In recent years, intelligent vehicles operating in urban environments have demonstrated the capability to autonomously execute various tasks, such as object detection, lane detection, segmentation, etc. This advancement is facilitated by the extensive datasets accumulated by researchers, alongside advancements in intelligent algorithms, as well as significant breakthroughs in software and hardware. However, within the autonomous driving community, there is a scarcity of data regarding scenarios encountered in mining environments. This scarcity presents challenges and bottlenecks for the advancement of comprehensive autonomous driving systems and autonomousoperations. Although we previously released our dataset, AutoMine, which includes over 18 hours of driving data in open-pit mines, its scope is limited to two specific tasks. This scope limitation impedes the training and validation of the majority of algorithms for different tasks in this particular scenario. To broaden the scope of autonomous driving visual tasks in mining environments, we have curated a diverse collection encompassing multiple tasks, including detection, segmentation, tracking, etc. Additionally, we have established benchmarks and set up baselines for the aforementioned multiple tasks. By comparing the performance differences of visual algorithms between mining areas and other scenarios, we demonstrate the distinctive characteristics of mining regions in an intuitive manner. We have developed a suite of tools for converting annotated data into the standardized format used in existing driving datasets. Our aspiration is to establish data and benchmark foundations, supporting research endeavors in intelligent transportation within mining environments and autonomous driving in comprehensive scenarios. Our project website can be seen in AutoMine, and the dataset can be downloaded via AutoMine-Benchmark.

Ergonomics or human factors engineering (HFE) mainly exploits human experiments to discover one's cognitive and behavioral mechanisms. Such a paradigm, however, suffers from the scale of subject group and the extent to which they can stand for the whole studied population. Additionally, for real-time human-machine tasks, the experiment-modeling-validation-application path may not be applicable since the experiment cannot be flexibly conducted to update cognitive models, leading to a failure of the online system control and management. To solve the dilemma, this article proposes the generative artificial intelligence (GAI)-driven ergonomics to augment the HFE research. By introducing GAI techniques, virtual-real hybrid experiments are combined and supplement more heterogeneous samples, enhancing the input diversity for cognitive modeling and behavioral learning. The case studies of human-machine cooperative driving and aerospace robotic arm operation indicate that the innovative paradigm can effectively and efficiently augment the human experiment data. It can elevate the generality and robustness of human models.

Typical human resource management relies on equilibrium analysis or manual design to develop appropriate strategies. Such a paradigm, however, may not be applicable for modern enterprises, as systems are highly time variant with diverse participants. To tackle such individual cognitive difference and systemic complexity, this article proposes a distributed model repository—the digital personnel with heterogeneity. The digital personnel are composed of different digital employers and employees and can conveniently conduct computational experiments to dynamically explore possible management policies. By cognitive reinforcement learning and constant interaction with the real human users, it provides a knowledge automation approach for the agile reengineering and optimization of workflows as well as the elevation of user's satisfaction. Experiment based on a multinational company manifests that the methodology is feasible and effective. Consequently, the heterogeneous digital personnel play a source of intelligent behavior generation with interactive computational experiments and can be an efficient testbed for management strategies.

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.

Point cloud data labeling is considered a time-consuming and expensive task in autonomous driving, whereas annotation-free learning training can avoid it by learning point cloud representations from unannotated data. In this paper, we propose AFOV, a novel 3D Annotation-Free framework assisted by 2D Open-Vocabulary segmentation models. It consists of two stages: In the first stage, we innovatively integrate high-quality textual and image features of 2D open-vocabulary models and propose the Tri-Modal contrastive Pre-training (TMP). In the second stage, spatial mapping between point clouds and images is utilized to generate pseudo-labels, enabling cross-modal knowledge distillation. Besides, we introduce the Approximate Flat Interaction (AFI) to address the noise during alignment and label confusion. To validate the superiority of AFOV, extensive experiments are conducted on multiple related datasets. We achieved a record-breaking 47.73% mIoU on the annotation-free 3D segmentation task in nuScenes, surpassing the previous best model by 3.13% mIoU. Meanwhile, the performance of fine-tuning with 1% data on nuScenes and SemanticKITTI reached a remarkable 51.75% mIoU and 48.14% mIoU, outperforming all previous pre-trained models.

Parallel LiDAR emerges as an innovative framework for next-generation intelligent LiDAR systems in autonomous driving. In parallel LiDAR research, V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle) cooperative perception is a promising technology which can effectively enhance perception range and accuracy through inter-agent information exchange. Currently, sensor heterogeneity remains a critical challenge in V2V. Although some work has made initial attempts to address this issue, existing studies are primarily conducted under ideal clear-weather conditions, ignoring the impact of variable weather factors in real-world applications. In fact, adverse weather has been shown to significantly degrade the performance of LiDAR systems, with the risk of cumulative degradation in V2V. To address this challenge, we first introduce OPV2V-W and V2V4Real-W as new benchmarks to study sensor heterogeneity in V2V under adverse weather. Then we propose the HPLaw architecture (Heterogeneous Parallel LiDARs for Adverse Weather), a self-knowledge distillation method designed to enhance model robustness across varying weather scenarios. HPLaw employs an efficient PF network to facilitate heterogeneous feature fusion and incorporates an SAKD module to extract weather-invariant features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the student model in HPLaw achieves outstanding performance under all weather conditions, exhibiting remarkable robustness.

