This paper presents the design, implementation, and verification of a blockchain-based online electronic voting system that ensures accuracy and reliability in electronic voting and its application to various types of voting using blockchain technologies, such as distributed ledgers and smart contracts. Specifically, in this study, the connection between the electronic voting system and blockchain nodes is simplified using the REST API design, and the voting opening and counting information is designed to store the latest values in the distributed ledger in JSON format, using a smart contract that cannot be falsified. The developed electronic voting system can provide blockchain authentication, secret voting, forgery prevention, ballot verification, and push notification functions, all of which are currently not supported in existing services. Furthermore, the developed system demonstrates excellence on all evaluation items, including 101 transactions per second (TPS) of blockchain online authentication, 57.6 TPS of secret voting services, 250 TPS of forgery prevention cases, 547 TPS of read transaction processing, and 149 TPS of write transaction processing, along with 100% ballot verification service, secret ballot authentication, and encryption accuracy. Functional and performance verifications were obtained through an external test certification agency in South Korea. Our design allows for blockchain authentication, non-forgery of ballot counting data, and secret voting through blockchain-based distributed ledger technology. In addition, we demonstrate how existing electronic voting systems can be easily converted to blockchain-based electronic voting systems by applying a blockchain-linked REST API. This study greatly contributes to enabling electronic voting using blockchain technology through cost reductions, information restoration, prevention of misrepresentation, and transparency enhancement for a variety of different forms of voting.

Given a graph G=(V, E), where V and E are vertex and edge sets of G, and a subset V_NT of vertices called a non-terminal set, a spanning tree with a non-terminal set V_NT, denoted by STNT, is a connected and acyclic spanning subgraph of G that contains all vertices of V where each vertex in a non-terminal set is not a leaf. On general graphs, the problem of finding an STNT of G is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we show that if G is a circular-arc graph then finding an STNT of G is polynomially solvable with respect to the number of vertices.

Nowadays, a rapid increase of demand on high-performance computation causes the enthusiastic research activities regarding massively parallel systems. An interconnection network in a massively parallel system interconnects a huge number of processing elements so that they can cooperate to process tasks by communicating among others. By regarding a processing element and a link between a pair of processing elements as a node and an edge, respectively, many problems with respect to communication and/or routing in an interconnection network are reducible to the problems in the graph theory. For interconnection networks of the massively parallel systems, many topologies have been proposed so far. The hypercube is a very popular topology and it has many variants. The bicube is a such topology and it can interconnect the same number of nodes with the same degree as the hypercube while its diameter is almost half of that of the hypercube. In addition, the bicube keeps the node-symmetric property. Hence, we focus on the bicube and propose an algorithm that gives a minimal or shortest path between an arbitrary pair of nodes. We give a proof of correctness of the algorithm and demonstrate its execution.

As a kind of marine vehicles, Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV) are widely used in military and civilian fields because of their low cost, good concealment, strong mobility and high speed. High-precision detection of obstacles plays an important role in USV autonomous navigation, which ensures its subsequent path planning. In order to further improve obstacle detection performance, we propose an encoder-decoder architecture named Fusion Refinement Network (FRN). The encoder part with a deeper network structure enables it to extract more rich visual features. In particular, a dilated convolution layer is used in the encoder for obtaining a large range of obstacle features in complex marine environment. The decoder part achieves the multiple path feature fusion. Attention Refinement Modules (ARM) are added to optimize features, and a learnable fusion algorithm called Feature Fusion Module (FFM) is used to fuse visual information. Experimental validation results on three different datasets with real marine images show that FRN is superior to state-of-the-art semantic segmentation networks in performance evaluation. And the MIoU and MPA of the FRN can peak at 97.01% and 98.37% respectively. Moreover, FRN could maintain a high accuracy with only 27.67M parameters, which is much smaller than the latest obstacle detection network (WaSR) for USV.

