Agrifood system actors operate within diverse sociocultural, economic, and biophysical settings. For growers, crop planning, usually a yearly business plan, is a key decision to make on when, what, and how many to plant. It is a challenging task as it deals with multiple constraints in volatile economic and/or climate environment. Most crop planning models have difficulty in adapting to changing situation. In this study, a parallel system of crop planning composed of the artificial system, computational experiment, and parallel execution is proposed. The farmers are described as agents, and the decision is made based on the heuristic searching of optimal plan; the adaption of plan is triggered autonomously given strong environment changes. Focus is given to economic environment, which is indicated as product price. In a case study, the economic environment of the artificial system is built based on the monthly and weekly price information for 13 products during 7 years. The computational experiment provides the initial cropping plan and harvest time, with social and ecological constraints. Result shows that the cropping plan can further adapt to price variation. This flexible cropping plan system can strengthen the capability of cooperatives serving small-scale farmers.

This paper deals with the challenging problem of building visual reasoning models for answering questions related to artworks in artistic domains. The nature of abstract styles and cultural contexts within an artistic image makes the corresponding learning tasks extremely difficult. We propose a novel framework termed as Hierarchical-Knowledge Embedded Meta-Learning to address the critical issues of visual reasoning in artistic domains. In particular, we firstly present a deep relational model to capture and memorize the relations among different samples. Then, we provide the hierarchical-knowledge embedding that mines the implicit relationship between question-answer pairs for knowledge representation as the guidance of our meta-learner. This is a case of "knowledge is power" in the sense that the hierarchical knowledge representation is incorporated into our meta-learning based model. The final classification is derived from our model by learning to compare the features of samples. Experimental results show that our approach achieves significantly higher performance compared with other state-of-the-arts.

Person search often requires a query photo of the target person. However, in many practical scenarios, there is no guarantee that such a photo is always available. In this paper, we define the problem of sketch based person search, which uses a sketch instead of a photo as the probe for retrieving. We tackle this problem in a weak supervision setting and propose a clustering and feature attention based weakly supervised learning framework, which contains two stages of pedestrian detection and sketch based person re-identification. Specially, we introduce multiple detectors, followed by fuzzy c-means clustering to achieve weakly supervised pedestrian detection. Moreover, we design an attention module to learn discriminative features in subsequent re-identification network. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our method.

Adversarial images generated by generative adversarial networks are not close to any existing benign images, and contain nonrobust features that have been identified as critical to the robustness of a machine learning model. Since adversarial images have an underlying distribution that differs from normal images, these kinds of images can offer valuable features for training a robust model. To deal with these special features, we focus on a novel machine learning task of adversarial images classification, where adversarial images can be used to investigate the problem of classifying adversarial images themselves. In the setting of this novel task, adversarial images are the ONLY kind of data used in training and testing, rather than not just a set of testing images as usual. To this end, we propose a novel spatial–frequency ensemble relation network with generative adversarial learning. First, we present a spatial–frequency ensemble representation learning to extract the feature of training images. Second, we design a meta-learning-based relation model to gain the relationship between images. Third, to achieve a robust model, we utilize generative adversarial learning and transform the relationship into a Jacobian matrix. Finally, we design a discriminator model that determines whether an adversarial image is from the matching category or not. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves significantly higher performance compared with other state-of-the-arts.

The goal of diagnosing the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) from suspected pneumonia cases, that is, recognizing COVID-19 from chest X-ray or computed tomography (CT) images, is to improve diagnostic accuracy, leading to faster intervention. The most important and challenging problem here is to design an effective and robust diagnosis model. To this end, there are three challenges to overcome: (1) The lack of training samples limits the success of existing deep-learning-based methods. (2) Many public COVID-19 data sets contain only a few images without fine-grained labels. (3) Due to the explosive growth of suspected cases, it is urgent and important to diagnose not only COVID-19 cases but also the cases of other types of pneumonia that are similar to the symptoms of COVID-19. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework called Unsupervised Meta-Learning with Self-Knowledge Distillation to address the problem of differentiating COVID-19 from pneumonia cases. During training, our model cannot use any true labels and aims to gain the ability of learning to learn by itself. In particular, we first present a deep diagnosis model based on a relation network to capture and memorize the relation among different images. Second, to enhance the performance of our model, we design a self-knowledge distillation mechanism that distills knowledge within our model itself. Our network is divided into several parts, and the knowledge in the deeper parts is squeezed into the shallow ones. The final results are derived from our model by learning to compare the features of images. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves significantly higher performance than other state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we construct a new COVID-19 pneumonia data set based on text mining, consisting of 2696 COVID-19 images (347 X-ray + 2349 CT), 10,155 images (9661 X-ray + 494 CT) about other types of pneumonia, and the fine-grained labels of all. Our data set considers not only a bacterial infection or viral infection which causes pneumonia but also a viral infection derived from the influenza virus or coronavirus.

