User experience in mobile communications is vulnerable to worse quality at the cell edge, which cannot be compensated by enjoying excellent service at the cell center, according to the principle of risk aversion in behavioral economics. Constrained by weak signal strength and substantial inter-cell interference, the cell edge is always a major bottleneck of any mobile network. Due to their possibility for empowering the next-generation mobile system, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) and cell-free massive MIMO (CFmMIMO) have recently attracted a lot of focus from academia and industry. In addition to a variety of technological advantages, both are highly potential to boost cell-edge performance. To the authors' best knowledge, a performance comparison of RIS and CFmMIMO, especially on the cell edge, is still missing in the literature. To fill this gap, this paper establishes a fair scenario and demonstrates extensive numerical results to clarify their behaviors at the cell edge.
Blockchain-based IoT systems can manage IoT devices and achieve a high level of data integrity, security, and provenance. However, incorporating the existing consensus protocols in many IoT systems limits scalability and leads to high computational cost and network latency. We propose a hierar-chical and location-aware consensus protocol for IoI-blockchain applications inspired by the original Raft protocol to address these limitations. The proposed consensus protocol generates the consensus candidate groups based on nodes' individual reputation and distance information to elect the leader in each sub-layer blockchain and uses our threshold signature scheme to reach global consensus. Experimental results show that the proposed consensus protocol is scalable for large IoT applications and significantly reduces the communication cost, network latency, and agreement time by more than 50% compared with the Raft protocol for consensus processing.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed several weaknesses in the public health infrastructure, including supply chain mechanisms and public health ICT systems. The expansion of testing and contact tracing has been key to identifying and isolating infected individuals, as well as tracking and containing the spread of the virus. Digital technologies, such as telemedicine and virtual consultations, have experienced a surge in demand to provide medical support while minimizing the risk of transmission and infection. The pandemic has made it clear that cooperation, information sharing, and communication among stakeholders are crucial in making the right decisions and preventing future outbreaks. Redesigning public health systems for effective management of outbreaks should include five key elements: disease surveillance and early warning systems, contact tracing and case management, data analytics and visualization, communication and education, and telemedicine. As the world navigates the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare ICT systems will play an increasingly important role in the future of healthcare delivery. In a post COVID-19 world, several ICT strategies should be implemented to improve the quality, efficiency, and accessibility of healthcare services, including the expansion of telemedicine, data analytics and population health management, interoperability, and cybersecurity. Overall, this report summarises the importance of early detection and rapid response, international cooperation and coordination, clear and consistent communication, investing in public health systems and emergency preparedness, digital technology and telemedicine, and equity and social determinants of health. These lessons demonstrate the need for better preparedness and planning for future crises and the importance of addressing underlying issues to create a more resilient and accessible digital infrastructure.
The 6G standard aims to be an integral part of the future economy by providing both high-performance communication and sensing services. At terahertz (THz) frequencies, indoor campus networks can offer the highest sensing quality. Health monitoring in hospitals is expected to be an application site for these. This work outlines a 6G-enabled monostatic phase-based system for breathing rate monitoring. Our conducted feasibility study observes motion measurement accuracy down to the micrometer level. However, we also find that the patient's pose needs to be considered for generalized applicability. Thus, a solution that leverages multiple propagation paths and beam orientations is proposed.
Audio-visual person recognition (AVPR) has received extensive attention. However, most datasets used for AVPR research so far are collected in constrained environments, and thus cannot reflect the true performance of AVPR systems in real-world scenarios. To meet the request for research on AVPR in unconstrained conditions, this paper presents a multi-genre AVPR dataset collected `in the wild', named CN-Celeb-AV. This dataset contains more than 420k video segments from 1,136 persons from public media. In particular, we put more emphasis on two real-world complexities: (1) data in multiple genres; (2) segments with partial information. A comprehensive study was conducted to compare CN-Celeb-AV with two popular public AVPR benchmark datasets, and the results demonstrated that CN-Celeb-AV is more in line with real-world scenarios and can be regarded as a new benchmark dataset for AVPR research. The dataset also involves a development set that can be used to boost the performance of AVPR systems in real-life situations. The dataset is free for researchers and can be downloaded from //cnceleb.org/.
The 6th generation (6G) wireless communication network is envisaged to be able to change our lives drastically, including transportation. In this paper, two ways of interactions between 6G communication networks and transportation are introduced. With the new usage scenarios and capabilities 6G is going to support, passengers on all sorts of transportation systems will be able to get data more easily, even in the most remote areas on the planet. The quality of communication will also be improved significantly, thanks to the advanced capabilities of 6G. On top of providing seamless and ubiquitous connectivity to all forms of transportation, 6G will also transform the transportation systems to make them more intelligent, more efficient, and safer. Based on the latest research and standardization progresses, technical analysis on how 6G can empower advanced transportation systems are provided, as well as challenges and insights for a possible road ahead.