In recent years, there has been an increasing trend of applying artificial intelligence in many different fields, which has a profound and direct impact on human life. Consequently, this raises the need to understand the principles of model making predictions. Since most current high-precision models are black boxes, neither the AI scientist nor the end-user profoundly understands what is happening inside these models. Therefore, many algorithms are studied to explain AI models, especially those in the image classification problem in computer vision such as LIME, CAM, GradCAM. However, these algorithms still have limitations, such as LIME's long execution time and CAM's confusing interpretation of concreteness and clarity. Therefore, in this paper, we will propose a new method called Segmentation - Class Activation Mapping (SeCAM)/ This method combines the advantages of these algorithms above while at simultaneously overcoming their disadvantages. We tested this algorithm with various models, including ResNet50, InceptionV3, and VGG16 from ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) data set. Outstanding results were achieved when the algorithm has met all the requirements for a specific explanation in a remarkably short space of time.

We investigate a problem of finding the minimum, in which each user has a real value, and we want to estimate the minimum of these values under the local differential privacy constraint. We reveal that this problem is fundamentally difficult, and we cannot construct a consistent mechanism in the worst case. Instead of considering the worst case, we aim to construct a private mechanism whose error rate is adaptive to the easiness of estimation of the minimum. As a measure of easiness, we introduce a parameter α that characterizes the fatness of the minimum-side tail of the user data distribution. As a result, we reveal that the mechanism can achieve O((ln⁶N/ε²N)^1/2α) error without knowledge of α and the error rate is near-optimal in the sense that any mechanism incurs Ω((1/ε²N)^1/2α) error. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our mechanism outperforms a naive mechanism by empirical evaluations on synthetic datasets. Also, we conducted experiments on the MovieLens dataset and a purchase history dataset and demonstrate that our algorithm achieves Õ((1/N)^1/2α) error adaptively to α.

Recently several researchers have proposed various methods to build intelligent stock trading and portfolio management systems using rapid advancements in artificial intelligence including machine learning techniques. However, existing technical analysis-based stock price prediction studies primarily depend on price change or price-related moving average patterns, and information related to trading volume is only used as an auxiliary indicator. This study focuses on the effect of changes in trading volume on stock prices and proposes a novel method for short-term stock price predictions based on trading volume patterns. Two rapid volume decrease patterns are defined based on the combinations of multiple volume moving averages. The dataset filtered using these patterns is learned through the supervised learning of neural networks. Experimental results based on the data from Korea Composite Stock Price Index and Korean Securities Dealers Automated Quotation, show that the proposed prediction system can achieve a trading performance that significantly exceeds the market average.

Service mining aims to use process mining for the analysis of services, making it possible to discover, analyze, and improve service processes. In the context of Web services, the recording of all kinds of events related to activities is possible, which can be used to extract new information of service processes. However, the distributed nature of the services tends to generate large-scale service event logs, which complicates the discovery and analysis of service processes. To solve this problem, this research focus on the existing large-scale service event logs, a hybrid genetic service mining based on a trace clustering population method (HGSM) is proposed. By using trace clustering, the complex service system is divided into multiple functionally independent components, thereby simplifying the mining environment; And HGSM improves the mining efficiency of the genetic mining algorithm from the aspects of initial population quality improvement and genetic operation improvement, makes it better handle large service event logs. Experimental results demonstrate that compare with existing state-of-the-art mining methods, HGSM has better characteristics to handle large service event logs, in terms of both the mining efficiency and model quality.

A new approach for multi-target tracking in an occlusion environment is presented. In pedestrian tracking using a video camera, pedestrains must be tracked accurately and continuously in the images. However, in a crowded environment, the conventional tracking algorithm has a problem in that tracks do not continue when pedestrians are hidden behind the foreground object. In this study, we propose a robust tracking method for occlusion that introduces a degeneration hypothesis that relaxes the track hypothesis which has one measurement to one track constraint. The proposed method relaxes the hypothesis that one measurement and multiple trajectories are associated based on the endpoints of the bounding box when the predicted trajectory is approaching, therefore the continuation of the tracking is improved using the measurement in the foreground. A numerical evaluation using MOT (Multiple Object Tracking) image data sets is performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Noninvasive recognition is an important trend in diabetes recognition. Unfortunately, the accuracy obtained from the conventional noninvasive recognition methods is low. This paper proposes a novel Diabetes Noninvasive Recognition method via the plantar pressure image and improved Capsule Network (DNR-CapsNet). The input of the proposed method is a plantar pressure image, and the output is the recognition result: healthy or possibly diabetes. The ResNet18 is used as the backbone of the convolutional layers to convert pixel intensities to local features in the proposed DNR-CapsNet. Then, the PrimaryCaps layer, SecondaryCaps layer, and DiabetesCaps layer are developed to achieve the diabetes recognition. The semantic fusion and locality-constrained dynamic routing are also developed to further improve the recognition accuracy in our method. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method has a better performance on diabetes noninvasive recognition than the state-of-the-art methods.

