Despite the recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies showing great potential in improving transport efficiency and safety, autonomous vehicles (AVs) still face great challenges when driving in time-varying traffic flow, especially in dense and interactive situations. Meanwhile, humans have free will and usually do not make the same decisions even situated in exactly the same scenarios, leading to data-driven methods suffering from poor migratability and high search cost problems, decreasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the behavior policy. In this article, we propose a safety-first human-like decision-making (SF-HLDM) framework for AVs to drive safely, comfortably, and with social compatibility and efficiency. The framework integrates a hierarchical progressive architecture, which combines a spatial–temporal attention (STA) mechanism for other road users’ intention inference, a social compliance estimation (SCE) module for behavior regulation, and a deep evolutionary reinforcement learning (DERL) model for expanding the search space efficiently and effectively to make avoidance of falling into the local optimal trap and reduce the risk of overfitting, thus make human-like decisions with interpretability and flexibility. The SF-HLDM framework enables autonomous driving AI agents to dynamically adjust decision parameters to maintain safety margins while adhering to contextually appropriate driving behaviors at the same time. Extensive experiments in car learning to act, an open-source autonomous-driving simulator (CARLA) validate the framework’s superior performance, which enlarges the minimum time to worst-case hazards (TWHs) by 41.8% to keep a safer distance away from others, while improving the average velocity by 2.5%, reducing the average acceleration and yaw rate by 23.5% and 60.5%, respectively. The results highlight the potential of SF-HLDM to bridge the gap between machine-driven precision and human-like flexibility in AV systems, paving the way for more interpretable and socially acceptable autonomous driving solutions.

Most existing deep learning-based trajectory prediction algorithms heavily rely on human expertise, involving iterative manual tuning of their architectures and parameters to tailor prediction models for specific tasks or scenarios. This approach is not only complex to implement and inefficient, but also struggles to balance inference speed with prediction accuracy. To address this challenge, this paper innovatively proposes an improved heterogeneous multi-agent trajectory prediction algorithm utilizing graph neural architecture search. This method automatically conducts an end-to-end graph architecture search to obtain an optimal trajectory prediction model. To enhance model interpretability and its heterogeneous awareness of diverse scenarios, we design a physics- and risk-interaction-based guidance mechanism to steer the architecture search process. Furthermore, we construct a novel neural architecture search loss function, SocialMI-Loss, which comprehensively considers multiple factors such as prediction accuracy, driving region semantic constraints, and model complexity. This function is intended to guide the learning of the trajectory predictor, achieving a harmonious balance between accuracy and computational complexity. A comprehensive series of comparative experiments conducted on three large-scale autonomous driving datasets (nuScenes, Argoverse, and ApolloScape) consistently demonstrates the superior performance of our proposed method. Experimental results indicate that our framework achieves performance comparable to current state-of-the-art methods, while its automatically searched architecture remains remarkably lightweight. Our code is available at:https://github.com/Tu5tra/TrajGNAS.

The task of Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction (PTP) aims to forecast the future movement paths of pedestrians based on their past behavioral patterns, which is crucial for autonomous systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles and social robots) in path planning and decision-making processes. In recent years, with the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially in the field of deep learning, PTP has achieved remarkable breakthroughs. However, this field still faces numerous challenges and unresolved issues that require further research and exploration. This paper provides a comprehensive review and perspectives of the latest advancements in PTP methods, starting with the problem definition and method classification. Then, guided by the key issues at hand, we compare and analyze physics-based, classic Machine Learning (ML)-based, and AI-based methods, and discuss their applicability in various application scenarios. Finally, the paper provides existing datasets and performance metrics, and outlines potential research directions.

Recent methods to enhance Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for Visual Question Answering (VQA) have focused on strengthening their inference capabilities, enabling them to tackle VQA tasks independently rather than merely as aids to Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these approaches often ignore the rich commonsense knowledge inside the given VQA image sampled from the real world, limiting the full potential of VLMs. Inspired by the human top-down reasoning process, i.e., systematically exploring relevant issues to derive a comprehensive answer, this work introduces a novel, explainable multi-agent collaboration framework by leveraging the expansive knowledge of LLMs to enhance the capabilities of VLMs themselves. Our framework comprises three agents, i.e.,Responder,Seeker, andIntegrator, to collaboratively answer the given VQA question by seeking its relevant issues and generating the final answer in such a top-down reasoning process. The VLM-basedResponderagent generates the answer candidates for the question and responds to other relevant issues. TheSeekeragent, primarily based on LLM, identifies relevant issues related to the question to inform theResponderagent and constructs a Multi-View Knowledge Base (MVKB) for the given visual scene by leveraging the build-in world knowledge of LLM. TheIntegratoragent combines knowledge from theSeekeragent and theResponderagent to produce the final VQA answer. Extensive and comprehensive evaluations on diverse VQA datasets with a variety of VLMs demonstrate the superior performance and interpretability of our framework over the baseline method, e.g., 5.7% improvement on VQA-RAD and 5.2% on Winoground in the zero-shot setting without extra training cost.

Multi-image Interleaved Reasoning aims to improve Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) ability to jointly comprehend and reason across multiple images and their associated textual contexts, introducing unique challenges beyond single-image or non-interleaved multi-image tasks. While current multi-image benchmarks overlook interleaved textual contexts and neglect distinct relationships between individual images and their associated texts, enabling models to reason over multi-image interleaved data may significantly enhance their comprehension of complex scenes and better capture cross-modal correlations. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel benchmark MIR, requiring joint reasoning over multiple images accompanied by interleaved textual contexts to accurately associate image regions with corresponding texts and logically connect information across images. To enhance MLLMs ability to comprehend multi-image interleaved data, we introduce reasoning steps for each instance within the benchmark and propose a stage-wise curriculum learning strategy. This strategy follows an "easy to hard" approach, progressively guiding models from simple to complex scenarios, thereby enhancing their ability to handle challenging tasks. Extensive experiments benchmarking multiple MLLMs demonstrate that our method significantly enhances models reasoning performance on MIR and other established benchmarks. We believe that MIR will encourage further research into multi-image interleaved reasoning, facilitating advancements in MLLMs capability to handle complex inter-modal tasks.

This paper investigates the practical prescribed-time consensus (Pd-TC) for nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs) in the presence of uncertain disturbance, employing intermittent adaptive dynamic event-triggered and self-triggered controllers, respectively. A novel lemma for achieving the practical prescribed-time stability (Pd-TS) is proposed within the framework of intermittent control (IC), where a single parameter exclusively bounds the settling time. To further reduce the triggered instants, a dynamic variable is introduced to construct the dynamic event-triggered mechanism (D-ETM). Utilizing the proposed lemma, an intermittent adaptive dynamic event-triggered controller is developed by incorporating D-ETM with an intermittent adaptive control scheme, which achieves the practical Pd-TC for uncertain nonlinear MASs. Notably, the developed controller is devoid of global information, such as algebraic connectivity and system scale. Following this, an intermittent adaptive self-triggered controller is designed to eliminate the necessity for continuous monitoring. The results presented above are finally applied to Chua’s system, accompanied by a numerical example to demonstrate the efficacy of the designed controllers.

Crowd simulation plays a crucial role in the prevention and management of public safety events in cities. However, the inherent complexity and diverse nature of human behaviors present substantial challenges in developing realistic and precise simulation models. Traditional rule-based physical models are limited by their reliance on fixed physical formulas and parameters, which hinders their ability to effectively handle the complex tasks associated with crowd simulation. Although deep learning methods have emerged as a promising solution, existing approaches largely emphasize pedestrian trajectory generation while struggling with interpretability and real-time dynamic simulation requirements. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a novel data-driven crowd simulation framework that integrates physics-informed machine learning (PIML) with navigation potential fields. Our approach takes advantage of the strengths of both physical models and PIML. Specifically, we design an innovative physics-informed spatial-temporal graph convolutional network (PI-STGCN) as a data-driven module. Leveraging PI-STGCN, pedestrian movement trends can be accurately predicted in real-time during the simulation. Additionally, we construct a physical model of navigation potential fields based on flow field theory to guide pedestrian movements, thereby reinforcing physical constraints during the simulation. In our framework, navigation potential fields are dynamically computed and updated based on the movement trends predicted by the PI-STGCN, while the updated crowd dynamics, guided by these fields, subsequently feed back into the PI-STGCN. Comparative experiments on two publicly available large-scale real-world datasets across five scenes demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms existing rule-based methods in both accuracy and fidelity. The similarity between the simulated and actual pedestrian trajectories improves by 10.8%. Furthermore, our framework exhibits enhanced adaptability and superior interpretability compared with methods that rely solely on deep learning for trajectory generation.

Room-temperature superconductors (esp. LK-99 in the recent) have attracted extensive academic attention in recent years, both in academic circles and among the general public. This topic has spread through a number of social media channels, a plethora of contradiction in information has emerged within social networks. There arises the question on how to analyze the consistency and controversy of such scientific knowledge in the dissemination process, and how this process impact on public cognition on the scientific knowledge. In this article, taking room-temperature superconductor as example, we first designed a large language model based factual consistency detection approach to analyze the consistency between research papers and media reports. Then the consistency between media reports and comments is analyzed, by proposing a novel quantification method for media agenda-setting capability, which evaluates the agenda-setting capability of media based on emotional and positional consistencies. The results indicate that two significant deviations occur when room-temperature superconductor knowledge is spread from specialized fields to the public through the various media. One deviation is due to the specialized nature of room-temperature superconductor knowledge, leading to discrepancies between reported content and factual information in research papers. The other deviation is caused by conflicting knowledge, resulting in disparities between media reports and public perception.

Crowdsourcing is a critical technology in social manufacturing, which leverages an extensive and boundless reservoir of human resources to handle a wide array of complex tasks. The successful execution of these complex tasks relies on task decomposition (TD) and allocation, with the former being a prerequisite for the latter. Recently, pretrained language models-based methods have garnered significant attention. However, they are constrained to handling straightforward common-sense tasks due to their inherent restrictions involving limited and difficult-to-update knowledge as well as the presence of “hallucinations.” To address these issues, we propose a retrieval-augmented generation-based crowdsourcing framework that reformulates TD as event detection from the perspective of natural language understanding. However, the existing detection methods fail to distinguish differences between event types and always depend on heuristic rules and external semantic analyzing tools. Therefore, we present a prompt-based contrastive learning framework for TD (PBCT), which incorporates a prompt-based trigger detector to overcome dependence. Additionally, trigger-attentive sentinel and masked contrastive learning are designed to provide varying attention to trigger and contextual features according to different event types. Extensive experiment results demonstrate our method is highly competitive in both supervised and zero-shot detection. A case study on printed circuit board design and manufacturing is used to validate its adaptability and scalability in unfamiliar professional domains.