Given the scarcity of real data and the time-intensive nature of labeling, current multi-agent perception models often rely on simulated sensor data for training and validation. However, perception performance deteriorates significantly due to domain gap between simulated and real data. Existing adaptation methods focus on domain-generalized feature extraction while neglecting multi-agent shift uncertainty and relational semantic loss. To address this issue, we propose a Selective Shift Domain Adaptation method in multi-agent collaborative perception, called SSDA. SSDA incorporates two essential components: the frequency-decoupled feature shift adjustment (FSA) and the entropy-driven staged adaptive alignment (SAA). To mitigate the relational semantic loss, the FSA is proposed to simplify the representation of correlation features and remove redundant information from the source domain, thereby mitigating interference for domain adversarial scenarios. To tackle the shift uncertainty, the SAA is designed to achieve adaptive alignment from global to local guided by information entropy, which dynamically adjusts weights for samples according to their level of uncertainty. The results demonstrate that the SSDA is significantly superior to the SOTA, achieving up to 7.35% improvements on [email protected].

Process reward model (PRM) has been proven effective in test-time scaling of LLM on challenging reasoning tasks. However, the reward hacking induced by PRM hinders its successful applications in reinforcement fine-tuning. We find the primary cause of reward hacking induced by PRM is that: the canonical summation-form credit assignment in reinforcement learning (RL), i.e. cumulative gamma-decayed future rewards, causes the LLM to hack steps with high rewards. Therefore, to unleashing the power of PRM in training-time, we propose PURE: Process sUpervised Reinforcement lEarning. The core of PURE is the min-form credit assignment that defines the value function as the minimum future rewards. This method unifies the optimization objective with respect to process rewards during test-time and training-time, and significantly alleviates reward hacking due to the limits on the range of values of value function and more rational assignment of advantages. Through extensively experiments on 3 base models, we achieve similar reasoning performance using PRM-based approach compared with verifiable reward-based approach if enabling min-form credit assignment. In contrast, the canonical sum-form credit assignment even collapses training at the beginning. Moreover, when we incorporate 1/10th verifiable rewards to auxiliary the PRM-based fine-tuning, it further alleviate reward hacking and results in the best fine-tuned model based on Qwen2.5-Math-7B with 82.5% accuracy on AMC23 and 53.3% average accuracy across 5 benchmarks. Furthermore, we summary the reward hacking cases we encountered during training and analysis the cause of training collapse.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly important in dynamic environments such as logistics transportation and disaster response. However, current tasks often rely on human operators to monitor aerial videos and make operational decisions. This mode of human-machine collaboration suffers from significant limitations in efficiency and adaptability. In this paper, we present AirVista-II—an end-to-end agentic system for embodied UAVs, designed to enable general-purpose semantic understanding and reasoning in dynamic scenes. The system integrates agent-based task identification and scheduling, multimodal perception mechanisms, and differentiated keyframe extraction strategies tailored for various temporal scenarios, enabling the efficient capture of critical scene information. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves high-quality semantic understanding across diverse UAV-based dynamic scenarios under a zero-shot setting.

Academic journals serve as pivotal bridges for knowledge dissemination and technology innovation, playing a crucial role in promoting scientific research, industrial progress, and societal development. However, traditional models of journal management and operation, hindered by prolonged peer review processes, overarching publication inefficiencies, and surging page expenditures, are increasingly powerless to address challenges posed by ever-faster knowledge updates, broad information dissemination, and interdisciplinary scholarly work. This has led to an urgent need for smart organizations and intelligent operations of journals. In view of this, the paper identifies the primary issues in current journal management and proposes the concept of smart journals based on TRUE Autonomous Organizations and Operations (TRUE DAO or TAO). This paper introduces the foundational architecture of smart journals and proposes incentive mechanisms for a more dynamic publishing ecosystem. Moreover, a simulation experiment is designed to evaluate an adaptive incentive mechanism, demonstrating significant improvements in review quality and accuracy through personalized incentive allocation strategies. Smart journals not only enable digital transformation but also foster profound innovation and long-term sustainability in publishing.

