Advances in image processing and analysis as well as machine learning techniques have contributed to the use of biometric recognition systems in daily people tasks. These tasks range from simple access to mobile devices to tagging friends in photos shared on social networks and complex financial operations on self-service devices for banking transactions. In China, the use of these systems goes beyond personal use becoming a country's government policy with the objective of monitoring the behavior of its population. On July 05th 2021, the Brazilian government announced acquisition of a biometric recognition system to be used nationwide. In the opposite direction to China, Europe and some American cities have already started the discussion about the legality of using biometric systems in public places, even banning this practice in their territory. In order to open a deeper discussion about the risks and legality of using these systems, this work exposes the vulnerabilities of biometric recognition systems, focusing its efforts on the face modality. Furthermore, it shows how it is possible to fool a biometric system through a well-known presentation attack approach in the literature called morphing. Finally, a list of ten concerns was created to start the discussion about the security of citizen data and data privacy law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Dataset scaling, also known as normalization, is an essential preprocessing step in a machine learning pipeline. It is aimed at adjusting attributes scales in a way that they all vary within the same range. This transformation is known to improve the performance of classification models, but there are several scaling techniques to choose from, and this choice is not generally done carefully. In this paper, we execute a broad experiment comparing the impact of 5 scaling techniques on the performances of 20 classification algorithms among monolithic and ensemble models, applying them to 82 publicly available datasets with varying imbalance ratios. Results show that the choice of scaling technique matters for classification performance, and the performance difference between the best and the worst scaling technique is relevant and statistically significant in most cases. They also indicate that choosing an inadequate technique can be more detrimental to classification performance than not scaling the data at all. We also show how the performance variation of an ensemble model, considering different scaling techniques, tends to be dictated by that of its base model. Finally, we discuss the relationship between a model's sensitivity to the choice of scaling technique and its performance and provide insights into its applicability on different model deployment scenarios. Full results and source code for the experiments in this paper are available in a GitHub repository.\footnote{https://github.com/amorimlb/scaling\_matters}

深度学习已在许多神经影像应用中有效。但是，在许多情况下，捕获与小血管疾病有关的信息的成像序列的数量不足以支持数据驱动的技术。此外，基于队列的研究可能并不总是具有用于准确病变检测的最佳或必需成像序列。因此，有必要确定哪些成像序列对于准确检测至关重要。在这项研究中，我们旨在找到磁共振成像（MRI）序列的最佳组合，以深入基于学习的肿瘤周围空间（EPV）。为此，我们实施了一个有效的轻巧U-NET，适用于EPVS检测，并全面研究了来自易感加权成像（SWI），流体侵入的反转恢复（FLAIR），T1加权（T1W）和T2的不同信息组合 - 加权（T2W）MRI序列。我们得出的结论是，T2W MRI对于准确的EPV检测最为重要，并且在深神经网络中掺入SWI，FLAIR和T1W MRI可能会使精度的提高无关。

我们的目标是量化热带旋风（TC）卫星图像中的时空模式是否以及如何量化，信号是即将发生的快速强度变化事件。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一个新的非参数测试，对图像的时间序列和一系列二进制事件标签之间的关联测试。我们询问在事件之前与非事件之前的图像的24小时序列之间的分布差异（相关但分布相同）之间是否存在差异。通过将统计检验重写为回归问题，我们利用神经网络来推断TC对流的结构演变模式，这些模式代表了促进快速强度变化事件的导致。附近序列之间的依赖性通过估计标签系列边际分布的自举程序来处理。我们证明，只要标签系列的分布得到充分估计，就可以保证I型错误控制，这可以通过二进制TC事件标签的广泛历史数据更容易。我们表明的经验证据表明，我们提出的方法确定了与快速强化风险相关的红外图像原型，通常以随着时间的推移深度或深化核心对流标记。这样的结果为改善快速强化的预测提供了基础。

