There is a global aging population requiring the need for the right tools that can enable older adults' greater independence and the ability to age at home, as well as assist healthcare workers. It is feasible to achieve this objective by building predictive models that assist healthcare workers in monitoring and analyzing older adults' behavioral, functional, and psychological data. To develop such models, a large amount of multimodal sensor data is typically required. In this paper, we propose MAISON, a scalable cloud-based platform of commercially available smart devices capable of collecting desired multimodal sensor data from older adults and patients living in their own homes. The MAISON platform is novel due to its ability to collect a greater variety of data modalities than the existing platforms, as well as its new features that result in seamless data collection and ease of use for older adults who may not be digitally literate. We demonstrated the feasibility of the MAISON platform with two older adults discharged home from a large rehabilitation center. The results indicate that the MAISON platform was able to collect and store sensor data in a cloud without functional glitches or performance degradation. This paper will also discuss the challenges faced during the development of the platform and data collection in the homes of older adults. MAISON is a novel platform designed to collect multimodal data and facilitate the development of predictive models for detecting key health indicators, including social isolation, depression, and functional decline, and is feasible to use with older adults in the community.

近年来，虚拟学习已成为传统课堂教学的替代方法。学生参与虚拟学习可能会对满足学习目标和计划辍学风险产生重大影响。在虚拟学习环境中，有许多专门针对学生参与度（SE）的测量工具。在这项关键综述中，我们分析了这些作品，并从不同的参与定义和测量量表上突出了不一致之处。现有研究人员之间的这种多样性在比较不同的注释和构建可推广的预测模型时可能会出现问题。我们进一步讨论了有关参与注释和设计缺陷的问题。我们根据我们定义的七个参与注释的七个维度分析现有的SE注释量表，包括来源，用于注释的数据模式，注释发生的时间，注释发生的时间段，抽象，组合和组合水平的时间段，定量。令人惊讶的发现之一是，在SE测量中，很少有审查的数据集使用了现有的精神法法学验证量表中的注释中。最后，我们讨论了除虚拟学习以外的其他一些范围，这些量表具有用于测量虚拟学习中SE的潜力。

In education and intervention programs, user engagement has been identified as a major factor in successful program completion. Automatic measurement of user engagement provides helpful information for instructors to meet program objectives and individualize program delivery. In this paper, we present a novel approach for video-based engagement measurement in virtual learning programs. We propose to use affect states, continuous values of valence and arousal extracted from consecutive video frames, along with a new latent affective feature vector and behavioral features for engagement measurement. Deep-learning sequential models are trained and validated on the extracted frame-level features. In addition, due to the fact that engagement is an ordinal variable, we develop the ordinal versions of the above models in order to address the problem of engagement measurement as an ordinal classification problem. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method on the only two publicly available video engagement measurement datasets, DAiSEE and EmotiW-EW, containing videos of students in online learning programs. Our experiments show a state-of-the-art engagement level classification accuracy of 67.4% on the DAiSEE dataset, and a regression mean squared error of 0.0508 on the EmotiW-EW dataset. Our ablation study shows the effectiveness of incorporating affect states and ordinality of engagement in engagement measurement.

Federated Learning (FL) and Split Learning (SL) are privacy-preserving Machine-Learning (ML) techniques that enable training ML models over data distributed among clients without requiring direct access to their raw data. Existing FL and SL approaches work on horizontally or vertically partitioned data and cannot handle sequentially partitioned data where segments of multiple-segment sequential data are distributed across clients. In this paper, we propose a novel federated split learning framework, FedSL, to train models on distributed sequential data. The most common ML models to train on sequential data are Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). Since the proposed framework is privacy-preserving, segments of multiple-segment sequential data cannot be shared between clients or between clients and server. To circumvent this limitation, we propose a novel SL approach tailored for RNNs. A RNN is split into sub-networks, and each sub-network is trained on one client containing single segments of multiple-segment training sequences. During local training, the sub-networks on different clients communicate with each other to capture latent dependencies between consecutive segments of multiple-segment sequential data on different clients, but without sharing raw data or complete model parameters. After training local sub-networks with local sequential data segments, all clients send their sub-networks to a federated server where sub-networks are aggregated to generate a global model. The experimental results on simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method successfully trains models on distributed sequential data, while preserving privacy, and outperforms previous FL and centralized learning approaches in terms of achieving higher accuracy in fewer communication rounds.