Fault diagnosis is important for predictive maintenance in smart manufacturing, which involves intelligent human-machine interactions in order to make smart decisions for potential problems. Large language model (LLM) is promising in providing general artificial intelligence capabilities in this regard. However, LLM itself can not accurately analyze faults due to heterogeneous data from different Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices in different processes during the complete production process. To accurately diagnose faults and facilitate human-machine interaction, this article proposes a brain-like cognition-driven model factory (BC-MF), using an LLM as a supervisor to adaptively generate personalized small-scale models according to the features of these heterogeneous data, where the vertical federated learning (VFL) idea is adopted. This BC-MF-based fault diagnosis approach includes a preliminary diagnosis phase and a precise diagnosis phase. The preliminary diagnosis is accomplished by prompting the LLM using a brain-like chain of thoughts (BLCoTs). A hypernetwork uses the preliminary diagnostic results and the feature maps trained by each node in the VFL to generate dedicated diagnostic small models and uses these models for final precise diagnostics. The LLM provides fault maintenance recommendations interactively according to the final diagnostic results. Comprehensive evaluations are conducted using four open IIoT datasets and one self-made dataset. It shows that the proposed BC-MF approach is significantly better than the existing approaches, in terms of model accuracy, comprehension of faults, and so on.

Isolated data islands are prevalent in intelligent automated optical inspection (AOI) systems, limiting the full utilization of data resources and impeding the potential of AOI systems. Establishing a collaborative ecology involving software providers, hardware manufacturers, and factories offers an encouraging solution to build a closed-loop data flow and achieve optimal data resource utilization. However, concerns about privacy issues, rights infringement, and threats from other participants present challenges in establishing an efficient and effective community. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, AOI-OPEN, which first creates a trustworthy AOI ecology to gather related entities with decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) mechanisms. Then, a parallel data pipeline is proposed to generate large-scale virtual samples from small-scale real data for AOI systems. Finally, federated learning (FL) is adopted to use the distributed data resources among multiple entities and build privacy-preserving big models. Experiments on defect classification tasks show that, with privacy preserved, AOI-OPEN greatly strengthens the utilization of distributed data resources and improves the accuracy of inspection models.

平行交通是一种实现智能交通管理与控制的综合性范式,致力于解决人类行为和社会因素的复杂性问题。近年来,基础模型(foundational models, FMs)的崛起为平行交通的实现提供了新的可能。但这种模型固有的知识陈旧、“幻觉”现象以及“黑盒”特性削弱了其决策的可靠性和可信度。为解决这一问题,提出一种基于检索增强生成与思维链提示(chain-of-thought prompting)的平行交通框架TransRAG。该框架由紧密协作的存储层、管理层和执行层组成,旨在为用户提供个性且多样化的交通服务。其中,存储层引入的外部知识增强了管理层中基础模型的性能,以实现复杂的计算实验。执行层中人工交通系统与实际交通系统的虚实交互使得管理层的决策得到持续优化,从而实现动态知识更新和灵活的策略调整,以适应不断变化的交通环境。此外,TransRAG通过区块链、智能合约和缓存技术的集成,能够有效应对单点故障、隐私泄露以及数据访问延迟等问题,从而加速推进向“6S”交通5.0的全面迈进。

Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is an additive manufacturing process capable of producing intricate structures with high accuracy. Despite this capability, it struggles to achieve the required reliability for mass production—specifically the stability of a production run and repeatability across multiple runs. Parameter optimization, which adjusts process parameters to regulate a specific quantity of interest (QoI), is a crucial means of quality control. Existing methods, however, have not adequately addressed both random and systematic factors in the LPBF process. The stochastic nature of the process is often neglected under the assumption that identical parameter inputs will consistently yield the same QoI. This deviates from reality and is not intended to reduce potential variations in the QoI. Moreover, many studies do not incorporate the systematic neighboring effects between scan tracks into their optimization, so process reliability cannot be guaranteed. To address this issue, this study focuses on optimizing the probability distribution of the QoI. The key idea is not only to increase the likelihood of achieving the ideal QoI but also to reduce its variance. This is achieved by uncertainty-aware modeling and optimization of the LPBF process using machine learning. Specifically, the problem is formulated as maximizing the posterior distribution of scan parameters given an ideal QoI sequence and historical manufacturing data, yielding a large-scale constrained optimization problem. A stochastic, distributed, gradient-based method is proposed to solve this problem, where a coarse-to-fine strategy plays a critical role in accelerating convergence. A case study is then conducted to stabilize the melt pool volume by optimizing laser powers. The solutions are verified in a calibrated finite element-based simulation environment, in which the variations of the melt pool volume are effectively reduced both within a single run and across multiple runs. The implementation of our method is available at https://github.com/qihangGH/uncertainty_aware_param_optim_for_AM.

