Deep learning of artificial neural networks (ANNs) is creating highly functional processes that are, unfortunately, nearly as hard to interpret as their biological counterparts. Identification of functional modules in natural brains plays an important role in cognitive and neuroscience alike, and can be carried out using a wide range of technologies such as fMRI, EEG/ERP, MEG, or calcium imaging. However, we do not have such robust methods at our disposal when it comes to understanding functional modules in artificial neural networks. Ideally, understanding which parts of an artificial neural network perform what function might help us to address a number of vexing problems in ANN research, such as catastrophic forgetting and overfitting. Furthermore, revealing a network's modularity could improve our trust in them by making these black boxes more transparent. Here, we introduce a new information-theoretic concept that proves useful in understanding and analyzing a network's functional modularity: the relay information $I_R$. The relay information measures how much information groups of neurons that participate in a particular function (modules) relay from inputs to outputs. Combined with a greedy search algorithm, relay information can be used to identify computational modules in neural networks. We also show that the functionality of modules correlates with the amount of relay information they carry.

Access plan recommendation is a query optimization approach that executes new queries using prior created query execution plans (QEPs). The query optimizer divides the query space into clusters in the mentioned method. However, traditional clustering algorithms take a significant amount of execution time for clustering such large datasets. The MapReduce distributed computing model provides efficient solutions for storing and processing vast quantities of data. Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop frameworks are used in the present investigation to cluster different sizes of query datasets in the MapReduce-based access plan recommendation method. The performance evaluation is performed based on execution time. The results of the experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of parallel query clustering in achieving high scalability. Furthermore, Apache Spark achieved better performance than Apache Hadoop, reaching an average speedup of 2x.

Multiple convolutional neural network (CNN) classifiers have been proposed for electroencephalogram (EEG) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However, CNN models have been found vulnerable to universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs), which are small and example-independent, yet powerful enough to degrade the performance of a CNN model, when added to a benign example. This paper proposes a novel total loss minimization (TLM) approach to generate UAPs for EEG-based BCIs. Experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of TLM on three popular CNN classifiers for both target and non-target attacks. We also verified the transferability of UAPs in EEG-based BCI systems. To our knowledge, this is the first study on UAPs of CNN classifiers in EEG-based BCIs. UAPs are easy to construct, and can attack BCIs in real-time, exposing a potentially critical security concern of BCIs.