Existing automated techniques for software documentation typically attempt to reason between two main sources of information: code and natural language. However, this reasoning process is often complicated by the lexical gap between more abstract natural language and more structured programming languages. One potential bridge for this gap is the Graphical User Interface (GUI), as GUIs inherently encode salient information about underlying program functionality into rich, pixel-based data representations. This paper offers one of the first comprehensive empirical investigations into the connection between GUIs and functional, natural language descriptions of software. First, we collect, analyze, and open source a large dataset of functional GUI descriptions consisting of 45,998 descriptions for 10,204 screenshots from popular Android applications. The descriptions were obtained from human labelers and underwent several quality control mechanisms. To gain insight into the representational potential of GUIs, we investigate the ability of four Neural Image Captioning models to predict natural language descriptions of varying granularity when provided a screenshot as input. We evaluate these models quantitatively, using common machine translation metrics, and qualitatively through a large-scale user study. Finally, we offer learned lessons and a discussion of the potential shown by multimodal models to enhance future techniques for automated software documentation.

In this paper, we reduce the complexity of approximating the correlation clustering problem from $O(m\times\left( 2+ \alpha (G) \right)+n)$ to $O(m+n)$ for any given value of $\varepsilon$ for a complete signed graph with $n$ vertices and $m$ positive edges where $\alpha(G)$ is the arboricity of the graph. Our approach gives the same output as the original algorithm and makes it possible to implement the algorithm in a full dynamic setting where edge sign flipping and vertex addition/removal are allowed. Constructing this index costs $O(m)$ memory and $O(m\times\alpha(G))$ time. We also studied the structural properties of the non-agreement measure used in the approximation algorithm. The theoretical results are accompanied by a full set of experiments concerning seven real-world graphs. These results shows superiority of our index-based algorithm to the non-index one by a decrease of %34 in time on average.

This paper proposes a novel self-supervised based Cut-and-Paste GAN to perform foreground object segmentation and generate realistic composite images without manual annotations. We accomplish this goal by a simple yet effective self-supervised approach coupled with the U-Net based discriminator. The proposed method extends the ability of the standard discriminators to learn not only the global data representations via classification (real/fake) but also learn semantic and structural information through pseudo labels created using the self-supervised task. The proposed method empowers the generator to create meaningful masks by forcing it to learn informative per-pixel as well as global image feedback from the discriminator. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the standard benchmark datasets.

Machine learning models are typically evaluated by computing similarity with reference annotations and trained by maximizing similarity with such. Especially in the bio-medical domain, annotations are subjective and suffer from low inter- and intra-rater reliability. Since annotations only reflect the annotation entity's interpretation of the real world, this can lead to sub-optimal predictions even though the model achieves high similarity scores. Here, the theoretical concept of Peak Ground Truth (PGT) is introduced. PGT marks the point beyond which an increase in similarity with the reference annotation stops translating to better Real World Model Performance (RWMP). Additionally, a quantitative technique to approximate PGT by computing inter- and intra-rater reliability is proposed. Finally, three categories of PGT-aware strategies to evaluate and improve model performance are reviewed.

Finding and localizing the conceptual changes in two scenes in terms of the presence or removal of objects in two images belonging to the same scene at different times in special care applications is of great significance. This is mainly due to the fact that addition or removal of important objects for some environments can be harmful. As a result, there is a need to design a program that locates these differences using machine vision. The most important challenge of this problem is the change in lighting conditions and the presence of shadows in the scene. Therefore, the proposed methods must be resistant to these challenges. In this article, a method based on deep convolutional neural networks using transfer learning is introduced, which is trained with an intelligent data synthesis process. The results of this method are tested and presented on the dataset provided for this purpose. It is shown that the presented method is more efficient than other methods and can be used in a variety of real industrial environments.

Simulation-based falsification is a practical testing method to increase confidence that the system will meet safety requirements. Because full-fidelity simulations can be computationally demanding, we investigate the use of simulators with different levels of fidelity. As a first step, we express the overall safety specification in terms of environmental parameters and structure this safety specification as an optimization problem. We propose a multi-fidelity falsification framework using Bayesian optimization, which is able to determine at which level of fidelity we should conduct a safety evaluation in addition to finding possible instances from the environment that cause the system to fail. This method allows us to automatically switch between inexpensive, inaccurate information from a low-fidelity simulator and expensive, accurate information from a high-fidelity simulator in a cost-effective way. Our experiments on various environments in simulation demonstrate that multi-fidelity Bayesian optimization has falsification performance comparable to single-fidelity Bayesian optimization but with much lower cost.