This article develops a cooperative-critic learning-based secure tracking control (CLSTC) method for unknown nonlinear systems in the presence of multisensor faults. By introducing a low-pass filter, the sensor faults are transformed into "pseudo" actuator faults, and an augmented system that integrates the system state and the filter output is constructed. To reduce design costs, a joint neural network Luenberger observer (NNLO) structure is established by using neural network and input/output data of the system to identify unknown system dynamics and sensor faults online. To achieve the optimal secure tracking control, an augmented tracking system is formed by integrating the dynamics of tracking error, reference trajectory, and filter output. Then, a novel cost function is designed for the augmented tracking system, which employs the fault estimation and the discount factor. The Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation is solved to obtain the CLSTC strategy through an adaptive critic structure with cooperative tuning laws. Besides, the Lyapunov stability theorem is utilized to prove that all signals of the closed-loop system converge to a small neighborhood of the equilibrium point. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed control method has good fault tolerance performance and is suitable for solving secure control problems of nonlinear systems with various sensor faults.

Point-voxel 3D object detectors have achieved impressive performance in complex traffic scenes. However, they utilize the 3D sparse convolution (spconv) layers with fixed receptive fields, such as voxel-based detectors, and inherit the fixed sphere radius from point-based methods for generating the features of keypoints, which make them weak in adaptively modeling various geometrical deformations and sizes of real objects. To tackle this issue, we propose a shape-adaptive set abstraction network (SASAN) for point-voxel 3D object detection. First, the proposal and offset generation module is adopted to learn the coordinates and confidences of 3D proposals and shape-adaptive offsets of the certain number of offset points for each voxel. Meanwhile, an extra offset supervision task is employed to guide the learning of shifting values of offset points, aiming at motivating the predicted offsets to preferably adapt to the various shapes of objects. Then, the shape-adaptive set abstraction module is proposed to extract multiscale keypoints features by grouping the neighboring offset points' features, as well as features learned from adjacent raw points and the 2-D bird-view map. Finally, the region of interest (RoI)-grid proposal refinement module is used to aggregate the keypoints features for further proposal refinement and confidence prediction. Extensive experiments on the competitive KITTI 3D detection benchmark demonstrate that the proposed SASAN gains superior performance as compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Recent years have witnessed remarkable advance-ments in entity alignment, which endeavors to identify entities that represent the same real-world objects across different knowledge graphs (KGs). Nonetheless, prevailing approaches predominantly operate within closed-domain scenarios, rendering them inadequate for handling unmatchable entities. To address this challenge, we propose a retrieval augmented large language model framework (RALLM) to leverage the reasoning capacities of large language models (LLMs) to achieve open-set entity alignment, which not only enables the identification of equivalent entities for matchable entities but also addresses the identification of unmatchable ones. Specifically, we propose a novel retrieval augmentation method that leverages both textual and structural information of entities to retrieve potential equivalent candidates. Subsequently, we employ an iterative process to prompt the LLM to discern the equivalence between the retrieved candidate entity and the entity requiring alignment. To mitigate issues related to many-to-one alignment prediction and enhance alignment efficacy, we devise a memory mechanism to store highly confident aligned entity pairs and provide reminders to the LLM when a candidate entity has been matched. Our experimental findings underscore the superior performance of RALLM, highlighting the potential of LLMs in facilitating open-set entity alignment tasks.

Replacing manual inspection, automated optical inspection (AOI) equipment is widely used in printed circuit board (PCB) factories for automatic PCB defect segmentation. However, parameter refinement of AOI devices has gradually become an efficiency bottleneck in AOI usage, posing a highly challenging task. Since a large number of AOI parameters and different types of inspected objects make timely proper parameter refinement for clear images quite difficult. Considering this, we propose the concept of parallel PCB inspection in cyber–physical–social systems (CPSSs). Based on artificial systems, computational experiments, and parallel execution (ACP) theory with automatic parameter identification and refinement, we perform descriptive intelligence to build an artificial imaging system, obtain knowledge about the mapping relationships of parameter settings and imaging results, and realize automatic parameter identification given image input; conduct predictive intelligence to obtain image quality assessment results and maximize quality score for refinement strategies; and carry out prescriptive intelligence to guide parameter refinement for better imaging. This system could guide engineers proactively with constructive suggestions on parameter refinement when imaging failures occur, greatly reducing the training cost of engineers while improving work efficiency and work quality. To validate that our parallel PCB inspection could perform automatic AOI results evaluation without human participation, we evaluate it on distortion-free and different distortion images and confirm image quality score is positively associated with segmentation accuracy.

The dynamics of public opinion on social media affects people’s feeling and minds about international affairs and leads to the reconstruction of societal states for international conflicts. In this article, we analyze the topics’ evolution on social media during the Pelosi visit. Such kind of analysis should help the related departments sense and beware the situation effectively and efficiently, and may provide technical supports for proper policy making and responses. To facilitate this purpose, a new method is proposed and an abbreviated large-graph clustering (ALGC) algorithm has been designed to generate documents and topic representation for alleviating the overhead of high computational complexity of large graphs by reducing the dimensionality of the attention matrix and adjacency matrix. The evolution pattern of topics is also analyzed in and between different time periods. Experiment results show that the proposed method performs well, achieving a high clustering accuracy with lower computational cost. The dataset used in this article is also released for public analysis.

Human travel and social contacts are deemed as the key force in driving the transmission of infectious diseases. Consequently, epidemic models should represent individuals’ spatiotemporal contacts in detail to investigate the complex process of epidemic diffusion. Mathematical epidemic models usually assume a homogeneous human population and describe unstructured contacts. Most network-based epidemic models do not synthetically consider the temporal and spatial features of human structured contact behaviors. We here combined a social network with a bipartite network to build a multilayer agent network to model heterogeneous individuals’ temporal and spatial structured contacts. We used the largest collective outbreak of H1N1 influenza at a Chinese university in 2009 as a case study. Experimental results indicate that our models can reproduce individuals’ daily travel and social contact patterns, as well as the H1N1 influenza outbreak. We found that only quarantining dormitories to stop interbuilding transmission could not achieve a great effect in mitigating epidemic outbreaks at a university. The prohibition of students’ visiting across dormitory rooms was indispensable to prevent intrabuilding transmission of infectious diseases. Furthermore, it would be better to quarantine admitted case patients’ close contacts to control potentially latent individuals.

The governance technology of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) provides an effective solution for solving existing organizational management issues. Governance mechanisms of DAOs are usually encoded in smart contracts in the form of rule sets and executed automatically. However, the mechanism’s logical flaws and code errors expose DAOs to unpredictable risks. Complex adaptive dynamics computer-aided design (CadCAD) can test the effectiveness of the mechanisms through simulation. Nonetheless, as DAOs are typical complex systems with social and engineering complexity, managing, controlling, and supervising their operation through traditional methods are difficult. The parallel intelligence theory based on artificial societies, computational experiments, and parallel execution (ACP) method provides an effective research framework and practical method for solving DAOs’ governance issues. Therefore, in this article, we propose a parallel mechanism verification method and execution system, namely, complex adaptive systems for computer-aided dynamic design (casCAD2) as an extension of cadCAD. Leveraging parallel intelligence and cyber–physical–social systems (CPSS), casCAD2 is capable of probing into the laws that govern system evolution within a simulated environment. It serves as a robust tool for verifying the efficacy of DAOs’ mechanisms and predicting their potential risks. We also build a parallel market-based anchoring mechanism (MAM) system to demonstrate how it can be used for DAOs’ mechanism verification. This study can provide a new research method and application system for DAOs’ effective governance.

Knowledge question and answering (Q&A) is widely used. However, most existing semantic parsing methods in Q&A usually use cascading, which can incur error accumulation. In addition, using only one institution’s Q&A data definitely will limit the Q&A performance, while data privacy prevents sharing between institutions. This article proposes a knowledge graph-based reinforcement federated learning (KGRFL)-based Q&A approach to address these challenges. We design an end-to-end multitask semantic parsing model [MSP-bidirectional and auto-regressive transformers (BART)] that identifies question categories while converting questions into SPARQL statements to improve semantic parsing. Meanwhile, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based model fusion strategy is proposed to improve the effectiveness of federated learning, which enables multi-institution joint modeling and data privacy protection using cross-domain knowledge. In particular, it also reduces the negative impact of low-quality clients on the global model. Furthermore, a prompt learning-based entity disambiguation method is proposed to address the semantic ambiguity problem because of joint modeling. The experiments show that the proposed method performs well on different datasets. The Q&A results of the proposed approach outperform the approach of using only a single institution. Experiments also demonstrate that the proposed approach is resilient to security attacks, which is required for real applications.

Powered by advanced information technology, more and more complex systems are exhibiting characteristics of the cyber–physical–social systems (CPSS). In consideration of the cost, legal, and institutional constraints on the study of CPSS in real world, computational experiments have emerged as a new method for quantitative analysis of CPSS. However, with the increase of application scenarios, how to map complex and diverse domain models to artificial society models has become a key challenge to hinder the wide use of computational experiments. In this article, the docking framework between the domain model and the artificial society model was proposed in this article, and the model docking specification is given from three aspects: the agent model, the environmental model, and the rules model. In addition, the effectiveness of the framework was verified by two classic cases: artificial stock market and epidemic prevention and control. The result showed that the proposed model docking framework can provide technical support for the multidisciplinary applications of computational experiments and significantly reduce the difficulty of using the method.

Based on an investigation of online public opinion on the Nahel Merzouk protests in France, an approach for analyzing and predicting public opinion on protests based on large language model (LLM) is proposed, revealing the impact of emerging social media on the protests. We demonstrate that protests generate public opinion on social media with some lag, but that comment sentiment and expression are consistent with protest trends. As the protests unfolded, we analyzed the evolution of public sentiment. We constructed the prompt based on historical data to predict the protests using the p-tuning and Lora approach to fine-tune LLM. In addition, we discuss how to use blockchain technology to optimize distributed, self-organizing protests and reduce the potential for disinformation and violent conflict.

