Discrete data-based learning approaches have facilitated the wide applications of AI models, especially the notably favored foundation models. However, simply scaling the diversity and quantity of training data is still inadequate to achieve human-like thinking and action competency. A shift of learning paradigm from spatially–temporally discrete, weakly correlated, and noninteractive samples to spatially–temporally continuous, strongly correlated, and interactive scenarios is expected to go beyond the element-level understanding and promote the relation, trend, as well as situation awareness abilities of AI models. This article systematically structures the methodology of scenarios engineering (SE) and proposes a three-layer SE roadmap consisting of the scenarios development layer, scenarios organization layer, and scenarios cognition layer. This roadmap is designed to foster the flexible and efficient construction, organization, and utilization of scenarios. Building on this foundation and parallel intelligence, we introduce the framework of scenarios intelligence (SI) that leverages scenarios as next-generation data resources and microworld models to cultivate embodied AI agents, facilitating the development of descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive intelligence in tasks like perception, decision-making, and action. Experiments are conducted with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in environmental understanding, risk assessment, and active perception.

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.

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.

Examining the perceptual differences between China and the United States can facilitate a better understanding of their opinions and perspectives, helping to promote peaceful interactions among the two nations as well as the world. This study presents a data-driven approach to measure cognitive differences, investigating these differences from topical and sentimental angles regarding the unmanned balloon event that had been shot down by U.S. warplanes. We also explore the cognitive differences between news media and the followers, and the evolution of topics over time. Our findings reveal those discussions about “balloons” on social media in China and the United States display certain differences in terms of sentiment. In addition, we assess the impact of this event on U.S.–China relationship, particularly in trade. To evaluate the analytical capabilities of the popular ChatGPT model, we use this event as a case study to demonstrate that ChatGPT-like models may have limited capabilities for such kind of specialized analysis. The dataset utilized here is made available for public usage for further investigation on public opinion dynamics for similar events.

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.

Visual reasoning between visual images and natural language is a long-standing challenge in computer vision. Most of the methods aim to look for answers to questions only on the basis of the analysis of the offered questions and images. Other approaches treat knowledge graphs as flattened tables to search for the answer. However, there are two major problems with these works: 1) the model disregards the fact that the world we surrounding us interlinks our hearing and speaking of natural language and 2) the model largely ignores the structure of the acrlong KG. To overcome these challenging deficiencies, a model should jointly consider two modalities of vision and language, as well as the rich structural and logical information embedded in knowledge graphs. To this end, we propose a general joint representation learning framework for visual reasoning, namely, knowledge-embedded mutual guidance. It realizes mutual guidance not only between visual data and natural language descriptions but also between knowledge graphs and reasoning models. In addition, it exploits the knowledge derived from the reasoning model to boost knowledge graphs when applying the visual relation detection task. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach performs dramatically better than state-of-the-art methods on two benchmarks for visual reasoning.

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is an important but challenging task in computer vision that aims to identify unseen classes without matching training samples. Current cutting-edge ZSL methods based on locality focus on acquiring the explicit locality of distinguishing characteristics, which could face a lack of adequate supervision at the class attribute level. This paper introduces a novel approach called IAC, which aims to learn Implicit Attribute Composition for ZSL. This method is more comprehensive compared to attribute localization that solely focuses on class-level attribute supervision. IAC utilizes subspace representations that efficiently capture the inherent structure of high-dimensional image features. Then, we learn implicit attribute composition through subspace representation learning. The superiority of the proposed IAC compared to the state-of-the-art is demonstrated through sufficient experiments conducted on three commonly used ZSL datasets, CUB, SUN, and AwA2.

With cloud computing facing higher levels of Big Data than ever, the processor scale is rapidly expanding. Large clusters place a heavy burden on cloud service providers and the environment. High energy consumption decreases the economic benefits of cloud service providers while enormous power demands pressure on the environment. The dynamic consolidation of virtual machines (VMs), which uses live migration technology to optimize resource usage and reduce energy consumption, is sufficient for saving energy while ensuring high performance with the desired level of quality of service (QoS) between cloud providers and users. In this article, we propose a novel machine-learning algorithm called deep-Q neural network VM consolidation (DQNVMC) that combines the Q-leaning approach with deep learning neural network to find an approximately optimal solution. Furthermore, based on the real workload trace in the cloud environment, the experiments show that DQNVMC effectively reduces energy consumption while meeting the high performance of QoS requirements.

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!

Along with the development of cloud computing, more and more applications are migrated into the cloud. An important feature of cloud computing is pay-as-you-go. However, most users always should pay more than their actual usage due to the one-hour billing cycle. In addition, most cloud service providers provide a certain discount for long-term users, but short-term users with small computing demands cannot enjoy this discount. To reduce the cost of cloud users, we introduce a new role, which is cloud broker. A cloud broker is an intermediary agent between cloud providers and cloud users. It rents a number of reserved VMs from cloud providers with a good price and offers them to users on an on-demand basis at a cheaper price than that provided by cloud providers. Besides, the cloud broker adopts a shorter billing cycle compared with cloud providers. By doing this, the cloud broker can reduce a great amount of cost for user. In addition to reduce the user cost, the cloud broker also could earn the difference in prices between on-demand and reserved VMs. In this paper, we focus on how to configure a cloud broker and how to price its VMs such that its profit can be maximized on the premise of saving costs for users. Profit of a cloud broker is affected by many factors such as the user demands, the purchase price and the sales price of VMs, the scale of the cloud broker, etc. Moreover, these factors are affected mutually, which makes the analysis on profit more complicated. In this paper, we first give a synthetically analysis on all the affecting factors, and define an optimal multiserver configuration and VM pricing problem which is modeled as a profit maximization problem. Second, combining the partial derivative and bisection search method, we propose a heuristic method to solve the optimization problem. The near-optimal solutions can be used to guide the configuration and VM pricing of the cloud broker. Moreover, a series of comparisons are given which show that a cloud broker can save a considerable cost for users.