The widespread adoption of laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) additive manufacturing is hampered by process unreliability problems. Modeling the melt pool behavior in LPBF is crucial to develop process control methods. While data-driven models linking melt pool dynamics to specific process parameters have shown appreciable advancements, existing models often oversimplify these relationships as deterministic, failing to account for the inherent instability of LPBF processes. Such simplifications can lead to overconfident and unreliable predictions, potentially resulting in erroneous process decisions. To address this critical issue, we propose a probabilistic data-driven approach to melt pool modeling that incorporates process noise and uncertainty. Our framework formulates a problem that includes distribution approximation and uncertainty quantification. Specifically, the Gaussian distribution with higher order priors, aided with variational inference and importance sampling, is used to approximate the probability distribution of melt pool characteristics. The uncertainty inherent in both LPBF process data and the modeling approach itself are then decomposed and approximated by using Monte Carlo sampling. The melt pool model is improved further by using a novel grid-based representation for the neighborhood of a fusion point, and a neural network architecture designed for effective feature fusion. This approach not only refines the accuracy of the model but also quantifies the uncertainty of the predictions, thereby enabling more informed decision-making with reduced risk. Two potential applications, including LPBF process planning and anomaly detection, are discussed. The implementation of our model is available athttps://github.com/qihangGH/probabilistic_melt_pool_model. Note to Practitioners—Modeling the melt pool behavior in laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) processes is pivotal for enhancing its quality control. However, a problem is that most existing data-driven melt pool models learn melt pool behavior with a deterministic function, which predicts the same outputs if its inputs are the same. This deviates from the reality and neglects the uncertainty in LPBF processes. As a consequence, the quality control methods based on such melt pool models lack required reliability. In response to these challenges, this work proposes to model melt pool behavior by using probability distributions with deep learning techniques, which can quantify the uncertainty in both LPBF process data and data-driven models. Aided with an elegantly designed representation for the neighborhood of a fusion point as model input, and a neural network architecture that fuses multi-modal data, the proposed model achieves accurate melt pool size prediction results. More importantly, this work quantifies and decomposes the prediction uncertainty. By accounting for noise and parameter variations, the probabilistic modeling models developed herein offer a more robust foundation for LPBF quality control than the existing ones. They can be readily applied by practitioners to perform improved process planning, defect prognosis, and real-time anomaly detection tasks.

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.

Traditional cognitive travel modeling typically employs a unified cognitive model to simulate representative travel behaviors, which may usually result in a weak characterization of user heterogeneity in paths, modes, and other factors. Large language model (LLM), by contrast, has significantly enhanced the anthropomorphic and personalized features of intelligent systems. To integrate their advantages, this article proposes LLM-driven cognitive modeling to generate more diverse and personalized travel demands. The new method sufficiently exploits LLM such as the llama as a basis and provides personalized travel plans so that more heterogenous travel demands could be generated. Additionally, introducing LLM into cognitive modeling can significantly reduce the time of model development, thus accelerating the research or engineering deployment. By calibrating and testing with one month’s data from public transportation (buses and subways) in Beijing, our method, compared to traditional cognitive models, not only achieves better accuracy in reproducing typical travel patterns, but also generates more diverse ones, providing a more comprehensive input for computational experiments on traffic management and control strategies.

In February 2024, Lionel Messi's absence from a Hong Kong exhibition match ignited extensive debate across social media platforms, capturing the attention of the public and sparking controversies that extended into realms such as business partnerships and diplomatic implications. This incident not only reflects the public's reaction and pattern of stance changes toward such a complex Incident but also significantly demonstrates the close connection between cyberspace and the real world. Research on this incident has important practical significance for predicting and intervening in the evolution of similar hot incidents. In this article, the case of Messi's absence from the Hong Kong match is delved into. A stance detection method and a quantification approach for stance divergence have been devised to analyze the evolution of the stance surrounding the incident. Furthermore, by examining topic clusters over time, the topical progression of public stances is tracked. Findings reveal that nearly 60% of posts expressed an explicit stance throughout the incident, with the majority (66.9%) taking an opposing stance. Additionally, it was noted that the topics discussed at various stages followed a long-tail distribution, indicating that most discussions revolved around a few dominant themes. Within more segmented and specific topics, stance divergences were often more prominent.

Aiming to boost production efficiency and reduce human workload, human-centricity has emerged as the core concept of Industry 5.0 (I5.0). However, current works have not established a unified automation and autonomous framework for human-centric smart manufacturing across various real world applications. Addressing this gap, this research introduces an innovative automated framework, ParallelWorkforce, which integrates blockchain intelligence and decentralized autonomous organizations and operations (DAOs) to drive the evolution from digital twins to parallel intelligence. First, this research conducts a comprehensive investigation into smart manufacturing in I5.0, summarizing the ongoing evolution. Next, a detailed exploration of ParallelWorkforce is provided to offer customized strategies for managing different levels of out-of-distribution events, significantly alleviating the workload on biological workers and maximizing the potential of both digital and robotic workers. Finally, the development of ParallelWorkforce across various key applications of smart manufacturing is demonstrated, including autonomous transportation, task assignment, and worker management. This research provides a viable solution for the further development of human-centered smart manufacturing and paves the way for the realization of “6S” goals in I5.0.

