Africa
HAGCN : Network Decentralization Attention Based Heterogeneity-Aware Spatiotemporal Graph Convolution Network for Traffic Signal Forecasting
The construction of spatiotemporal networks using graph convolution networks (GCNs) has become one of the most popular methods for predicting traffic signals. However, when using a GCN for traffic speed prediction, the conventional approach generally assumes the relationship between the sensors as a homogeneous graph and learns an adjacency matrix using the data accumulated by the sensors. However, the spatial correlation between sensors is not specified as one but defined differently from various viewpoints. To this end, we aim to study the heterogeneous characteristics inherent in traffic signal data to learn the hidden relationships between sensors in various ways. Specifically, we designed a method to construct a heterogeneous graph for each module by dividing the spatial relationship between sensors into static and dynamic modules. We propose a network decentralization attention based heterogeneity-aware graph convolution network (HAGCN) method that aggregates the hidden states of adjacent nodes by considering the importance of each channel in a heterogeneous graph. Experimental results on real traffic datasets verified the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving a 6.35% improvement over the existing model and realizing state-of-the-art prediction performance.
Impact analysis of recovery cases due to COVID19 using LSTM deep learning model
Haque, Md Ershadul, Hoque, Samiul
The present world is badly affected by novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Using medical kits to identify the coronavirus affected persons are very slow. What happens in the next, nobody knows. The world is facing erratic problem and do not know what will happen in near future. This paper is trying to make prognosis of the coronavirus recovery cases using LSTM (Long Short Term Memory). This work exploited data of 258 regions, their latitude and longitude and the number of death of 403 days ranging from 22-01-2020 to 27-02-2021. Specifically, advanced deep learning-based algorithms known as the LSTM, play a great effect on extracting highly essential features for time series data (TSD) analysis.There are lots of methods which already use to analyze propagation prediction. The main task of this paper culminates in analyzing the spreading of Coronavirus across worldwide recovery cases using LSTM deep learning-based architectures.
Drone Delivery in Africa Zipline and Jumia
Africa led the world in medical drone delivery. Now, instant logistics leader Zipline announced a partnership with African e-commerce platform Jumia that will see the integration of Zipline's delivery system with Jumia's distribution network for the deployment of automated, on-demand delivery for e-commerce in Africa. "Using the latest instant logistics technology will allow Jumia to offer our consumers on-demand delivery of the products they need – instantly," said Apoorva Kumar, EVP Jumia, Group COO. "Whether they're ordering electronics, fashion, health, and beauty, or other categories, Zipline's instant logistics system will provide fast and convenient access. This will support Jumia's commitment to sustainability and innovation and provide much-needed access to rural and remote areas where conventional delivery services have challenges." A trial period was conducted across a variety of use cases with a range of assorted products, covering up to 2,500km in testing.
Liberia plans biometric voter registry with enrollment beginning in December
NEC Chairperson Davidetta Browne Lansanah said during a press conference that portable tablets with fingerprint scanners will be used to capture thumbprints for a biometric voter registry, The New Dawn Liberia reports. The biometrics could also be used for deduplication and the prevention of impersonation. Facial images will also be collected, and the NEC will attempt to reduce the volume of incorrect voter data in the system. Following deduplication, biometric voter registry cards will be issued from registration centers. A biometric voter registration initiative is slated to start on December 15, 2022, and conclude on March 17, 2023.
Fraud Detection Using Optimized Machine Learning Tools Under Imbalance Classes
Isangediok, Mary, Gajamannage, Kelum
Fraud detection is a challenging task due to the changing nature of fraud patterns over time and the limited availability of fraud examples to learn such sophisticated patterns. Thus, fraud detection with the aid of smart versions of machine learning (ML) tools is essential to assure safety. Fraud detection is a primary ML classification task; however, the optimum performance of the corresponding ML tool relies on the usage of the best hyperparameter values. Moreover, classification under imbalanced classes is quite challenging as it causes poor performance in minority classes, which most ML classification techniques ignore. Thus, we investigate four state-of-the-art ML techniques, namely, logistic regression, decision trees, random forest, and extreme gradient boost, that are suitable for handling imbalance classes to maximize precision and simultaneously reduce false positives. First, these classifiers are trained on two original benchmark unbalanced fraud detection datasets, namely, phishing website URLs and fraudulent credit card transactions. Then, three synthetically balanced datasets are produced for each original data set by implementing the sampling frameworks, namely, RandomUnderSampler, SMOTE, and SMOTEENN. The optimum hyperparameters for all the 16 experiments are revealed using the method RandomzedSearchCV. The validity of the 16 approaches in the context of fraud detection is compared using two benchmark performance metrics, namely, area under the curve of receiver operating characteristics (AUC ROC) and area under the curve of precision and recall (AUC PR). For both phishing website URLs and credit card fraud transaction datasets, the results indicate that extreme gradient boost trained on the original data shows trustworthy performance in the imbalanced dataset and manages to outperform the other three methods in terms of both AUC ROC and AUC PR.
