We present WildHands, a method for 3D hand pose estimation in egocentric images in the wild. This is challenging due to (a) lack of 3D hand pose annotations for images in the wild, and (b) a form of perspective distortion-induced shape ambiguity that arises in the analysis of crops around hands. For the former, we use auxiliary supervision on in-the-wild data in the form of segmentation masks & grasp labels in addition to 3D supervision available in lab datasets. For the latter, we provide spatial cues about the location of the hand crop in the camera's field of view. Our approach achieves the best 3D hand pose on the ARCTIC leaderboard and outperforms FrankMocap, a popular and robust approach for estimating hand pose in the wild, by 45.3% when evaluated on 2D hand pose on our EPIC-HandKps dataset.

The concept of digital twin (DT), which enables the creation of a programmable, digital representation of physical systems, is expected to revolutionize future industries and will lie at the heart of the vision of a future smart society, namely, Society 5.0, in which high integration between cyber (digital) and physical spaces is exploited to bring economic and societal advancements. However, the success of such a DT-driven Society 5.0 requires a synergistic convergence of artificial intelligence and networking technologies into an integrated, programmable system that can coordinate networks of DTs to effectively deliver diverse Society 5.0 services. Prior works remain restricted to either qualitative study, simple analysis or software implementations of a single DT, and thus, they cannot provide the highly synergistic integration of digital and physical spaces as required by Society 5.0. In contrast, this paper envisions a novel concept of an Internet of Federated Digital Twins (IoFDT) that holistically integrates heterogeneous and physically separated DTs representing different Society 5.0 services within a single framework and system. For this concept of IoFDT, we first introduce a hierarchical architecture that integrates federated DTs through horizontal and vertical interactions, bridging the cyber and physical spaces to unlock new possibilities. Then, we discuss the challenges of realizing IoFDT, highlighting the intricacies across communication, computing, and AI-native networks while also underscoring potential innovative solutions. Subsequently, we elaborate on the importance of the implementation of a unified IoFDT platform that integrates all technical components and orchestrates their interactions, emphasizing the necessity of practical experimental platforms with a focus on real-world applications in areas like smart mobility.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has gained widespread adoption in corporate organizations, streamlining work processes while also introducing additional maintenance tasks. Effective governance of RPA can be achieved through the reusability of RPA components. However, refactoring RPA processes poses challenges when dealing with larger development teams, outsourcing, and staff turnover. This research aims to explore the possibility of identifying similarities in RPA processes for refactoring. To address this issue, we have developed Similarity Discovering Techniques for RPA (SiDiTeR). SiDiTeR utilizes source code or process logs from RPAautomations to search for similar or identical parts within RPA processes. The techniques introduced are specifically tailored to the RPA domain. We have expanded the potential matches by introducing a dictionary feature which helps identify different activities that produce the same output, and this has led to improved results in the RPA domain. Through our analysis, we have discovered 655 matches across 156 processes, with the longest match spanning 163 occurrences in 15 processes. Process similarity within the RPA domain proves to be a viable solution for mitigating the maintenance burden associated with RPA. This underscores the significance of process similarity in the RPA domain.

Monocular 3D human pose estimation (3D-HPE) is an inherently ambiguous task, as a 2D pose in an image might originate from different possible 3D poses. Yet, most 3D-HPE methods rely on regression models, which assume a one-to-one mapping between inputs and outputs. In this work, we provide theoretical and empirical evidence that, because of this ambiguity, common regression models are bound to predict topologically inconsistent poses, and that traditional evaluation metrics, such as the MPJPE, P-MPJPE and PCK, are insufficient to assess this aspect. As a solution, we propose ManiPose, a novel manifold-constrained multi-hypothesis model capable of proposing multiple candidate 3D poses for each 2D input, together with their corresponding plausibility. Unlike previous multi-hypothesis approaches, our solution is completely supervised and does not rely on complex generative models, thus greatly facilitating its training and usage. Furthermore, by constraining our model to lie within the human pose manifold, we can guarantee the consistency of all hypothetical poses predicted with our approach, which was not possible in previous works. We illustrate the usefulness of ManiPose in a synthetic 1D-to-2D lifting setting and demonstrate on real-world datasets that it outperforms state-of-the-art models in pose consistency by a large margin, while still reaching competitive MPJPE performance.

Time series refer to a series of data points indexed in time order, which can be found in various fields, e.g., transportation, healthcare, and finance. Accurate time series forecasting can enhance optimization planning and decision-making support. Time series have multi-scale characteristics, i.e., different temporal patterns at different scales, which presents a challenge for time series forecasting. In this paper, we propose TPRNN, a Top-down Pyramidal Recurrent Neural Network for time series forecasting. We first construct subsequences of different scales from the input, forming a pyramid structure. Then by executing a multi-scale information interaction module from top to bottom, we model both the temporal dependencies of each scale and the influences of subsequences of different scales, resulting in a complete modeling of multi-scale temporal patterns in time series. Experiments on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that TPRNN has achieved the state-of-the-art performance with an average improvement of 8.13% in MSE compared to the best baseline.