Face recognition technology has advanced significantly in recent years due largely to the availability of large and increasingly complex training datasets for use in deep learning models. These datasets, however, typically comprise images scraped from news sites or social media platforms and, therefore, have limited utility in more advanced security, forensics, and military applications. These applications require lower resolution, longer ranges, and elevated viewpoints. To meet these critical needs, we collected and curated the first and second subsets of a large multi-modal biometric dataset designed for use in the research and development (R&D) of biometric recognition technologies under extremely challenging conditions. Thus far, the dataset includes more than 350,000 still images and over 1,300 hours of video footage of approximately 1,000 subjects. To collect this data, we used Nikon DSLR cameras, a variety of commercial surveillance cameras, specialized long-rage R&D cameras, and Group 1 and Group 2 UAV platforms. The goal is to support the development of algorithms capable of accurately recognizing people at ranges up to 1,000 m and from high angles of elevation. These advances will include improvements to the state of the art in face recognition and will support new research in the area of whole-body recognition using methods based on gait and anthropometry. This paper describes methods used to collect and curate the dataset, and the dataset's characteristics at the current stage.
Intelligence is a fundamental part of all living things, as well as the foundation for Artificial Intelligence. In this primer we explore the ideas associated with intelligence and, by doing so, understand the implications and constraints and potentially outline the capabilities of future systems. Artificial Intelligence, in the form of Machine Learning, has already had a significant impact on our lives. As an exploration, we journey into different parts of intelligence that appear essential. We hope that people find this helpful in determining the future. Also, during the exploration, we hope to create new thought-provoking questions. Intelligence is not a single weighable quantity but a subject that spans Biology, Physics, Philosophy, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Psychology, and Computer Science. The historian Yuval Noah Harari pointed out that engineers and scientists in the future will have to broaden their understandings to include disciplines such as Psychology, Philosophy, and Ethics. Fiction writers have long portrayed engineers and scientists as deficient in these areas. Today, in modern society, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence and legal requirements act as forcing functions to push these broader subjects into the foreground. We start with an introduction to intelligence and move quickly to more profound thoughts and ideas. We call this a Life, the Universe, and Everything primer, after the famous science fiction book by Douglas Adams. Forty-two may be the correct answer, but what are the questions?
What is learned by sophisticated neural network agents such as AlphaZero? This question is of both scientific and practical interest. If the representations of strong neural networks bear no resemblance to human concepts, our ability to understand faithful explanations of their decisions will be restricted, ultimately limiting what we can achieve with neural network interpretability. In this work we provide evidence that human knowledge is acquired by the AlphaZero neural network as it trains on the game of chess. By probing for a broad range of human chess concepts we show when and where these concepts are represented in the AlphaZero network. We also provide a behavioural analysis focusing on opening play, including qualitative analysis from chess Grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik. Finally, we carry out a preliminary investigation looking at the low-level details of AlphaZero's representations, and make the resulting behavioural and representational analyses available online.
It has been a long time that computer architecture and systems are optimized to enable efficient execution of machine learning (ML) algorithms or models. Now, it is time to reconsider the relationship between ML and systems, and let ML transform the way that computer architecture and systems are designed. This embraces a twofold meaning: the improvement of designers' productivity, and the completion of the virtuous cycle. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of work that applies ML for system design, which can be grouped into two major categories, ML-based modelling that involves predictions of performance metrics or some other criteria of interest, and ML-based design methodology that directly leverages ML as the design tool. For ML-based modelling, we discuss existing studies based on their target level of system, ranging from the circuit level to the architecture/system level. For ML-based design methodology, we follow a bottom-up path to review current work, with a scope of (micro-)architecture design (memory, branch prediction, NoC), coordination between architecture/system and workload (resource allocation and management, data center management, and security), compiler, and design automation. We further provide a future vision of opportunities and potential directions, and envision that applying ML for computer architecture and systems would thrive in the community.
Knowledge graph embedding, which aims to represent entities and relations as low dimensional vectors (or matrices, tensors, etc.), has been shown to be a powerful technique for predicting missing links in knowledge graphs. Existing knowledge graph embedding models mainly focus on modeling relation patterns such as symmetry/antisymmetry, inversion, and composition. However, many existing approaches fail to model semantic hierarchies, which are common in real-world applications. To address this challenge, we propose a novel knowledge graph embedding model---namely, Hierarchy-Aware Knowledge Graph Embedding (HAKE)---which maps entities into the polar coordinate system. HAKE is inspired by the fact that concentric circles in the polar coordinate system can naturally reflect the hierarchy. Specifically, the radial coordinate aims to model entities at different levels of the hierarchy, and entities with smaller radii are expected to be at higher levels; the angular coordinate aims to distinguish entities at the same level of the hierarchy, and these entities are expected to have roughly the same radii but different angles. Experiments demonstrate that HAKE can effectively model the semantic hierarchies in knowledge graphs, and significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets for the link prediction task.