As digital transformation accelerates, data has become a core driver of technological innovation and economic growth. However, a key challenge in data utilization is the semantic misalignment between data supply and the demands of business scenarios. This misalignment significantly hinders efficient data flow and collaborative utilization. To address this issue, this article proposes a federated service solution integrating blockchain and decentralized autonomous organizations and operations (DAOs), large language models (LLMs) and scenarios engineering, federated learning and edge computing, as well as encryption technologies and privacy-computing. A five-layer federated service framework is introduced, consisting of the foundation layer, the data-scenario layer, the semantic coordination layer, the incentive-security layer, and the application layer, which is designed to ensure efficient and context-aware data supply–demand matching while preserving privacy and scalability. Moreover, the core mechanisms for semantic coordination are proposed, and a detailed solution process for resolving semantic misalignment with these mechanisms, as well as an illustrative example, is also presented. The proposed federated service framework offers an effective solution to semantic misalignment in supply–demand matching, fostering seamless data collaboration across diverse business scenarios. This work provides an intelligent service paradigm that leverages distributed data co-governance to address semantic challenges in the digital economy.

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 study seeks to develop a constructive approach that settles the optimal control issue for nonlinear systems with known time delays. The feedback system, which depends on the state and control input, is built to identify the actual control rule utilizing the backstepping integral technique. Optimal control of the augmented system established on parallel control delivers a solution for nonlinear time-delayed systems. At the cost of the modified gain condition, the value function is specified in terms of the state and input delays, transforming the optimal control issue into a minimax task. Then, the critic-actor framework is employed to reconstruct the cost function and control rule while maintaining the persistently exciting (PE) condition so that the online optimal control algorithm is investigated. In addition, the Lyapunov proof discusses the system's stability. Ultimately, the remarkable properties become visible through experimental findings.

Lane detection is a critical technology for autonomous driving, but current deep learning-based methods face significant challenges due to the lack of diverse datasets, especially for nighttime conditions. Most datasets are predominantly composed of daytime images, making it difficult to develop models that perform reliably around the clock. Inspired by the parallel system theory, we explore a novel approach to generate comprehensive 24-hour datasets from daytime images alone. In this paper, we propose the Parallel Scene Information Collaboration (PSIC) framework, designed to enhance 24-hour lane detection using only daytime data. The PSIC framework consists of three key components: artificial scene generation, information collaboration, and lane line detection. First, we address the limitations of existing datasets by proposing two generators—one that transforms daytime images into realistic nighttime scenes, and another that refines nighttime images by adding daytime characteristics. Next, to mitigate noise in the generated scenes, we propose a Multi-Spatial Feature Fusion (MSFF) module that effectively integrates features from both real and artificial scenes through spatial collaboration. Finally, the combined information is used by an anchor-based detection head to accurately identify lane positions. Our experiments on the TuSimple, Night TuSimple, and CULane datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in 24-hour lane line detection, significantly improving reliability and robustness across varying conditions.

Maritime surveillance plays a vital role in reducing maritime accidents and improving maritime safety. To enhance situational awareness for maritime movements, deep learning-based visual object detection has become an important part of maritime surveillance. However, the detection results are highly dependent on the training datasets collected from different departments (i.e., clients). If the sub-datasets from departments are sensitive and private in cross-department maritime surveillance, it will be intractable to directly combine these sub-datasets to train the learning-based object detection method. To solve this issue, we propose a federated learning-driven cross-spatial vessel detection model, called FLCSDet, for maritime surveillance with privacy preservation. In particular, an efficient multi-scale attention module is integrated into our FLCSDet to achieve local cross-spatial feature learning. To improve the federated-learning aggregation method, we propose an optimized algorithm based on the proportion of valid data on departments to adaptively select the allocating weights and preserve the specific characteristics of client data. In addition, we employ transfer learning to further improve the robustness and convergence of our FLCSDet under different experimental scenarios. Compared with several representative federated learning-based detection methods, our FLCSDet could achieve superior detection performance in terms of both quantitative and qualitative results. Moreover, comprehensive experiments conducted on real datasets from both inland waterways and open seas demonstrate the robustness and generalization of our method in intelligent transportation systems. The source code is available athttps://github.com/huangyanh/FLCSDet.