Under the impetus of Industry 4.0, oil and gas is undergoing an unprecedented digital transformation, and many innovative ideas are proposed. However, the achieved higher efficiency comes at the expense of reduced social consideration, which necessitates more society-related research and calls for a technological paradigm shift. To meet this challenge, this article introduces parallel oil and gas within the framework of parallel intelligence-based Industry 5.0, providing a pivotal transition from cyber–physical systems (CPS) to cyber–physical–social systems (CPSS). A comprehensive review of oil and gas industrial chain that covers upstream, midstream, and downstream is first outlined. Grounded in Industry 5.0, the main principles of parallel oil and gas are then provided, where three kinds of workers (biological workers, digital workers, and robotic workers) and three operation modes (autonomous modes, parallel modes, and expert/emergency modes) collaborate to develop more human-oriented and resilient systems. To realize the desired vision, some enabling technologies, including blockchain, smart contracts, and industrial foundation models, are thereafter listed. Furthermore, computational experiments on fault diagnosis of sucker rod pumps are conducted to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed mechanism. Finally, the future trend toward imaginative intelligence is envisaged.

Unsupervised domain adaptive object detection methods aim to transfer knowledge from the label-sufficient domain to the unlabeled domain. Most existing works minimize domain disparity by concentrating on different levels through adversarial learning. However, adversarial learning do not consider the different influences on under-aligned and well-aligned samples as they merely match distinct distributions with consistent weight. To address this issue, we design a novel scale-disentangled and uncertainty-guided alignment for domain-adaptive object detection (SDUGA), consisting of three main components: (1) Disentangled scale coarse module, which decouples scale information from global image features and performs individual alignment across domains for the corresponding scale by training domain classifiers in an adversarial learning manner; (2) Disentangled scale fine module, which generalizes the disentangled scale alignment to instance-level adaptation, reinforcing the distribution alignment across domains from multi-scale local instance level; (3) Uncertainty-guided coarse-to-fine attention alignment, which adjusts weights for various samples adaptively by generating the uncertainty-guided attention map, thus enforcing the detector to converge more on alignment for under-aligned samples and avoid misaligning well-aligned ones. Extensive experiments over three challenging domain-shift object detection scenarios demonstrate that SDUGA gains superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) share their kernels among all positions of the input, which may constrain the representation ability in feature extraction. Dynamic convolution proposes to generate different kernels for different inputs to improve the model capacity. However, the total parameters of the dynamic network can be significantly huge. In this article, we propose a lightweight dynamic convolution method to strengthen traditional CNNs with an affordable increase of total parameters and multiply-adds. Instead of generating the whole kernels directly or combining several static kernels, we choose to "look inside," learning the attention within convolutional kernels. An extra network is used to adjust the weights of kernels for every feature aggregation operation. By combining local and global contexts, the proposed approach can capture the variance among different samples, the variance in different positions of the feature maps, and the variance in different positions inside sliding windows. With a minor increase in the number of model parameters, remarkable improvements in image classification on CIFAR and ImageNet with multiple backbones have been obtained. Experiments on object detection also verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Recent years have witnessed the growing popularity of connectionist temporal classification (CTC) and attention mechanism in scene text recognition (STR). CTC-based methods consume less time with few computational burdens, while they are not as effective as attention-based methods. To retain computational efficiency and effectiveness, we propose the global-local attention-augmented light Transformer (GLaLT), which adopts a Transformer-based encoder-decoder structure to orchestrate CTC and attention mechanism. The encoder integrates the self-attention module with the convolution module to augment the attention, where the self-attention module pays more attention to capturing long-term global dependencies and the convolution module focuses on local context modeling. The decoder consists of two parallel modules: one is the Transformer-decoder-based attention module and the other is the CTC module. The first one is removed in the testing phase and can guide the second one to extract robust features in the training phase. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that GLaLT achieves state-of-the-art performance for both regular and irregular STR. In terms of tradeoffs, the proposed GLaLT is at or near the frontiers for maximizing speed, accuracy, and computational efficiency at the same time.

Reidentification (Re-ID) is a crucial computer vision application with a variety of potential uses in many maritime scenarios, including search, rescue, and surveillance. However, the development of advanced boat reidentification (Boat Re-ID) algorithms necessitates the availability of large-scale Re-ID datasets for model training and evaluation. Inspired by scenarios engineering, this study proposes a new framework for automatically generating a realistic synthetic dataset for boat Re-ID investigation. The synthetic dataset contains 107 boat models and various visual conditions in 36 real backgrounds. The use of synthetic datasets enables the learning-based Re-ID algorithm’s performance to be quantitatively verificated under varying imaging conditions. Nonetheless, our experiments prove that synthetic datasets are inadequate to handle real-world challenges. Therefore, we present a domain adaptation approach that integrates both real and synthetic data to create trustworthy models. This approach employs a multistep training strategy, gradient reversal layer and novel loss functions to preserve the features from two distribution dataset domains. The results of the experiments demonstrate that 1) synthetic datasets can be employed to train boat Re-ID algorithms and quantitatively test the performance of these algorithms under diverse imaging conditions and 2) our approach utilizes the attributes of the two data domains (real and synthetic) to achieve exceptional performance in real-world applications.

Given the complex nature of cyber-physical-social systems (CPSSs), understanding their mechanism is essential for analyzing and controlling their actions while minimizing potential harm. However, studying CPSS in the real world is costly and constrained by legal and institutional factors. Computational experiments have emerged as a new method for quantitative analysis, and this article proposes a method of using computational experiments for analyzing CPSS, which consists of model docking, experiment design, and experiment analysis. The cloud manufacturing service ecosystem (CMSE) is used as a typical case study to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method by simulating different operation strategies. The results show that the computational experiments method is effective in providing new means and ideas for analyzing CPSS.

Since Manufacturing 4.0 faces various challenges, including the risks of data leakage and privacy violation, the struggle to meet the growing demand for personalization, and the limitations in harnessing human creativity, it has become crucial to embark on a transformation toward Manufacturing 5.0. To this end, we propose a DeFACT framework for parallel manufacturing and Manufacturing 5.0, which focuses on safe, efficient and personalized collaborative production. In DeFACT, different enterprises and parallel workers (i.e., digital, robotic and biological workers) are organized, coordinated and scheduled based on decentralized autonomous organizations and operations to promote mutual benefits among members, even in the context of low or zero trust. This contributes to providing customers with higher-quality personalized products and services while ensuring the confidentiality and safeguarding of data. Additionally, various advanced technologies, such as generative artificial intelligence, scenarios engineering, and blockchain, are leveraged to achieve trustworthy and adaptable decision making, user-friendly human–machine interaction, and the federated control and management of parallel workers. Finally, the effectiveness and efficiency of DeFACT are experimentally validated through the design and implementation of three case studies.

High-precision simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is one of the core technologies of unmanned driving. LiDAR-based SLAM algorithms are often complex and computationally intensive, and usually are deployed on high performance CPU or GPU computing architecture with high power consumption and low energy efficiency ratio, which is not conducive to vehicle-level applications. In this paper, we design and implement a low power CPU and FPGA hybrid computing architecture for accelerating the key algorithm of LiDAR-based localization scheme. More specifically, we propose a software and hardware co-design strategy: (1) we first propose chain representation as a new type of map representation, which uses the depth discontinuity region as the segmentation location to segment the point cloud data. Our method not only reduces noise issues for down-sampling operation in point cloud representation, but also has the same computational and storage overhead as point cloud representation. (2) We further exploit the inherent parallelism in the algorithms to design a pipeline hardware architecture, which can effectively improve the speed of the algorithm in the embedded platform. Deployed on the Xilinx ZCU102 platform, our system achieves 24.4x and 3.2x speedups compared to the ARM Cortex A53 processor and the Intel i7-10700 processor, respectively, at 4.204W power consumption without severely degrading the final output quality.

Multi-source heterogeneous knowledge collaboration is the technical foundation for establishing a complete knowledge base. A parallel reasoning framework based on the ACP method is proposed to establish a complete knowledge base. The contribution of this framework is three-fold. First, it provides a virtual experimental platform for generating the artificial data needed for missing knowledge extraction by constructing an artificial system. Second, it generates artificial big data and organizes it into a knowledge graph to achieve structured representation and storage of system control knowledge by carrying out calculation experiments related to missing scene knowledge. Finally, it achieves unbiased application and update of knowledge through parallel execution, completing the optimization and control of the actual system. Parallel reasoning provides an effective technical means for multi-source knowledge collaboration and provides strong support for building knowledge-enhanced complex system control systems. The effectiveness of parallel reasoning is verified through experiments.

Federated learning is an emerging distributed machine learning paradigm that can break through data silos and make use of data from different clients in a secure way. However, for deep neural networks in federated learning, the models on clients may learn the same pattern with different weight distributions despite the same data distribution of local data sets, which limits the performance of neural networks after weight fusions. Therefore, in this article, we propose a homophily learning-based federated intelligence (HLFI) approach, where hierarchical federated learning strategy and dynamic elimination learning strategy are designed to alleviate the problem. The experiments on equipment failure prediction show that the proposed approach can improve the failure prediction F1-score up to 9.32%. Our approach also has good generalization capabilities and can be applied in other federated learning methods to improve the model performance.

Federated learning can collaboratively train AI models while protecting data privacy. In practical industry environment, non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) characteristics of data affect the effectiveness of federated learning. Personalized federated learning can help resolve this, but it cannot adapt to unknown data. In addition, practical applications also call for trusted training environment and remain stable when there are security threats. In this article, we propose a credible federated self-learning (CFSL), based on the idea of hypernetwork supported by blockchain to achieve secured, credible, personalized federated self-learning, especially, for unknown data in Non-IID environment. Extensive experiments on three Non-IID data sets demonstrate the capabilities on adaptive resilience for security attacks and on accuracy of recognizing unknown objects, with good performance at the same time. CFSL outperforms the existing personalized federated learning methods, with an increase in average accuracy by 4.11%.

Breast cancer (BC) seriously threatens women’s health. The establishment of a risk evaluation model cancer is conducive to early screening and prevention of BC. In this article, a new method of the evaluation and the framework of prevention for BC are proposed by synthesizing interval type-2 fuzzy sets (IT2 FSs), two-level fuzzy comprehensive evaluation, and parallel control (Artificial societies, Computational experiments, and Parallel execution, ACP). At the same time, 12 risk factors were selected as indicators to evaluate the risk level of BC, and then, according to the evaluation results, the correspondingly prevention strategies and intervention measures for different risk levels were discussed. Then, the prevention strategies are analyzed and selected in the computational experiment module of the artificial system, and the patient indexes are monitored in real time by the parallel mechanism between the actual and the artificial system, to feedback, adjust, and optimize the prevention scheme in time. This parallel BC prevention process can achieve dynamic closed-loop control effects. A new effective way for BC prevention was presented, which is of great significance for reducing its incidence rate and developing new medical means.

Social computing encompasses the development of information and communications technologies (ICTs) via computational approaches to model and study the human behavior in social environment. With the pervasive use of mobile devices as “social sensors” recording messages of where we are, when we go, who we talk, what we eat, and why we behave, social computing enables us study social phenomenon and cyber movement dynamics using data from social networks and media platforms, thus provides abundant user-generated content (UGC) for human behavior learning and predicting.