While existing person search methods have achieved good performance, they require the images used for training contain labels about the identity and bounding box location of each person. However, it is expensive and difficult to manually annotate these labels in the large scale scenario. To overcome this issue, we consider weakly supervised person search. The weakly supervised setting means during training we only know which identities appear in the image set and how many individuals present in each image, without any identity or location information on the image. Facing this challenge, we propose a clustering and patch based weakly supervised learning (CPBWSL) framework, which separately addresses two sub-tasks including pedestrian detection and person re-identification. Particularly, we introduce multiple detectors to provide more detection results as well as fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm to cluster these results and remove low membership ones. Moreover, a patch based learning network is designed to generate different patches and learn discriminative patch features. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks indicate that the proposed weakly supervised setting is feasible and our method can achieve performance comparable to some fully supervised person search methods.

One of the principal goals in medicine is to determine and implement the best treatment for patients through fastidious estimation of the effects and benefits of therapeutic procedures. The inherent complexities of physiological and pathological networks that span across orders of magnitude in time and length scales, however, represent fundamental hurdles in determining effective treatments for patients. Here we argue for a new approach, called the ACP-based approach, that combines artificial (societies), computational (experiments), and parallel (execution) methods in intelligent systems and technology for integrative and predictive medicine, or more generally, precision medicine and smart health management. The advent of artificial societies that collect the clinically relevant information in prognostics and therapeutics provides a promising platform for organizing and experimenting complex physiological systems toward integrative medicine. The ability of computational experiments to analyze distinct, interactive systems such as the host mechanisms, pathological pathways, and therapeutic strategies, as well as other factors using the artificial systems, will enable control and management through parallel execution of real and arficial systems concurrently within the integrative medicine context. The development of this framework in integrative medicine, fueled by close collaborations between physicians, engineers, and scientists, will result in preventive and predictive practices of a personal, proactive, and precise nature, including rational combinatorial treatments, adaptive therapeutics, and patient-oriented disease management.

Tapping into the wisdom of the crowd, social tagging can be considered an alternative mechanism - as opposed to Web search - for organizing and discovering information on the Web. Effective tag-based recommendation of information items, such as Web resources, is a critical aspect of this social information discovery mechanism. A precise understanding of the information structure of social tagging systems lies at the core of an effective tag-based recommendation method. While most of the existing research either implicitly or explicitly assumes a simple tripartite graph structure for this purpose, we propose a comprehensive information structure to capture all types of co-occurrence information in the tagging data. Based on the proposed information structure, we further propose a unified user profiling scheme to make full use of all available information. Finally, supported by our proposed user profile, we propose a novel framework for collaborative filtering in social tagging systems. In our proposed framework, we first generate joint item-tag recommendations, with tags indicating topical interests of users in target items. These joint recommendations are then refined by the wisdom from the crowd and projected to the item space for final item recommendations. Evaluation using three real-world datasets shows that our proposed recommendation approach significantly outperformed state-of-the-art approaches.

Abstract User‐generated content on the Web has become an extremely valuable source for mining and analyzing user opinions on any topic. Recent years have seen an increasing body of work investigating methods to recognize favorable and unfavorable sentiments toward specific subjects from online text. However, most of these efforts focus on English and there have been very few studies on sentiment analysis of Chinese content. This paper aims to address the unique challenges posed by Chinese sentiment analysis. We propose a rule‐based approach including two phases: (1) determining each sentence's sentiment based on word dependency, and (2) aggregating sentences to predict the document sentiment. We report the results of an experimental study comparing our approach with three machine learning‐based approaches using two sets of Chinese articles. These results illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method and its advantages against learning‐based approaches.

The 12 papers in this special section focus on intelligence and security informatics. They are summarized here.

Rough set theory is a useful tool for data mining. It is based on equivalence relations and has been extended to covering-based generalized rough set. This paper studies three kinds of covering generalized rough sets for dealing with the vagueness and granularity in information systems. First, we examine the properties of approximation operations generated by a covering in comparison with those of the Pawlak's rough sets. Then, we propose concepts and conditions for two coverings to generate an identical lower approximation operation and an identical upper approximation operation. After the discussion on the interdependency of covering lower and upper approximation operations, we address the axiomization issue of covering lower and upper approximation operations. In addition, we study the relationships between the covering lower approximation and the interior operator and also the relationships between the covering upper approximation and the closure operator. Finally, this paper explores the relationships among these three types of covering rough sets.