At an urban intersection, traffic performance is highly influenced not only by signal timing schemes but also by lane assignments. However, dynamic adjustment of lane configurations remains understudied due to the prevalent use of predetermined lane arrangements. To address this research gap, we propose the TransLane framework, which collaboratively optimizes time and space resources within an intersection by implementing dynamic lanes. We model each intersection as an agent and apply a hierarchical recommendation approach to these agents. Additionally, the framework addresses the challenge of training an agent in the absence of sufficient data by using transfer learning techniques. Specifically, a new intersection agent can be trained from pre-trained agents via model and sample transfer mechanisms, which facilitate the reuse of traffic control knowledge from similar intersections. The efficacy and superiority of TransLane are demonstrated through simulation studies that show it outperforms models that optimize space or time resources independently using widely adopted traffic control optimization methods.

Most conventional crowd counting methods utilize a fully-supervised learning framework to establish a mapping between scene images and crowd density maps. They usually rely on a large quantity of costly and time-intensive pixel-level annotations for training supervision. One way to mitigate the intensive labeling effort and improve counting accuracy is to leverage large amounts of unlabeled images. This is attributed to the inherent self-structural information and rank consistency within a single image, offering additional qualitative relation supervision during training. Contrary to earlier methods that utilized the rank relations at the original image level, we explore such rank-consistency relation within the latent feature spaces. This approach enables the incorporation of numerous pyramid partial orders, strengthening the model representation capability. A notable advantage is that it can also increase the utilization ratio of unlabeled samples. Specifically, we propose a Deep Rank-consist Ent pyrAmid Model (DREAM), which makes full use of rank consistency across coarse-to-fine pyramid features in latent spaces for enhanced crowd counting with massive unlabeled images. In addition, we have collected a new unlabeled crowd counting dataset, FUDAN-UCC, comprising 4000 images for training purposes. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, namely UCF-QNRF, ShanghaiTech PartA and PartB, and UCF-CC-50, show the effectiveness of our method compared with previous semi-supervised methods. The codes are available at https://github.com/bridgeqiqi/DREAM.

Gait recognition is a prominent biometric recognition technique extensively employed in public security. Appearance-based and model-based gait recognition are two categories of methods commonly used. Specifically, appearance-based methods, which use silhouettes to represent body information, typically outperform model-based methods that rely on skeleton data, making them more popular. Recently, the shift from single-frame templates to multiframe silhouettes has advanced appearance-based gait recognition with better spatiotemporal representation. However, there is a notable lack of comprehensive studies that deepen the understanding of multiframe appearance-based gait recognition methods. This article reviews various methods to trace the evolution of gait recognition. Furthermore, we unify various performant models in one framework, study the overlooked effects on data arrangement, and explore the scaling ability of existing methods. Besides the advancement in gait recognition, we also summarize the current challenges and future prospects to foster future research.

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.

This article utilizes parallel control to investigate the problem of continuous-time (CT) nonzero-sum games (NZSGs) for completely unknown nonlinear systems via reinforcement learning (RL), and a parallel control-based NZSG (PNZSG) method is developed without reconstructing unknown dynamics or employing off-policy integral RL (IRL). First, novel dynamic control policies (DCPs) are developed for NZSGs by introducing controls into feedback, and an augmented system with augmented performance indices is constructed to derive the DCPs. Then, we theoretically analyze the effect of the DCPs on the control stability and performance indices, and the optimality of PNZSG is proven to be equivalent to the optimality of the original NZSGs. Subsequently, an IRL technique is employed to achieve the developed PNZSG method, and we show that no prior knowledge of the dynamics of NZSGs is needed to deploy the developed PNZSG method because of the augmented system and performance indices. Finally, numerical examples, including cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) of a vehicular platoon, demonstrate the correctness of the developed PNZSG method. The associated code is available at:https://github.com/lujingweihh/Adaptive-dynamic-programming-algorithms/tree/main/model_free_nonzero_sum_games.

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) circumvents the need for reward engineering by harnessing human preferences as the reward signal. However, current PbRL methods excessively depend on high-quality feedback from domain experts, which results in a lack of robustness. In this paper, we present RIME, a robust PbRL algorithm for effective reward learning from noisy preferences. Our method utilizes a sample selection-based discriminator to dynamically filter out noise and ensure robust training. To counteract the cumulative error stemming from incorrect selection, we suggest a warm start for the reward model, which additionally bridges the performance gap during the transition from pre-training to online training in PbRL. Our experiments on robotic manipulation and locomotion tasks demonstrate that RIME significantly enhances the robustness of the state-of-the-art PbRL method. Code is available at https://github.com/CJReinforce/RIME_ICML2024.