Crypto management is proposed to tackle the management decision-making challenges under data asymmetry and trust asymmetry that cannot be solved merely by technical means. It emphasizes the novel management model for the real-time generation of reliable, trustworthy, and usable management decisions based on blockchain and blockchain-driven technologies. First, the framework model of crypto management with detailed descriptions of each technique is introduced, where blockchain is the underlying technology, decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is the management structure, federated data is the decision basis, smart contract is the decision method, and non-fungible token (NFT) is the main decision incentive. Then, its collaboration mechanisms of on-blockchain DAO and off-blockchain organization as well as intra-organization and extra-organization nodes are discussed. Moreover, the potential applications of crypto management are addressed, and a case of task-oriented performance management is given to state how crypto management works to generate the real-time management decisions. Toward the end, the future research directions are pointed out in this emerging new area.

Network alignment (NA) that identifies equivalent nodes across networks is an effective tool for integrating knowledge from multiple networks. The state-of-the-art NA methods learn inter-network node similarities based on labeled anchor links, which are costly, time-consuming, and difficult to acquire. Therefore, a few unsupervised network alignment (UNA) methods propose solving NA problems without anchor links. However, most existing UNA methods rely on discriminative attributes to capture nodes’ similarities and are hard to obtain optimal one-to-one alignments. Toward these issues, this article proposes a novel method named HackGAN to solve the UNA problem solely based on the structural information. Specifically, HackGAN represents nodes with embeddings based on an unsupervised graph neural network (GNN) to capture their global and local structural features. After that, it initializes mapping functions to transform the embedding spaces of different networks into the same vector space by iteratively solving the Wasserstein–Procrustes problem. The mapping functions are then refined by an adversarial model with cycle-consistency and Sinkhorn distance losses to obtain optimized one-to-one mappings. Based on the distances between mapped embeddings, accurate and robust results are obtained with a collective alignment algorithm. Experimental comparisons on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of HackGAN.

Federated learning enables multiple clients to learn a general model without sharing local data, and the federated learning system also improves information security and advances responsible artificial intelligence (AI). However, the data of different clients in the system are non-independently and identically distributed (IID), which results in weight divergence, especially for complex graph data extraction. This article proposes a novel feature-contrastive graph federated (FcgFed) learning approach to improve the robustness of the federated learning system in graph data. First, we design an architecture for FcgFed learning systems to analyze graph information. Furthermore, we present a graph federated learning method based on contrastive learning to alleviate the weight divergence in federated learning. The experiments in node classification and graph classification demonstrate that our method achieves better performance than model-contrastive federated learning (MOON) and federated average (FedAvg). We also test the adaptability of our method in image classification, and the results demonstrate that weight similarity evaluation works for other frameworks and tasks.

The multimodality nature of web data has necessitated complex multimodal information retrieval for a wide range of web applications. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely employed to extract semantic features from raw samples to improve retrieval accuracy. In addition, hashing is widely used to improve computational and storage efficiency. As such, deep hashing frameworks have been applied for multimodal retrieval tasks. However, there is still a great recognitive gap between primate brain structure-inspired DNNs and humans. On computer vision tasks, well-crafted DNN models can be easily defeated by invisible small attacks, and this phenomenon indicates a large recognition gap between DNN models and humans. Recently, adversarial defense methods have been shown to improve the human–machine recognition alignment in several classification tasks. However, the robustness problem on the retrieval tasks, especially on the deep hashing-based multimodal retrieval models, is still not well studied. Therefore, in this article, we present an adversarially robust training mechanism to improve model robustness for the purpose of human–machine recognition alignment on retrieval tasks. Through extensive experimental results on several social multimodal retrieval benchmarks, we show that the robust training hashing framework proposed can mitigate the recognition gap on retrieval tasks. Our study highlights the necessity of robustness enhancement on deep hashing models.

Federated learning has become an emerging hot research field in industry because of its ability to perform large-scale distributed learning while preserving data privacy. However, recent studies have shown that in the actual use of federated learning, there are device heterogeneity and data not identically and independently distributed (Non-IID) characteristics between client nodes, which will affect the effect of federated learning. In this work, we propose resilient reinforcement federated learning (R$^{2}$Fed), a R$^{2}$Fed method, which applies reinforcement learning to federated learning and uses reinforcement learning for weighted fusion of client models instead of average fusion. We conduct experiments on object detection, object classification, and sentiment classification tasks in the context of Non-IID and heterogeneity, and the experimental results show that the R$^{2}$Fed method outperforms traditional federated learning, increasing the average accuracy by 4.7%. Experiments also demonstrate that R$^{2}$Fed is resilient to federation attacks.

Foreground detection (FD) plays an important role in the domain of video surveillance for highway. The design of advanced FD algorithms requires large-scale and diverse video dataset. However, collecting and labeling real dataset is still time-consuming, labor-intensive, and highly subjective. To address this issue, we first use computer graphics (CG) to clone real highway scenarios (HS) and generate synthetic multi-challenge video datasets, called “Synthetic-HS (CG)”, automatically labeled with accurate pixel-level ground truth. The Synthetic-HS (CG) dataset contains eight imaging condition sequences for computer vision research. Then, we design an image translation (IT) model that translates source domain (Synthetic-HS (CG)) to target domain (real). This model uses skip connections and attention module to generate realistic synthetic images “Synthetic-HS (IT)”. We use publicly available Synthetic-HS in combination with the corresponding real video sequence to conduct experiments. The experiment results suggest that: 1) The Synthetic-HS (CG) dataset enables us to provide precise quantitative evaluation of the drawbacks of foreground detection methods 2) The realistic Synthetic-HS (IT) images can be used to promote the visual perception in highway video surveillance.

Rapid development of AI technologies has propelled the seamless integration of physical and cyber worlds with various kinds of online/offline information collected from millions of multimodal sensing systems. The complexity, diversity and uncertainty inherited in such systems, such as Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs), have gone far beyond human capacity of managing and controlling. Our team is among the first to propose the idea of utilizing the nearly unlimited computational resources in cyberspace to construct a bottom-up and top-down combined artificial ITSs for testing, experimenting, representation, verification, and validation of physical ITSs. Especially, the parallel transportation has been developed for safer, smarter, greener, and more reliable transportation services. After three decades of research and field studies, the DeCAST in Transverse, i.e., Decentralized/Distributed Autonomous Operations/Organizations (DAO) in transportation systems, has been envisioned. In this paper, we introduce its architecture, operational processes, software and hardware platforms, and real world applications. Specifically, a transportation foundation model driven by artificial transportation systems, parallel learning and federated intelligence, named TengYun, is outlined for DeCAST.

In cyber–physical–social systems, smart manufacturing has to overcome challenges, such as uncertainty, diversity, complexity in modeling, long-delayed responses to market changes, and human engineer dependency. DeFACT is a framework of parallel manufacturing in ManuVerse where the Decentralized Autonomous Organization-based interactions between parallel workers consisting of robotic, digital, and human workers are elaborated to transform from professional division to real-virtual division. In DeFACT, human workers are only responsible for 5% physical and mental work that is complex and creative, and the robotic and digital workers can take care of the rest. The perceptual and cognitive intelligence of digital workers are intensified by a manufacturing foundation model (MF-PC), where calibration and certification (C&C), and verification and validation (V&V) guarantee not only the accuracy of task models, but also the interpretability and controllability of feature learning. As a case study, the workflow of customized shoes of SANBODY Technology Company is illustrated to show how DeFACT breaks the time and space constraints, avoids production waste caused by aesthetic discrepancies with consumers, and truly realizes flexible manufacturing.

In recent years, deep learning (DL) has been widely used in vehicle misbehavior detection and has attracted great attention due to its powerful nonlinear mapping ability. However, because of the large number of network parameters, the training processes of these methods are time consuming. Besides, the existing detection methods lack scalability; thus, they are not suitable for Internet of Vehicles (IoV) where new data are constantly generated. In this article, the concept of the broad learning system (BLS) is innovatively introduced into vehicle misbehavior detection. In order to make better use of vehicle information, key features are first extracted from the collected raw data. Then, a BLS is established, which is able to calculate the connection weight of the network efficiently and effectively by ridge regression approximation. Finally, the system can be updated and refined by an incremental learning algorithm based on the newly generated data in IoV. The experimental results show that the proposed method performs much better than DL or traditional classifiers, and could update and optimize the old model fastly and progressively while improving the system’s misbehavior detection accuracy.

Traffic signal control is shifting from passive control to proactive control, which enables the controller to direct current traffic flow to reach its expected destinations. To this end, an effective prediction model is needed for signal controllers. What to predict, how to predict, and how to leverage the prediction for control policy optimization are critical problems for proactive traffic signal control. In this paper, we use an image that contains vehicle positions to describe intersection traffic states. Then, inspired by a model-based reinforcement learning method, DreamerV2, we introduce a novel learning-based traffic world model. The traffic world model that describes traffic dynamics in image form is used as an abstract alternative to the traffic environment to generate multi-step planning data for control policy optimization. In the execution phase, the optimized traffic controller directly outputs actions in real time based on abstract representations of traffic states, and the world model can also predict the impact of different control behaviors on future traffic conditions. Experimental results indicate that the traffic world model enables the optimized real-time control policy to outperform common baselines, and the model achieves accurate image-based prediction, showing promising applications in futuristic traffic signal control.

As an interdisciplinary research approach, traditional cognitive science adopts mainly the experiment, induction, modeling, and validation paradigm. Such models are sometimes not applicable in cyber-physical-social-systems (CPSSs), where the large number of human users involves severe heterogeneity and dynamics. To reduce the decision-making conflicts between people and machines in human-centered systems, we propose a new research paradigm called parallel cognition that uses the system of intelligent techniques to investigate cognitive activities and functionals in three stages: descriptive cognition based on artificial cognitive systems (ACSs), predictive cognition with computational deliberation experiments, and prescriptive cognition via parallel behavioral prescription. To make iteration of these stages constantly on-line, a hybrid learning method based on both a psychological model and user behavioral data is further proposed to adaptively learn an individual’s cognitive knowledge. Preliminary experiments on two representative scenarios, urban travel behavioral prescription and cognitive visual reasoning, indicate that our parallel cognition learning is effective and feasible for human behavioral prescription, and can thus facilitate human-machine cooperation in both complex engineering and social systems.