In the neck part of a two-stage object detection network, feature fusion is generally carried out in either a top-down or bottom-up manner. However, two types of imbalance may exist: feature imbalance in the neck of the model and gradient imbalance in the region of interest extraction layer due to the scale changes of objects. The deeper the network is, the more abstract the learned features are, that is to say, more semantic information can be extracted. However, the extracted image background, spatial location, and other resolution information are less. In contrast, the shallow part can learn little semantic information, but a lot of spatial location information. We propose the Both Ends to Centre to Multiple Layers (BEtM) feature fusion method to solve the feature imbalance problem in the neck and a Multi-level Region of Interest Feature Extraction (MRoIE) layer to solve the gradient imbalance problem. In combination with the Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (R-CNN) framework, our Balanced Feature Fusion (BFF) method offers significantly improved network performance compared with the Faster R-CNN architecture. On the MS COCO 2017 dataset, it achieves an average precision (AP) that is 1.9 points and 3.2 points higher than those of the Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) Faster R-CNN framework and the Generic Region of Interest Extractor (GRoIE) framework, respectively.

Traditional pipeline methods for task-oriented dialogue systems are designed individually and expensively. Existing memory augmented end-to-end methods directly map the inputs to outputs and achieve promising results. However, the most existing end-to-end solutions store the dialogue history and knowledge base (KB) information in the same memory and represent KB information in the form of KB triples, making the memory reader's reasoning on the memory more difficult, which makes the system difficult to retrieve the correct information from the memory to generate a response. Some methods introduce many manual annotations to strengthen reasoning. To reduce the use of manual annotations, while strengthening reasoning, we propose a hierarchical memory model (HM2Seq) for task-oriented systems. HM2Seq uses a hierarchical memory to separate the dialogue history and KB information into two memories and stores KB in KB rows, then we use memory rows pointer combined with an entity decoder to perform hierarchical reasoning over memory. The experimental results on two publicly available task-oriented dialogue datasets confirm our hypothesis and show the outstanding performance of our HM2Seq by outperforming the baselines.

Fault localization analyzes the runtime information of two classes of test cases (i.e., passing test cases and failing test cases) to identify suspicious statements potentially responsible for a failure. However, the failing test cases are always far fewer than passing test cases in reality, and the class imbalance problem will affect fault localization effectiveness. To address this issue, we propose a data augmentation approach using conditional variational auto-encoder to synthesize new failing test cases for FL. The experimental results show that our approach significantly improves six state-of-the-art fault localization techniques.

Feature selection based on particle swarm optimization is often employed for promoting the performance of artificial intelligence algorithms. However, its interpretability has been lacking of concrete research. Improving the stability of the feature selection method is a way to effectively improve its interpretability. A novel feature selection approach named Interpretable Particle Swarm Optimization is developed in this paper. It uses four data perturbation ways and three filter feature selection methods to obtain stable feature subsets, and adopts Fuch map to convert them to initial particles. Besides, it employs similarity mutation strategy, which applies Tanimoto distance to choose the nearest 1/3 individuals to the previous particles to implement mutation. Eleven representative algorithms and four typical datasets are taken to make a comprehensive comparison with our proposed approach. Accuracy, F1, precision and recall rate indicators are used as classification measures, and extension of Kuncheva indicator is employed as the stability measure. Experiments show that our method has a better interpretability than the compared evolutionary algorithms. Furthermore, the results of classification measures demonstrate that the proposed approach has an excellent comprehensive classification performance.

Query-by-example spoken term detection (QbE-STD) is a task of using speech queries to match utterances, and the acoustic word embedding (AWE) method of generating fixed-length representations for speech segments has shown high performance and efficiency in recent work. We propose an AWE training method using a label-adversarial network to reduce the interference information learned during AWE training. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements on multilingual and zero-resource test sets.