To develop the next generation of intelligent LiDARs, we propose a novel framework of parallel LiDARs and construct a hardware prototype in our experimental platform, DAWN (Digital Artificial World for Natural). It emphasizes the tight integration of physical and digital space in LiDAR systems, with networking being one of its supported core features. In the context of autonomous driving, V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle) technology enables efficient information sharing between different agents which significantly promotes the development of LiDAR networks. However, current research operates under an ideal situation where all vehicles are equipped with identical LiDAR, ignoring the diversity of LiDAR categories and operating frequencies. In this paper, we first utilize OpenCDA and RLS (Realistic LiDAR Simulation) to construct a novel heterogeneous LiDAR dataset named OPV2V-HPL. Additionally, we present HPL-ViT, a pioneering architecture designed for robust feature fusion in heterogeneous and dynamic scenarios. It uses a graph-attention Transformer to extract domain-specific features for each agent, coupled with a cross-attention mechanism for the final fusion. Extensive experiments on OPV2V-HPL demonstrate that HPL-ViT achieves SOTA (state-of-the-art) performance in all settings and exhibits outstanding generalization capabilities.

In natural disasters, the emergency rescue system is of utmost importance for the smart city development, but the search and rescue (SAR) leveraging unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is under-explored. This study has established an Internet of UAVs architecture motivated by search and rescue activities, focusing on the path planning problem of UAV in three-dimensional urban disaster scenes. A mathematical model for UAV-based SAR missions has been built, aiming to use UAV platforms equipped with life-detection radars to search for survivors inside buildings. Our aim is to search for the most survivors in the shortest amount of time while ensuring coverage of the entire search area. Based on the mathematical model for SAR activities, the improved Multi-Verse Optimizer (IMVO) is used to solve the path of UAV. Finally, simulations were conducted in a photorealistic urban scenario, demonstrating the paths generated by the proposed method. The results indicate the potential of the generated path in terms of search time and the number of survivors discovered.

This paper introduces a neural-dynamics-based active steering control (NDASC) scheme developed under artificial systems, computational experiments, and parallel execution (ACP) framework, aimed at enhancing the stability and reliability of autonomous vehicles in noisy environments. Based on the Taylor expansion theorem, noises can be represented in the form of polynomials for the desired accuracy, and therefore polynomial noises can be viewed as a more generalized representation of noises. Then, the proposed NDASC scheme includes a model predictive active steering control (MPASC) strategy solved by a polynomial noise resilience neural dynamics (PNRND) model. Computational experiments parallelly implemented upon the CarSim-Simulink platform substantiate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed NDASC scheme, providing significant theoretical and practical insights for control strategies of autonomous vehicles under various noisy environments.

In this paper, we propose the innovative use of Intelligent Vehicle Carriers (IVCs) as a key solution to address the energy constraints of small-scale unmanned Intelligent Vehicles (IVs). IVCs function as both transporters and charging stations, significantly boosting the operational range and efficiency of IVs. Our research delves into the IV-IVC collaborative framework, highlighting the existing challenges, exploring potential solutions, and examining a range of applications. This study offers a visionary approach to revolutionizing intelligent transportation systems by leveraging the synergistic relationship between IVs and IVCs.

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.

本文概述了基于基础模型和并行智能开发基础、基础设施机器人、机器人技术的初始步骤和基本框架,以及新型人工智能技术(如AlphaGO、ChatGPT和Sora)的潜在应用。

去中心化自治组织(DAO)的兴起, 为传统的社会协作关系带来全新的可能性, 而DAO组织的核心驱动力和权利基础就在于其创新的运作机制. 然而, DAO作为一个同时具有社会复杂性和工程复杂性的复杂系统, 其机制需要能够动态适应不断变化的外部环境, 这同时也是其面临的巨大挑战. 传统的自上而下的设计方法并不能有效解决这些问题. 循环因果理论将复杂系统的运作视作是一个持续演化的动态过程, 从而为解决以上问题提供了新的视角. 因此, 基于平行智能理论和循环因果理论, 提出一种用于DAO机制设计和验证的工程方法. 在这种方法中, 采用了计算机辅助复杂自适应系统的动态设计工具(cad2CAS)简化DAO机制的设计, 并使用复杂自适应系统的计算机辅助动态设计系统(casCAD2)验证和引导这些机制, 从而建立一个因果循环. 通过提出这种方法, 希望能提高DAO治理系统的效率、安全性和适应性, 为更加鲁棒和弹性的去中心化组织发展奠定基础.

This paper presents a framework for parallel intelligent education that involves physical and virtual learning for a personalized learning experience.We especially focus on Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) owing to its considerable potential to supplement regular class learning.We address the strengths and weaknesses of learning with ChatGPT.Finally, we discuss the challenges and solutions of the proposed parallel intelligent education with ChatGPT.