The intensity and scale of the opinion fightings in cyberspace on the Russia–Ukraine war (RUW) have opened a new chapter in the history of world warfare. This is a magnificent demonstration of social cognitive war fighting with cyber-physical-social systems (CPSS) that would impact our humankind significantly now and for a long time to come, not just on our understanding of wars, but every aspect of our life. Therefore, it is worth of studying the opinion dynamics of the RUW in the cyberspace. This article will start this direction with an analysis of the evolutionary dynamics of the public opinion fighting, only using Chinese Weibo texts as a case study due to the time constraint. It first clusters the Weibo texts into four categories with unsupervised learning method using Latent Dirichlet Allocation and then collects opinions by extracting keywords. Meanwhile, an opinion adversarial evolution algorithm is proposed to dynamically model the dominance degree of an opinion in the evolutionary processes. We release a dataset of Chinese Weibo associated with RUW. The proposed approach of modeling and analyzing data-driven public opinion dynamics provides a new way for accessing opinion warfare in CPSS.

Computational experiments are an important method for carrying out the quantitative analysis of complex systems and play a major role in mapping the real world to the virtual world. However, the flexibility of computational experiments leads to arbitrary modeling processes and unconvincing results, which greatly hinder the large-scale application of this method. In this context, the verification of computational models has become an urgent problem in this field. Currently, model evaluation is still in its infancy and the existing evaluation methods are not mature enough. Thus, we took epidemic models as the research object and proposed a capability maturity evaluation framework for computational models of artificial society. The framework differs from previous assessment methods that focus on the validity of results, but instead provides a comprehensive evaluation from two perspectives: 1) evaluation of the model itself—by comparing the expectation with the final implementation, we can obtain whether the model meets the expectation and 2) comparison between different models—by evaluating the implementation process of each model and comparing the results, we can identify more mature models. The implementation of the model is evaluated from input, process, and output. Further, specific analyses and evaluations are conducted for several representative COVID-19 models to verify the validity of this evaluation framework. The results of the case study show that the proposed evaluation framework can help decision-makers identify more mature and referential models, and point out the directions where modelers can improve their models.

Neonatal pathological jaundice (NPJ) is easy to cause bilirubin encephalopathy, which has high mortality and sequelae rate. Therefore, accurate risk evaluation can help clinicians take appropriate measures to timely intervene in neonatal jaundice level and avoid complications. In this article, five indexes are extracted as the factor set for the risk evaluation of NPJ, and the diagnostic criteria are determined. Then, five index sets are described by interval type-2 fuzzy sets, and the corresponding membership functions and membership function figures are provided. The feasibility of interval type-2 fuzzy comprehensive evaluation in risk evaluation of NPJ is demonstrated through example, and the fuzzy rule bases of prevention and treatment for NPJ are constructed according to the results of risk evaluation. Finally, this article demonstrates that the proposed risk evaluation and treatment process of NPJ is actually a dynamic closed-loop control process, which is consistent with the clinical treatment process. This article provides a new solution for the aided diagnosis and decision-making treatment of NPJ, which is of great significance in reducing neonatal mortality and alleviating the pressure of medical staff.

Welcome to the first issue of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS) of 2022. We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere thanks to our associate editors, reviewers, authors, and readers for your great support and effort devoted to IEEE TCSS. Happy New Year to you all, and cheers to health, happiness, and high-producing in 2022!

In the present study, a two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) model and spatial econometric method were employed to evaluate and analyze the utilization efficiency of urban water resources and spatial–temporal differences in cities of China. The traditional DEA model was enhanced by adopting the Shannon entropy in the first stage. After selecting variables based on the previous step and the Bayes information criterion (BIC), redundant variables were removed. In the meanwhile, a comprehensive efficiency score (CES) was generated to rank the efficiency. Finally, spatial econometric analysis was applied to explore the spatial–temporal differences of urban water resource utilization efficiency. Results demonstrate that: 1) according to the calculations and analysis, communities should concentrate on increasing investment in equipment and technology that can help enhance water consumption efficiency, while overlooking some minor aspects, such as per capita gross domestic product (PCGDP); 2) most cities have poor water resource utilization efficiency (low CES). However, both input and output have much room for the improvement; 3) Lhasa, Beijing, Haikou, and Shanghai have high CES, indicating that the utilization efficiency of water resources is not entirely dependent on economic development; and 4) through performing the Lagrange multiplier (LM) test, the spatial error model (SEM) test is passed at the significant level of 5%. Moreover, the water resource utilization efficiency of a city may be enhanced with the economic development in neighboring cities.

Computational experiments have emerged as a new method for quantitative analysis of complex social systems. It has been applied to many interdisciplinary research fields, such as economics, finance, and epidemiology. Though the representation form of computational experiments is relatively flexible, the real system is more complex. Therefore, it is important to seek a balance between the flexibility of computational modeling and the credibility of conclusion. This article proposes a customized design framework for computational experiment models, so as to meet the diverse application demands of computational experiments in different fields. Finally, this article outlines some typical applications of computational experiments to provide a roadmap for its rapid development and widespread application.

In January 2021, the users of subreddit r/wallstreetbets (WSB) triggered an unprecedented short squeeze by driving up GameStop’s stock price to an unimaginable high point. During the event, a large number of users participated in the discussion about GameStop and coordinated trading behavior on r/WSB to push the stock price higher. In this article, we investigate the characteristics of the collective behaviors and social dynamics from the evolutions of topological structure, discussed topics, and user sentiment polarity (SP) by constructing dynamic interaction networks, modeling the topic, and analyzing the user sentiment. We find that the topological structure of the interaction network evolves toward a more efficient direction, the discussed topics change more centralized, and the user sentiment tends to be more positive and divergent. And we reveal that part of GameStop’s stock price is explained by the social media activity, popularity of the dominant topic, topic cohesiveness, SP of users, and sentiment divergence between interacted users on r/WSB. Our work quantitatively characterizes the interaction networks and user behavior during the GameStop short squeeze and provides an example to analyze the event which synchronously evolves in the physical space and cyberspace. It not only contributes to the analysis of social system behavior and structure but also provides valuable insights into the financial practice and policy decision-making.

The functional connectivity network (FCN) has been used to achieve several remarkable advancements in the diagnosis of neuro-degenerative disorders. Therefore, it is imperative to accurately estimate biologically meaningful FCNs. Several efforts have been dedicated to this purpose by encoding biological priors. However, owing to the high complexity of the human brain, the estimation of an 'ideal' FCN remains an open problem. To the best of our knowledge, almost all existing studies lack the integration of domain expert knowledge, which limits their performance. In this study, we focused on incorporating domain expert knowledge into the FCN estimation from a modularity perspective. To achieve this, we presented a human-guided modular representation (MR) FCN estimation framework. Specifically, we designed an adversarial low-rank constraint to describe the module structure of FCNs under the guidance of domain expert knowledge (i.e., a predefined participant index). The chronic tinnitus (TIN) identification task based on the estimated FCNs was conducted to examine the proposed MR methods. Remarkably, MR significantly outperformed the baseline and state-of-the-art(SOTA) methods, achieving an accuracy of 92.11%. Moreover, post-hoc analysis revealed that the FCNs estimated by the proposed MR could highlight more biologically meaningful connections, which is beneficial for exploring the underlying mechanisms of TIN and diagnosing early TIN.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are widely believed to be good for improving transportation safety and efficiency. However, recent fatal accidents by some of their prototypes remind us that there are no operationalizable and quantitative safe driving strategies available for an AV in a wide range of situations to avoid collisions. In contrast with many recent studies that focused on ethical considerations when AVs are facing unavoidable harms, we study how to proactively prevent collisions by setting up a set of decision rules for AVs to determine the right-of-way efficiently. Notably, we summarize three essential principles for AVs designing to increase driving safety, and establish a rule-based nine-step communication-decision model to implement them. Our method is constructed by analyzing how human drivers solve potential conflicts. The decision rules are designed to be ambiguity-free and readily computable with the least communication so that human drivers and AVs could easily understand each other in terms of their behaviors and intentions of. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method by comparing it with some alternative approaches.

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS (T-ITS) has become a leading international journal in the field of ITS since its first issue published in 2000. To obtain a structural overview as well as the evolution of T-ITS in the last decade (2010–2019), we present a comprehensive bibliometric analysis from multiple perspectives based on the articles published during the same period in this paper. Our analyses of the T-ITS literature include: (a) statistical analysis;(b) topic analysis; and (c) network analysis. Statistical analysis was first conducted to identify the most highly cited papers, then the top productive and influential authors, institutions and countries/regions were given from paper counts and citations respectively. In order to identify important topics and patterns of evolution, author keywords were used to identify the most frequent topics and the theme river map can visually demonstrate their corresponding trends. Furthermore, keyword co-occurrence network was constructed to reveal the hotspots and the research landscape within this field. In addition, three networks are provided to visualize the relationships and reveal the collaboration patterns from different perspectives, including authors, institutions and countries/regions. The results provide an insight on the characteristics of the publications over the last decade, from which we can know the key contributors and groups who brought the significant growth of the journal. This paper can benefit researchers in terms of promoting understanding of the entire field with the development status and trends.

Accurate and real-time taxi demand prediction can help managers pre-allocate taxi resources in cities, which assists drivers quickly finding passengers and reduce passengers’ waiting time. Most of the existing studies focus on mining spatial-temporal characteristics of taxi demand distributions, while lacking in modeling the correlations between taxi pick-up demand and the drop-off demand from the perspective of multi-task learning. In this article, we propose a multi-task learning model containing three parallel LSTM layers to co-predict taxi pick-up and drop-off demands, and compare the performance of single demand prediction methodology and that of two demands’ co-prediction methodology. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that the pick-up demand and the drop-off demand do depend on each other, and the effectiveness of the proposed co-prediction methods.

Emergency signage systems provide effective route guidance and evacuation information for pedestrians in case of emergencies such as fire, blackout, and explosion. This paper proposes a modified social force (SF) model to investigate crowd evacuation dynamics taking into account the influence of emergency signs. The perceiving probability model is formulated for the quantitative description of the probability that pedestrians can successfully notice the sign and clearly perceive the guidance information. Simulation experiments and controlled experiments are designed to calibrate the parameters of the proposed model. The effectiveness of the modified SF model is preliminarily verified by comparing the simulation results with experimental data and/or empirical results such as fundamental diagrams and self-organization phenomena. A case study of crowd evacuation simulations at a typical Beijing subway station is conducted to evaluate evacuation performance of three signage distribution schemes, i.e., Maximal Covering (MaxCover), Uniform, and Random, which are proposed by the maximal covering location and empirical approaches, as well as contrasted scheme without emergency signs. The effects of the quantity and distribution of emergency signs on crowd evacuation efficiency are studied quantitatively by simulations. The results show that installing emergency signs can improve evacuation efficiency no matter what distribution scheme is adopted. By choosing an appropriate distribution scheme i.e., MaxCover, the evacuation performance can be further improved and the evacuation time can be significantly reduced.

