited. In this article, we propose a novel trustless architecture of blockchain-enabled metaverse, aiming to provide efficient resource integration and allocation by consolidating hardware and software components. To realize our design objectives, we provide an On-Demand Trusted Computing Environment (OTCE) technique based on local trust evaluation. Specifically, the architecture adopts a hypergraph to represent a metaverse, in which each hyperedge links a group of users with certain relationship. Then the trust level of each user group can be evaluated based on graph analytics techniques. Based on the trust value, each group can determine its security plan on demand, free from interference by irrelevant nodes. Besides, OTCEs enable large-scale and flexible application environments (sandboxes) while preserving a strong security guarantee.
With the advent of deep learning methods replacing the ISP in transforming sensor RAW readings into RGB images, numerous methodologies solidified into real-life applications. Equally potent is the task of inverting this process which will have applications in enhancing computational photography tasks that are conducted in the RAW domain, addressing lack of available RAW data while reaping from the benefits of performing tasks directly on sensor readings. This paper's proposed methodology is a state-of-the-art solution to the task of RAW reconstruction, and the multi-step refinement process integrating an overexposure mask is novel in three ways: instead of from RGB to bayer, the pipeline trains from RGB to demosaiced RAW allowing use of perceptual loss functions; the multi-step processes has greatly enhanced the performance of the baseline U-Net from start to end; the pipeline is a generalizable process of refinement that can enhance other high performance methodologies that support end-to-end learning.
We describe ACE0, a lightweight platform for evaluating the suitability and viability of AI methods for behaviour discovery in multiagent simulations. Specifically, ACE0 was designed to explore AI methods for multi-agent simulations used in operations research studies related to new technologies such as autonomous aircraft. Simulation environments used in production are often high-fidelity, complex, require significant domain knowledge and as a result have high R&D costs. Minimal and lightweight simulation environments can help researchers and engineers evaluate the viability of new AI technologies for behaviour discovery in a more agile and potentially cost effective manner. In this paper we describe the motivation for the development of ACE0.We provide a technical overview of the system architecture, describe a case study of behaviour discovery in the aerospace domain, and provide a qualitative evaluation of the system. The evaluation includes a brief description of collaborative research projects with academic partners, exploring different AI behaviour discovery methods.
Behaviors of the synthetic characters in current military simulations are limited since they are generally generated by rule-based and reactive computational models with minimal intelligence. Such computational models cannot adapt to reflect the experience of the characters, resulting in brittle intelligence for even the most effective behavior models devised via costly and labor-intensive processes. Observation-based behavior model adaptation that leverages machine learning and the experience of synthetic entities in combination with appropriate prior knowledge can address the issues in the existing computational behavior models to create a better training experience in military training simulations. In this paper, we introduce a framework that aims to create autonomous synthetic characters that can perform coherent sequences of believable behavior while being aware of human trainees and their needs within a training simulation. This framework brings together three mutually complementary components. The first component is a Unity-based simulation environment - Rapid Integration and Development Environment (RIDE) - supporting One World Terrain (OWT) models and capable of running and supporting machine learning experiments. The second is Shiva, a novel multi-agent reinforcement and imitation learning framework that can interface with a variety of simulation environments, and that can additionally utilize a variety of learning algorithms. The final component is the Sigma Cognitive Architecture that will augment the behavior models with symbolic and probabilistic reasoning capabilities. We have successfully created proof-of-concept behavior models leveraging this framework on realistic terrain as an essential step towards bringing machine learning into military simulations.