This paper addresses the often overlooked issue of fairness in the autonomous driving domain, particularly in vision-based perception and prediction systems, which play a pivotal role in the overall functioning of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). We focus our analysis on biases present in some of the most commonly used visual datasets for training person and vehicle detection systems. We introduce an annotation methodology and a specialised annotation tool, both designed to annotate protected attributes of agents in visual datasets. We validate our methodology through an inter-rater agreement analysis and provide the distribution of attributes across all datasets. These include annotations for the attributes age, sex, skin tone, group, and means of transport for more than 90K people, as well as vehicle type, colour, and car type for over 50K vehicles. Generally, diversity is very low for most attributes, with some groups, such as children, wheelchair users, or personal mobility vehicle users, being extremely underrepresented in the analysed datasets. The study contributes significantly to efforts to consider fairness in the evaluation of perception and prediction systems for AVs. This paper follows reproducibility principles. The annotation tool, scripts and the annotated attributes can be accessed publicly at https://github.com/ec-jrc/humaint_annotator.

Modern Code Review (MCR) is an informal tool-assisted quality assurance practice. It relies on the asynchronous communication among the authors of code changes and reviewers, who are developers that provide feedback. However, from candidate developers, some are able to provide better feedback than others given a particular context. The selection of reviewers is thus an important task, which can benefit from automated support. Many approaches have been proposed in this direction, using for example data from code review repositories to recommend reviewers. In this paper, we propose the use of team-related features to improve the performance of predictions that are helpful to build code reviewer recommenders, with our target predictions being the identification of reviewers that would participate in a review and the provided amount of feedback. We evaluate the prediction power of these features, which are related to code ownership, workload, and team relationship. This evaluation was done by carefully addressing challenges imposed by the MCR domain, such as temporal aspects of the dataset and unbalanced classes. Moreover, given that it is currently unknown how much past data is needed for building MCR prediction models with acceptable performance, we explore the amount of past data used to build prediction models. Our results show that, individually, features related to code ownership have the best prediction power. However, based on feature selection, we conclude that all proposed features together with lines of code can make the best predictions for both reviewer participation and amount of feedback. Regarding the amount of past data, the timeframes of 3, 6, 9, and 12 months of data produce similar results. Therefore, models can be trained considering short timeframes, thus reducing the computational costs with negligible impact in the prediction performance ...

There is no denying that the use of Information Technology (IT) is undergoing exponential growth in today's world. This digital transformation has also given rise to a multitude of security challenges, notably in the realm of cybercrime. In response to these growing threats, public and private sectors have prioritized the strengthening of IT security measures. In light of the growing security concern, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gained prominence within the cybersecurity landscape. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of recent advancements in AI-driven threat response systems. To the best of our knowledge, the most recent survey covering the AI reaction domain was conducted in 2017. Since then, considerable literature has been published and therefore it is worth reviewing it. By means of several shared features, each of the studies is compared on a common ground. Through an analysis of the research papers conducted on a standardized basis, this survey aims to unravel the complexities and opportunities of integrating AI into cyber defense. The conclusions drawn from this collective analysis provide a comprehensive snapshot of the evolving landscape at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity. This landscape underscores the growing significance of not only anticipating and detecting threats but also responding to them effectively. Additionally, from these reviews, various research challenges for the future are presented. These challenges serve as a roadmap for researchers and practitioners in the field of AI-integrated reactive strategies.

How neuronal circuits achieve credit assignment remains a central unsolved question in systems neuroscience. Various studies have suggested plausible solutions for back-propagating error signals through multi-layer networks. These purely functionally motivated models assume distinct neuronal compartments to represent local error signals that determine the sign of synaptic plasticity. However, this explicit error modulation is inconsistent with phenomenological plasticity models in which the sign depends primarily on postsynaptic activity. Here we show how a plausible microcircuit model and Hebbian learning rule derived within an adaptive control theory framework can resolve this discrepancy. Assuming errors are encoded in top-down dis-inhibitory synaptic afferents, we show that error-modulated learning emerges naturally at the circuit level when recurrent inhibition explicitly influences Hebbian plasticity. The same learning rule accounts for experimentally observed plasticity in the absence of inhibition and performs comparably to back-propagation of error (BP) on several non-linearly separable benchmarks. Our findings bridge the gap between functional and experimentally observed plasticity rules and make concrete predictions on inhibitory modulation of excitatory plasticity.

We propose a time series forecasting method named Quantum Gramian Angular Field (QGAF). This approach merges the advantages of quantum computing technology with deep learning, aiming to enhance the precision of time series classification and forecasting. We successfully transformed stock return time series data into two-dimensional images suitable for Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) training by designing specific quantum circuits. Distinct from the classical Gramian Angular Field (GAF) approach, QGAF's uniqueness lies in eliminating the need for data normalization and inverse cosine calculations, simplifying the transformation process from time series data to two-dimensional images. To validate the effectiveness of this method, we conducted experiments on datasets from three major stock markets: the China A-share market, the Hong Kong stock market, and the US stock market. Experimental results revealed that compared to the classical GAF method, the QGAF approach significantly improved time series prediction accuracy, reducing prediction errors by an average of 25% for Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and 48% for Mean Squared Error (MSE). This research confirms the potential and promising prospects of integrating quantum computing with deep learning techniques in financial time series forecasting.