Strategic traffic management is crucial for combating traffic congestion at the macroscopic level. However, such a field is still relatively unexplored, particularly for microscopic control objects, such as intersections and coordinated intersection groups. This article proposes a human-in-the-loop recommendation system for strategic urban traffic management, which follows an agent-based structure. A regional agent dispatcher is defined to assign agents for operation whenever “operation on-demand” is required. Such a requirement is identified by a daily-dependent operational mode on strategic traffic operations at a control object level. The strategic management scheme for each control object is guided by a strategic agent (customized), which is essentially a deep recommender model with a specific architecture. By featuring the multiagent design, a customized operational scheme can be generated at the intersection level, which instructs the corresponding controller to take specific operations. The utility of the recommendation system is demonstrated via a case study using real-world traffic data. In both offline and online evaluations, the system performs consistently at traffic operational recommendations in different scenarios and has the potential to provide more reasonable traffic operational strategies than a human-operated system.

Medical diagnostic image analysis (e.g., CT scan or X-Ray) using machine learning is an efficient and accurate way to detect COVID-19 infections. However, the sharing of diagnostic images across medical institutions is usually prohibited due to patients' privacy concerns. This causes the issue of insufficient data sets for training the image classification model. Federated learning is an emerging privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm that produces an unbiased global model based on the received local model updates trained by clients without exchanging clients' local data. Nevertheless, the default setting of federated learning introduces a huge communication cost of transferring model updates and can hardly ensure model performance when severe data heterogeneity of clients exists. To improve communication efficiency and model performance, in this article, we propose a novel dynamic fusion-based federated learning approach for medical diagnostic image analysis to detect COVID-19 infections. First, we design an architecture for dynamic fusion-based federated learning systems to analyze medical diagnostic images. Furthermore, we present a dynamic fusion method to dynamically decide the participating clients according to their local model performance and schedule the model fusion based on participating clients' training time. In addition, we summarize a category of medical diagnostic image data sets for COVID-19 detection, which can be used by the machine learning community for image analysis. The evaluation results show that the proposed approach is feasible and performs better than the default setting of federated learning in terms of model performance, communication efficiency, and fault tolerance.

People can post their comments on public events on the Internet, such as their ideas, emotions, and attitudes that can affect others. Online public opinions may affect the stability or security of the country because of the speed and convenience of information disseminating on the Internet. This article proposes the public opinion cellular automata for situation deduction to predict the possible trending of public events. In the cellular automata, online users are represented by cells, and their eigenvalues are calculated from the user's historical comment data. The cell and their neighbors form a cellular space, whose topology is a directed graph. We set the state of each cell based on its attributes and initialize the cellular automata. The automata can deduce public opinion and predict the trend of public opinion by following the set evolutionary rules in advance. Experiments with the real data from Sina Weibo online users show that the cells in the cellular automata can accurately simulate users' behavior, and the deduction results are close to the trend of real historical events. The cellular automata-based prediction of the number of participants and emotional trending are more accurate than other methods.

During the novel coronavirus pneumonia, the underlying comments and news of the epidemic had bombed on the Internet media and social networks, reflecting the views and attitudes of the governments, society, and individuals to the epidemic situation. Those comments are closely related to people's lives and blend with each other. Novel coronavirus pneumonia affects people's lives, and they publish comments on social networks and media, and the underlying information from social networks and Internet media in turn affects people's attitude to the epidemic and the measures, and strategies taken to fight coronavirus in life. We collect the comments from various social network platforms and network media such as Weibo, WeChat, Chinanews, Sina News, NetEase News, Sohu News, and analyze the overall situation of public opinion on the novel coronavirus pneumonia. We explore the interaction between online public opinion and real life using a variety of algorithms in different stages of the epidemic. We can obtain public attention and key nodes in the dissemination of public opinion by detecting hot events and calculating user's influence. The analysis of information dissemination path is conducive to the rapid propagation of healthy comments, curbing the spread of bad information. Event-specific details and topics are mined from large amounts of comments by thematic clustering and association relationship detecting, which helps to provide technical support for government response measures. The emotional analysis of Internet users' groups helps to guide the direction of public opinion. The situation analysis shows the deep blending and mutual influence between the online public opinion and the real world.

Nuclear emergency evacuation is challenging and dangerous, with time constraints, resource limitations, and radiation exposure risks. The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence enables us to build an intelligent evacuation system to help mitigate this problem a great deal. In this article, we design the nuclear emergency parallel evacuation system based on the artificial systems (A), computational experiments (C), and parallel execution (P) approach and intelligent vehicle collaborative systems (IVCs). In this system, the evacuation risks of different regions under various possible scenarios are simulated and evaluated in the artificial systems. With data adversarially generated from the artificial systems and collected from sensors all over the area, an optimization model is proposed to find the optimal evacuation plans for emergent evacuation scenarios in the computational experiments. Eventually, the most suitable running strategy of autonomous buses will be selected and carried out based on the parallel execution in accordance with the real scene. A case study is conducted, and results indicate that the system can serve as an efficient tool for future nuclear emergency evacuation planning.

Welcome to the second issue of IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS) this year. First, I am grateful to report that, as of February 7, 2021, theCitescoreof TCSS has leapfrogged back to 5.8, a new high, which indicates the high quality and relevance of IEEE TCSS in the field of social computing and computational social systems research. Many thanks to all of you for your great effort and support.

Welcome to the last issue of IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (IEEE TCSS) in 2021. For IEEE TCSS, 2021 is an exciting year. TCSS has been added to the ISI Web of Science Sources Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) database in 2021, and all articles published since 2018 have been indexed by SCIE. This is an important milestone in the development of TCSS. We would like to take this opportunity to thank and congratulate everyone for their great efforts and supports. We are looking forward to working together to further improve the publication quality and speed up the review process of TCSS in the upcoming 2022.

Welcome to the fourth issue of IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS) this year. I am excited to share some great news.

Federated ecology can provide an effective solution forthe serious isolated data island issues caused by data privacy protection and information security requirements in the era of artificial intelligence (AI). As the data foundation of federated ecology, federated data include the data of all the nodes in the federation, as wellas their storage, computation, and communication resources. For privacy-preserving, federated data are divided into private data and non-private data, and through the federated control of these data, data federalization can be realized. In data-driven AI technologies, federated data play an important role, and it can help realize effective data retrieval, pre-processing, processing, mining, and visualization for AI-based applications. It can also provide effective solutionsfor the dilemmas faced by AI technologies, such as training AI models without sufficient data, increasing the generality of AI models for different application scenarios and establishing a unified processing workflow for data security and privacy control in AI-based applications.

Since early 2020, the COVID-19 global pandemic has significantly impacted almost every aspect of the human society throughout the world. Until now, middle of 2021, although with all the efforts on pandemic intervention and vaccination, COVID-19 is still hovering around the world, resulting in more than 177 million confirmed cases and 3.8 million deaths.

In the past few years, with the rapid growth of digital technologies, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms have become the digital oligarchies, which have the enormous capabilities to potentially control what is discussed in cyberspace. In the digital oligarchy era, social perception and social influence in different complex social systems have evolved quickly. In this article, we conducted large-scale empirical studies on social perception and social influence regarding the Trump phenomenon from personal perception, media, and public attention perspectives. We found that there exist obvious correlations between the posting behavior of Trump and the attention of news media. By constructing public attention networks using complex networks based on Google search information, we further reveal that digital platforms could affect social perception and social influence significantly. Especially, we obtained that the public attention can always be influenced by the political moments.

Agent-based simulation is a useful approach for the analysis of dynamic population evolution. In this field, the existing models mostly treat the migration behavior as a result of utility maximization, which partially ignores the endogenous mechanisms of human decision making. To simulate such a process, this article proposes a new cognitive architecture called the two-layered integrated decision cycle (TiDEC) which characterizes the individual's decision-making process. Different from the previous ones, the new hybrid architecture incorporates deep neural networks for its perception and implicit knowledge learning. The proposed model is applied in China and U.S. population evolution. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the cognitive computation is used in such a field. Computational experiments using the actual census data indicate that the cognitive model, compared with the traditional utility maximization methods, cannot only reconstruct the historical demographic features but also achieve better prediction of future evolutionary dynamics.

A paradigm shift towards agile and adaptive traffic signal control empowered with the massive growth of Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies is emerging rapidly for Intelligent Transportation Systems. Generally, an adaptive signal control system fine-tunes signal timing parameters based on pre-defined control hyperparameters using instantaneous traffic detection information. Once traffic pattern changes, those hyperparameters (e.g., maximum and minimum green times) need to be adjusted according to the evolution of traffic dynamics over a very short-term period. Such adjustment processes are usually conducted by professional and experienced traffic engineers. Here we present a human-in-the-loop parallel learning framework and its utilization in an end-to-end recommendation system that mimics and enhances professional signal control engineers' behaviors. The system has been deployed into a real-world application for an extended period in Hangzhou, China, where signal control hyperparameters are recommended based on large-scale multidimensional traffic datasets. Experimental evaluations demonstrate significant improvements in traffic efficiency through the use of our signal recommendation system.

Vehicles in Internet of Vehicles (IoV) exchange information about location, environment, infotainment, as well as social information with other units via vehicular communication networks. This makes IoV with key social entities in the human-vehicle-infrastructure-roadside units (RSUs) as integrated intelligent transportation systems. Therefore, by identifying the cyber-physical-social features of IoV and presenting its complexity issues of both engineering and social dimensions, this article proposes and introduces the concept, architecture, and applications of parallel IoV (PIoV). Three main components of PIoV are demonstrated, which are artificial IoV to learn and describe the physical IoV, computation experiments to evaluate and predict the consequences and values of driving strategies, and parallel execution to prescribe the operation of the physical IoV. PIoV makes it possible to achieve safe, smart, effective, and efficient transportation management and control. The final objective of PIoV is to equip IoV with descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive intelligence based on the parallel intelligence approach.

During the ongoing outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), people use social media to acquire and exchange various types of information at a historic and unprecedented scale. Only the situational information are valuable for the public and authorities to response to the epidemic. Therefore, it is important to identify such situational information and to understand how it is being propagated on social media, so that appropriate information publishing strategies can be informed for the COVID-19 epidemic. This article sought to fill this gap by harnessing Weibo data and natural language processing techniques to classify the COVID-19-related information into seven types of situational information. We found specific features in predicting the reposted amount of each type of information. The results provide data-driven insights into the information need and public attention.