IoT Book Bot
Datta, Souvik, Kundu, Mangolik, Choudhury, Ratnadeep Das, P, Sriramalakshmi, VT, Sreedevi
In order to ease the process of library management many technologies have been adopted but most of them focus on inventory management. There has hardly been any progress of automation in the field of issuing and returning books to the library on time. In colleges and schools, hostellers often forget to timely return the issued books back to the library. To solve the above issue and to ensure timely submission of the issued books, this work develops a Book-Bot which solves these complexities. The bot can commute from point A to point B, scan and verify QR Codes and Barcodes. The bot will have a certain payload capacity for carrying books. The QR code and Barcode scanning will be enabled by a Pi Camera, OpenCV and Raspberry Pi, thus making the exchange of books safe and secure. The odometry maneuvers of the bot will be controlled manually via a Blynk App. This paper focuses on how human intervention can be reduced and automates the issue part of library management system with the help of a bot.
Iran arms over 50 cities with defense system amid heightened tension with US
Fox News chief Washington correspondent Mike Emanuel reports on an Iranian warship intercepting American drones only to return them the following morning on'Special Report.' Iran has armed 51 cities and towns with a civil defense system aimed to respond to any foreign attack as tensions with the U.S. have mounted in recent weeks. The defenses will enable Iran's arms forces to "identify and monitor threats by using round-the-clock software according to the type of the threat and risk," Deputy Defense Minister General Mehdi Farahi said Saturday, according to a Reuters report. "These days, depending on the strength of countries, the form of battles has become more complicated," he added. Farahi did not name any specific countries Tehran could be targeted by but noted that conventional warfare has largely been replaced by cyber, biological and radioactive attack tactics.
Model-Free Deep Reinforcement Learning in Software-Defined Networks
Borchjes, Luke, Nyirenda, Clement, Leenen, Louise
This paper compares two deep reinforcement learning approaches for cyber security in software defined networking. Neural Episodic Control to Deep Q-Network has been implemented and compared with that of Double Deep Q-Networks. The two algorithms are implemented in a format similar to that of a zero-sum game. A two-tailed T-test analysis is done on the two game results containing the amount of turns taken for the defender to win. Another comparison is done on the game scores of the agents in the respective games. The analysis is done to determine which algorithm is the best in game performer and whether there is a significant difference between them, demonstrating if one would have greater preference over the other. It was found that there is no significant statistical difference between the two approaches.
VL-BEiT: Generative Vision-Language Pretraining
Bao, Hangbo, Wang, Wenhui, Dong, Li, Wei, Furu
We introduce a vision-language foundation model called VL-BEiT, which is a bidirectional multimodal Transformer learned by generative pretraining. Our minimalist solution conducts masked prediction on both monomodal and multimodal data with a shared Transformer. Specifically, we perform masked vision-language modeling on image-text pairs, masked language modeling on texts, and masked image modeling on images. VL-BEiT is learned from scratch with one unified pretraining task, one shared backbone, and one-stage training. Our method is conceptually simple and empirically effective. Experimental results show that VL-BEiT obtains strong results on various vision-language benchmarks, such as visual question answering, visual reasoning, and image-text retrieval. Moreover, our method learns transferable visual features, achieving competitive performance on image classification, and semantic segmentation.
Low-Power Hardware-Based Deep-Learning Diagnostics Support Case Study
Sethi, Khushal, Parmar, Vivek, Suri, Manan
Deep learning research has generated widespread interest leading to emergence of a large variety of technological innovations and applications. As significant proportion of deep learning research focuses on vision based applications, there exists a potential for using some of these techniques to enable low-power portable health-care diagnostic support solutions. In this paper, we propose an embedded-hardware-based implementation of microscopy diagnostic support system for PoC case study on: (a) Malaria in thick blood smears, (b) Tuberculosis in sputum samples, and (c) Intestinal parasite infection in stool samples. We use a Squeeze-Net based model to reduce the network size and computation time. We also utilize the Trained Quantization technique to further reduce memory footprint of the learned models. This enables microscopy-based detection of pathogens that classifies with laboratory expert level accuracy as a standalone embedded hardware platform. The proposed implementation is 6x more power-efficient compared to conventional CPU-based implementation and has an inference time of $\sim$ 3 ms/sample.