我们提出了分析分层聚类的方法，这些聚类完全使用了树木图提供的多分辨率结构。具体地，我们提出了在聚类方法之间选择的损失，特征重要性分数和用于可视化树木图中的特征分割的图形工具。这些任务的当前方法导致信息丢失，因为它们要求用户通过在指定级别切割树木图来生成本实例的单个分区。我们提出的方法使用了树木图的全结构。所提出的方法背后的关键洞察是将树形图视为系统发育。该类比允许通过祖先状态重建向树的每个内部节点分配特征值。真实和模拟数据集提供了证据表明我们所提出的框架具有理想的结果。我们提供了实现我们方法的R包。

通过人类预报员颁发热带气旋（TC）强度预测，他们评估时空观测（例如，卫星图像）和模型输出（例如，数值天气预报，统计模型）每6小时生产预测。在这些时间约束中，绘制来自此类数据的洞察力可能具有挑战性。虽然高容量机器学习方法非常适合具有复杂序列数据的预测问题，但难以提取可解释的科学信息。在这里，我们利用强大的AI预测算法和经典的统计推理，以识别TC对流结构的演变中的模式，这导致风暴的快速增强，从而为TC行为提供了预报员和科学家。

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning setting where many clients (e.g. mobile devices or whole organizations) collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central server (e.g. service provider), while keeping the training data decentralized. FL embodies the principles of focused data collection and minimization, and can mitigate many of the systemic privacy risks and costs resulting from traditional, centralized machine learning and data science approaches. Motivated by the explosive growth in FL research, this paper discusses recent advances and presents an extensive collection of open problems and challenges.

Three main points: 1. Data Science (DS) will be increasingly important to heliophysics; 2. Methods of heliophysics science discovery will continually evolve, requiring the use of learning technologies [e.g., machine learning (ML)] that are applied rigorously and that are capable of supporting discovery; and 3. To grow with the pace of data, technology, and workforce changes, heliophysics requires a new approach to the representation of knowledge.

Image classification with small datasets has been an active research area in the recent past. However, as research in this scope is still in its infancy, two key ingredients are missing for ensuring reliable and truthful progress: a systematic and extensive overview of the state of the art, and a common benchmark to allow for objective comparisons between published methods. This article addresses both issues. First, we systematically organize and connect past studies to consolidate a community that is currently fragmented and scattered. Second, we propose a common benchmark that allows for an objective comparison of approaches. It consists of five datasets spanning various domains (e.g., natural images, medical imagery, satellite data) and data types (RGB, grayscale, multispectral). We use this benchmark to re-evaluate the standard cross-entropy baseline and ten existing methods published between 2017 and 2021 at renowned venues. Surprisingly, we find that thorough hyper-parameter tuning on held-out validation data results in a highly competitive baseline and highlights a stunted growth of performance over the years. Indeed, only a single specialized method dating back to 2019 clearly wins our benchmark and outperforms the baseline classifier.

Applying deep learning concepts from image detection and graph theory has greatly advanced protein-ligand binding affinity prediction, a challenge with enormous ramifications for both drug discovery and protein engineering. We build upon these advances by designing a novel deep learning architecture consisting of a 3-dimensional convolutional neural network utilizing channel-wise attention and two graph convolutional networks utilizing attention-based aggregation of node features. HAC-Net (Hybrid Attention-Based Convolutional Neural Network) obtains state-of-the-art results on the PDBbind v.2016 core set, the most widely recognized benchmark in the field. We extensively assess the generalizability of our model using multiple train-test splits, each of which maximizes differences between either protein structures, protein sequences, or ligand extended-connectivity fingerprints. Furthermore, we perform 10-fold cross-validation with a similarity cutoff between SMILES strings of ligands in the training and test sets, and also evaluate the performance of HAC-Net on lower-quality data. We envision that this model can be extended to a broad range of supervised learning problems related to structure-based biomolecular property prediction. All of our software is available as open source at https://github.com/gregory-kyro/HAC-Net/.