Welcome to the first issue of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS) of 2020, and Happy New Year to You! We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere thanks to our editors, reviewers, authors, and readers for your great support and effort devoted to the TCSS, along with our best wish and hope that everyone has a happy, healthy, and fruitful 2020.

The measurement of influence on online platforms has been an important issue for various applications, including viral marketing, recommender systems, and the Internet celebrity economy. Generally, the citation frequency, mention frequency, and in-degree of users are the three major criteria for evaluating online influence in existed studies. However, some online media platforms neither provide social networking functions nor support social relationship labeling, making it infeasible to measure the user influence via the above three criteria. Such platforms can be named nonexplicit-relationship platforms. In this article, we propose three new criteria, explicit conversion rate (ER), frequency of promotion (FP), and average participation density (APD), and design a novel algorithm to effectively calculate and evaluate users' influence on these platforms. The stability and sustainability of user influence are evaluated to distinguish the real influentials from the disguised ones, while the latter usually appears for temporary commercial advertisement purposes. The experiments proved the effectiveness of the proposed criteria and the algorithm in determining influentials' influence, as well as the corresponding stability and sustainability.

Considering the distances to exits, exits' capacities, the sizes of queues at exits, distances to the nuclear power plant, as well as individual characteristics, the exit choice model for pedestrians in the plume planning area is established based on a random forest model. This model is trained and verified with the survey data of residents around the Daya Bay Nuclear Power Plant collected from a serious game-based questionnaire system. Combining the pedestrian choice with the agent-based pedestrian behavior simulation model, the evacuation process of a nuclear accident is simulated. Based on the detailed evacuation simulation model, a comparative experiment is performed to evaluate the staged evacuation strategy in such scenarios. Simulation results indicate that staged evacuation may not be the best strategy all the time, and the number of groups highly impacts its performance.

IoT-driven intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have great potential and capacity to make transportation systems efficient, safe, smart, reliable, and sustainable. The IoT provides the access and driving forces of seamlessly integrating transportation systems from the physical world to the virtual counterparts in the cyber world. In this paper, we present visions and works on integrating the artificial intelligent transportation systems and the real intelligent transportation systems to create and enhance “intelligence” of IoT-enabled ITS. With the increasing ubiquitous and deep sensing capacity of IoT-enabled ITS, we can quickly create artificial transportation systems equivalent to physical transportation systems in computers, and thus have parallel intelligent transportation systems, i.e. the real intelligent transportation systems and artificial intelligent transportation systems. The evolution process of transportation system is studied in the view of the parallel world. We can use a large number of long-term iterative simulation to predict and analyze the expected results of operations. Thus, truly effective and smart ITS can be planned, designed, built, operated and used. The foundation of the parallel intelligent transportation systems is based on the ACP theory, which is composed of artificial societies, computational experiments, and parallel execution. We also present some case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of parallel transportation systems.

Online business intelligence systems often collect the texts from different sources, such as social media and news websites that can be heterogeneous in practice. These collections bring the difficulties of managing and organizing the comprehensive information hidden in different texts of the system. To more effectively organize the multisourced texts and help online users acquire wider knowledge, we propose a business intelligence system which integrates the multisourced texts from multisources. Regarding in many occasions, multisourced texts share some common contents with respect to the same topics. For example, a tweet and a news report may talk about the same event. Therefore, our goal is to correlate such texts of different sources with respect to the similar topics and get integrated more comprehensive information to facilitate other data mining tasks as well as online applications. To handle the problem, we propose a heterogeneous information network-based text aligning (HINTA) framework in this paper. HINTA applies meta-paths to calculate the text similarities, and constructs correlated pairs between the two types of texts. Next, HINTA first applies anchored pairs as bridges to combine the different types of texts. Finally, three different inference methods are employed to align the multisourced texts. Experimental results on real-world dataset show the effectiveness and efficiency of the framework in addressing the texts alignment problem.

The choice of model orientation is a very important issue in Additive Manufacturing (AM). In this paper, the model orientation problem is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem, aiming at minimizing the building time, the surface quality, and the supporting area. Then we convert the problem into a single-objective optimization in the linear-weighted way. After that, the Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to solve the optimization problem and the process of GA is parallelized and implemented on GPU. Experimental results show that when dealing with complex models in AM, compared with CPU only implementation, the GPU based GA can speed up the process by about 50 times, which helps to significantly reduce the optimization time and ensure the quality of solutions. The GPU based parallel methods we proposed can help to reduce the execution time and improve the efficiency greatly, making the processes more efficient.

Vehicular networks (VNs) have received great attention as one of the crucial supportive techniques for intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). However, the introduction of dynamic and complex human behaviors into VNs makes it a cyber-social-physical system. Thus, artificial systems, computational experiments, parallel executions-based parallel VNs (PVN) are proposed in this paper. The framework of PVN is then designed and presented, its characteristics and applications are demonstrated, and its related research challenges are discussed. PVN uses software-defined artificial VNs for modeling and representation, computational experiments for analysis and evaluation, and parallel execution for control and management. Thus, more reliable and efficient traffic status and ultrahigh data rate communications are obtained among vehicles and infrastructures, which is expected to achieve the descriptive intelligence, predictive intelligence, and prescription intelligence for VNs. The proposed PVN offers a competitive solution for achieving a smooth, safe, and efficient cooperation among connected vehicles in future ITSs.

In general, the evaluation for tourist attractive competency is always by means of natural language, owing to the difficulty for people to use conventional mathematics method to describe the evaluation modeling and their evaluation results. In this paper, discrete and partially connected type-2 fuzzy sets, fuzzy comprehension evaluation, are synthesized, and then discrete type-2 fuzzy comprehension valuation and partially connected type-2 fuzzy comprehension evaluation are presented to provide the analysis of evaluation and represent the results of different conditions. Finally, the method of evaluation for tourist attractive competency is given, and the results illustrate that the method can describe the otherness of evaluated data.

Welcome to the fourth issue of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS), which includes 16 regular papers and a brief discussion on social computing. We would also like to inform you that IEEE will conduct its regular 5-year review for TCSS at its TAB meeting in November at Boston. Any suggestions for our review report are welcome!

Welcome to the first issue of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS) this year, and Happy New Year to everyone. We would like to take this opportunity to express sincere gratitude to our editors, reviewers, authors, and readers for your support and great efforts devoted to TCSS. Also, we want to express the best wishes to you all, and hope you have a happy, healthy, and fruitful 2019.

Mining traffic-relevant information from social media data has become an emerging topic due to the real-time and ubiquitous features of social media. In this paper, we focus on a specific problem in social media mining which is to extract traffic relevant microblogs from Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging platform. It is transformed into a machine learning problem of short text classification. First, we apply the continuous bag-of-word model to learn word embedding representations based on a data set of three billion microblogs. Compared to the traditional one-hot vector representation of words, word embedding can capture semantic similarity between words and has been proved effective in natural language processing tasks. Next, we propose using convolutional neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM) models and their combination LSTM-CNN to extract traffic relevant microblogs with the learned word embeddings as inputs. We compare the proposed methods with competitive approaches, including the support vector machine (SVM) model based on a bag of n-gram features, the SVM model based on word vector features, and the multi-layer perceptron model based on word vector features. Experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed deep learning approaches.

With increasing popularity of Internet of Vehicles (IoV), concerns for reliable and low complexity communication techniques are proposed due to the requirements of signal reliability and transmission delay for vehicles. Meanwhile, the explosive and pervasive use of social network applications further adds drivers' social relationships and behavioural characteristics into it, and makes it a cyber-physical-social system (CPSS). This paper proposes and analyzes an improved forward scheme for full deplex cooperative vehicular networks in terms of its CPSS features. The proposed CPSS-based forwarding (CPSS-F) strategy forwards a soft estimate of the received signal based on social historic data at the relay node (vehicle/infrastructure) to the destination node (vehicle/infrastructure), which achieves improved reliability than the two conventional strategies in cooperative networks, i.e., amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF). Furthermore, the proposed CPSS-F relay achieves performance gains and complexity reduction compared to the conventional AF and DF. Experimental results further confirm the advantages of the proposed CPSS-F for cooperative vehicular networks. The proposed CPSS-F approach is easily extended to other cooperative vehicular social networks, for example, multi-way, half-duplex, or large-antenna networks.

Vehicle detection is an important research topic for autonomous driving community. Since the great success of deep learning on object detection, almost all vehicle detection methods go along with this line. However, deep learning methods heavily rely on the training data, and the whole mechanism is like a “black box” Therefore, in this paper, we explore a vehicle detection method using traffic semantic context and human common sense instead of relying on the training data. To verify our idea, we compare our method with two classic machine learning methods as well as three state- of-the-art deep learning methods on a dataset collected in real traffics. The results show that our method outperforms others on this dataset. The deep learning methods may exceed ours after enlarging the training data or testing on more complicated datasets. However, the main contribution of this paper is providing inspiration for learning methods, and we believe their performance can be greatly improved after considering the idea of this paper.

For intelligent vehicles, multi-sensor fusion is of great importance to perceive traffic environment with high accuracy and robustness. In this paper, we propose two effective methods, i.e. spatio-temporal evidence generating and independent vision channel, to improve multi-sensor track-level fusion for vehicle environmental perception. The spatio-temporal evidence includes instantaneous evidence, tracking evidence and tracks matching evidence to improve existence fusion. Independent vision channel leverages the specific advantage of vision processing on object recognition to improve classification fusion. The proposed methods are evaluated by using the multi-sensor dataset collected from real traffic environment. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods can significantly improve the multi-sensor track-level fusion in terms of both detection accuracy and classification accuracy.

With the rapid development of cryptocurrency and its underlying blockchain technologies, platforms such as Ethereum and Hyperledger began to support various types of smart contracts. Smart contracts are computer protocols intended to digitally facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract. Smart contracts have broad range of applications, such as financial services, prediction markets and Internet of Things (IoT), etc. However, there are still many challenges such as security issues and privacy disclosure that await future research. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview on blockchain powered smart contracts. First, we give a systematic introduction for smart contracts, including the basic framework, operating mechanisms, platforms and programming languages. Second, application scenarios and existing challenges are discussed. Finally, we describe the recent advances of smart contract and present its future development trends, e.g., parallel blockchain. This paper is aimed at providing helpful guidance and reference for future research efforts.

On-road object detection is one of the most important tasks for the autonomous driving of intelligent vehicle. Nevertheless, the previous methods based on 2D LIDAR sensor only focus on the detection of vehicles, and show severe limitations on the detection of other objects. Accordingly, this paper proposes an on-road object detection method, which employs rectangle fitting and concavity determination to improve the robustness of ob- ject detection. The proposed approaches are extensively evaluated by using the sparse laser data collected by 2D LIDAR from real traffic environment. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed rectangle fitting outperforms the previous approaches in terms of both detection accuracy and computational efficiency.

In order to decrease the casualties in fire disasters and to improve the efficiency of evacuation, exploring, and revealing the impact of influence factors on evacuation is of vital importance. This paper is focused on the influence of fire and human factors on evacuation processes directed by evacuation strategies in the building structure. Interactions between fire environment and evacuees are considered in a systematic view. Building artificial evacuation systems and performing computational experiments are the main research ways. A case is given to illustrate the research approach and quantitative results have been analyzed. The work in this paper can be used for optimizing occupant distribution and composition, estimating evacuation strategies, and ultimately for improving the evacuation efficiency.

Radio resource management (RRM), which aims to satisfy the requirements of both mobile users and service providers, can be seen as one of the typical issues of cyber-physical-social system since the social factors, that is, the requirements and priorities of users are extremely important in heterogeneous networks. In this paper, we propose a novel resource allocation and access control mechanism based on parallel network architecture, which provides a high-bandwidth connectivity with guaranteed quality of service (QoS) for mobile users in a seamless manner. In this mechanism, multiple users are classified into several types according to their social property such as priorities and bandwidth requirements of different users. Compared with the general received signal strength (RSS)-based method, the proposed user priority (UP)-based method achieves three main advantages as follows: 1) it further balances the load of base stations (BSs) when the resource is sufficient; 2) it provides a mechanism called high priority users higher QoS when the network is heavily loaded compared to the RSS-based method; and 3) it hands over a few users from a heavily loaded BS to a lightly loaded one to allow more users to access this network. The simulation results confirm the advantages of the proposed UP-based mechanism and show that the simulation results of the Q-learning method are consistent with its theoretical analysis.

To improve the accuracy of diagnosis and the effectiveness of treatment, a framework of parallel healthcare systems (PHSs) based on the artificial systems + computational experiments + parallel execution (ACP) approach is proposed in this paper. PHS uses artificial healthcare systems to model and represent patients’ conditions, diagnosis, and treatment process, then applies computational experiments to analyze and evaluate various therapeutic regimens, and implements parallel execution for decision-making support and real-time optimization in both actual and artificial healthcare processes. In addition, we combine the emerging blockchain technology with PHS, via constructing a consortium blockchain linking patients, hospitals, health bureaus, and healthcare communities for comprehensive healthcare data sharing, medical records review, and care auditability. Finally, a prototype named parallel gout diagnosis and treatment system is built and deployed to verify and demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the blockchain-powered PHS framework.

Crime scene analysis is a retrospective process from traces to psychology and physiology. It is not only the starting point and foundation of criminal investigation, but also the key part for solving criminal cases. As a typical open complex social system, it has three features, namely, uncertainty, diversity, and complexity, thus making the system modeling a huge challenge. In this paper, we propose the parallel crime scene analysis system based on the artificial societies, computational experiments and parallel execution (ACP) approach, which uses artificial (A) crime scene to describe the basic elements, functions and states of the criminals, computational (C) experiments to compute and predict the different forms of crime scene, and parallel (P) execution to guide or control the evolution of the physical crime process in accordance with the results from the artificial crime scene. First, we propose the concept of parallel crime scene from the perspective of complex system theory and give an overview of its architecture, then we present the construction method of artificial crime scene and the blackboard-based multiagent artificial crime scene analysis system. On this basis, the temporal and spatial interaction models of the criminal subjects are proposed and verified. After that, we introduce the software-defined crime scene analyzing model systematically. The ACP approach sheds light on the intelligent management and control for complex crime scene analysis.

Welcome to the first issue of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS) for 2018, and Happy New Year to everyone. According to the Chinese lunar calendar, this is the year of the Dog, which in Chinese culture represents trust, loyalty, dedication, and energy. As such, I would like to take this opportunity to express my best wishes of a happy, healthy, and high-producing 2018 to each and every one of our readers, reviewers, and editors.

This paper is to discuss the state, trend, and frontiers of development of cyber-physical-social systems (CPSSs) in China. The demand for developing CPSS is discussed in detail, followed by the Artificial societies, Computational experiments, Parallel execution (ACP) approach for CPSS and knowledge automation. The development of ACP based on CPSS in transportation, energy, information, Internet of Things, and Internet of Minds (IoM) is discussed to demonstrate the cutting-edge applications in CPSS. Finally, the blockchainized IoM technology and the concepts of parallel society are described. This paper will contribute to the transition from the current social construct to a futuristic intelligent society.

We present a bibliographic and coauthorship-based collaboration analysis of papers published in the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (T-ITS) between 2014 and 2016 from the aspects of productivity, topics, citations, usage, and coauthorship networks. The most productive authors, institutions, countries/regions, and the most cited papers, most popular papers, as well as the most frequent topics and their trends are identified and analyzed. Social network methods are employed for revealing collaboration patterns among contributors through author- and institution-level coauthorship. The results show that China is playing a critical role in ITS research during this period but the interinstitution collaborations are less prevalent than it used to be. Overall data have indicated that IEEE T-ITS has made tremendous progress and contributed significantly to the accelerated growth of ITS fields over the last three years.

With the rapid development of big data analytics in online marketing, real-time bidding (RTB) has emerged as a promising business model in recent years, and now becomes one of the major online advertising channels. Based on analysis of Web Cookies, RTB platforms are able to precisely identify the features and preferences of target audiences visiting publishers' websites, and forward the generated ad impressions to competing advertisers who submit bids for their best-matched audience in real-time ad auctions. In RTB markets, reserve price serves as an important tuner to exclude advertisers with low estimated values, and hence can guarantee a desirable result for the publisher from ad impression auctions. In this paper, we strive to study publishers' strategy on the reserve price, and probe the impact of reserve price on their revenues. We first analyze the ad impression auction under a direct auction mechanism. We then introduce the reserve price and study its impact on publishers' revenues under an indirect auction mechanism, and our research findings indicate that a rational positive reserve price will always improve publishers' revenues even if it is not optimal. Also, the optimal reserve price is figured out based on the advertisers' bid distributions for publishers' revenue maximization. Finally, experiments using empirical log data from real-world RTB markets are designed to validate our model and analysis, and the results provide strong support to our theoretical analysis. The experimental results also indicate that although the number of bids does not impose any influence on the optimal reserve price, it has significant impacts on publishers' revenues.

In the paper, considering the limitation of effective method in E-learning area, a recommendation framework for E-Learning based on deep learning is proposed. Our model is based on deep learning, which has strong capability to learn from large-scale data. It has some improvements than previous methods. First, it is based on the conventional K-Nearnest Neighbor(KNN) method to train a model, thus its accuracy is guaranteed. Second, it can recommend the new item whose similarity can not be calculated. Third, it greatly reduces the heavy burden for a running system, which is useful in real practice of recommendation systems. In conclusion, the proposed framework can offer a new recommendation method for more personlized learning in the future.

An artificial community is constructed for studying cyber interactive behavior of message publishing by considering impacts from individual's psychological state and social environment. The bottom-up multiagent approach is applied to model the interactions between individuals, and the evolution and organization of collective cyber behaviors. The cyber message publishing behaviors in response to online topics is demonstrated in the artificial community, where each agent perceives the state of the topics and make decisions to operate on specific themes with particular message publishing mechanisms. The mechanisms are designed in line with the analysis of statistical results of 10 years data from Tianya.cn, which are further validated through the artificial community using computational experimental leverages. Experimental results illuminate that the individual's post publishing behavior is dominated by agent's psychological states, while the comment publishing behavior is more susceptible to the agent's social environment expressing the collective efforts of topics and other agents in the community. The artificial community has been used to test the impact of several factors (e.g., individual's psychological state, number of initial agents, and number of new added agents) to individual's message publishing mechanism and to cyber collective behavior patterns. It provides a software-defined social laboratory for social and cyber behavior studies with computational experimental measures.

With the potential to increase road safety and provide economic benefits, intelligent vehicles have elicited a significant amount of interest from both academics and industry. A robust and reliable vehicle detection and tracking system is one of the key modules for intelligent vehicles to perceive the surrounding environment. The millimeter-wave radar and the monocular camera are two vehicular sensors commonly used for vehicle detection and tracking. Despite their advantages, the drawbacks of these two sensors make them insufficient when used separately. Thus, the fusion of these two sensors is considered as an efficient way to address the challenge. This paper presents a collaborative fusion approach to achieve the optimal balance between vehicle detection accuracy and computational efficiency. The proposed vehicle detection and tracking design is extensively evaluated with a real-world data set collected by the developed intelligent vehicle. Experimental results show that the proposed system can detect on-road vehicles with 92.36% detection rate and 0% false alarm rate, and it only takes ten frames (0.16 s) for the detection and tracking of each vehicle. This system is installed on Kuafu-II intelligent vehicle for the fourth and fifth autonomous vehicle competitions, which is called “Intelligent Vehicle Future Challenge” in China.

In the last decade, crowdsourcing has emerged as a novel mechanism for accomplishing temporal and spatial critical tasks in transportation with the collective intelligence of individuals and organizations. This paper presents a timely literature review of crowdsourcing and its applications in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). We investigate the ITS services enabled by crowdsourcing, the keyword co-occurrence and coauthorship networks formed by ITS publications, and identify the problems and challenges that need further research. Finally, we briefly introduce our future works focusing on using geospatial tagged data to analyze real-time traffic conditions and the management of traffic flow in urban environment. This review aims to help ITS practitioners and researchers build a state-of-the-art understanding of crowdsourcing in ITS, as well as to call for more research on the application of crowdsourcing in transportation systems.

Big data for social transportation brings us unprecedented opportunities for resolving transportation problems for which traditional approaches are not competent and for building the next-generation intelligent transportation systems. Although social data have been applied for transportation analysis, there are still many challenges. First, social data evolve with time and contain abundant information, posing a crucial need for data collection and cleaning. Meanwhile, each type of data has specific advantages and limitations for social transportation, and one data type alone is not capable of describing the overall state of a transportation system. Systematic data fusing approaches or frameworks for combining social signal data with different features, structures, resolutions, and precision are needed. Second, data processing and mining techniques, such as natural language processing and analysis of streaming data, require further revolutions in effective utilization of real-time traffic information. Third, social data are connected to cyber and physical spaces. To address practical problems in social transportation, a suite of schemes are demanded for realizing big data in social transportation systems, such as crowdsourcing, visual analysis, and task-based services. In this paper, we overview data sources, analytical approaches, and application systems for social transportation, and we also suggest a few future research directions for this new social transportation field.