Additive manufacturing (AM) can build up complex parts in a layer-by-layer manner, which is a kind of novel and flexible production technology. The special manufacturing capability of AM shows great application potential in various fields. However, an open-loop control method cannot guarantee the reliability and repeatability of an AM process. Defects often occur to deteriorate product quality and lead to material and time waste, which hinders the development of AM industry. In this regard, a lot of efforts have been made to make an AM process more controllable. This work proposes an AM control framework that divides the related studies into three feedback loops, including the in-situ monitoring of process defects, fault diagnosis of 3-D printers, and closed-loop control of an AM process. These three loops constitute the inspection and control of AM from the machine level to product level. Specifically, the measurement requirements for monitoring techniques, defect detection, fault diagnosis, and closed-loop control are summarized. The challenges and future trends in realizing a more reliable and repeatable AM process are discussed. Note to Practitioners—This survey is motivated by urgent need to solve product quality problems in additive manufacturing (AM) caused by open-loop control. Three feedback loops can be established to solve them. The first one is defect detection that inspects part quality during fabrication. The second one is the fault diagnosis of a 3-D printer that monitors the health and operation conditions of its actuators. The last one is closed-loop control that improves AM process reliability and repeatability by regulating process variables in real time. These three loops are all based on the feedback signals of in-situ monitoring systems. This paper reviews the related studies and provides guidance for establishing the monitoring systems, performing defect detection and fault diagnosis, and designing closed-loop control systems, which helps realize more reliable and repeatable AM.

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 planning, construction, and maintenance of sand-breaking systems around highway in Taklimakan SandSea mainly depend on expert's empirical knowledge, and face the problems of time-consuming management, unpredictable system performance, and few available data. This work proposes a management and control method of sand-breaking systems that follows artificial system, computational experiments, and parallel execution (ACP) theory. Expert knowledge was extracted to develop artificial sand-breaking system. conditional tabular generative adversarial network (CTGAN) was developed to achieve data augmentation. Computational experiments were implemented to evaluate artificial system performance by predicting whether the system can reach the set age limit. Using fuzzy control, the real sand-breaking system and the artificial one can learn from each other in parallel execution to provide decision support for sand-breaking system management. This approach provides a human–machine hybrid parallel intelligence system for complex sand-breaking systems management.

Social manufacturing has significantly advanced the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), integrating information technology and operation technology to enhance production efficiency and quality, and to foster new business models. This integration, however, introduces novel risks, including advanced persistent threats, which demand robust security measures to safeguard IIoT systems. This article proposes an iCyberGuard game model, tailored for IIoT environments, designed to imitate the cyber and physical attacks for information and operation technologies. Then, we used a reinforcement learning algorithm to compute the optimal strategy. We conducted comprehensive simulation experiments, which demonstrate that our model the strategic interactions between attackers and defenders. Participants are enabled to learn adaptively, discerning optimal strategies based on the intelligence of their adversaries. Finally, we explain the practical significance of the best strategy of defenders or attackers, and how users can rely on these best strategies to strengthen the security performance of the network.

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.

With the increasing application of technology in the healthcare industry, it has become imperative to establish a robust medical information ecosystem for effective management of medical information secure storage and sharing. This article proposes a healthier ecosystem in collaboration with the main consortium chain and data side chain, using multiblockchain architecture. In the implementation methods for this ecosystem, we store medical information in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format within different side chain structures. Additionally, we introduce an improved Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant (PBFT) consensus mechanism based on a point nomination system and a dynamic RBAC access mechanism. By simulating a blockchain environment with multiple nodes, we analyze the efficiency of this method in terms of record retrieval, consensus mechanism, and storage execution time. The results demonstrate that compared to a single chain structure, the proposed method in this article achieves a substantial 30% improvement in query time efficiency. Moreover, the improved PBFT outperforms the traditional PBFT algorithm without dishonest nodes. Medical records stored in JSON format require shorter storage and execution time compared to text format records. This research contributes toward enhancing the security and efficiency of medical information storage and sharing among different medical subject information systems, thereby fostering a healthier healthcare alliance ecosystem.

With the rise and prevalence of social bots, their negative impacts on society are gradually recognized, prompting research attention to effective detection and countermeasures. Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have flourished and have been applied to social bot detection research, improving the performance of detection methods effectively. However, existing GNN-based social bot detection methods often fail to account for the heterogeneous associations among users within social media contexts, especially the heterogeneous integration of social bots into human communities within the network. To address this challenge, we propose a heterogeneous compatibility perspective for social bot detection, in which we preserve more detailed information about the varying associations between neighbors in social media contexts. Subsequently, we develop a compatibility-aware graph neural network (CGNN) for social bot detection. CGNN consists of an efficient feature processing module, and a lightweight compatibility-aware GNN encoder, which enhances the model’s capacity to depict heterogeneous neighbor relations by emulating the heterogeneous compatibility function. Through extensive experiments, we showed that our CGNN outperforms the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) method on three commonly used social bot detection benchmarks while utilizing only about 2% of the parameter size and 10% of the training time compared with the SOTA method. Finally, further experimental analysis indicates that CGNN can identify different edge categories to a significant extent. These findings, along with the ablation study, provide strong evidence supporting the enhancement of GNN’s capacity to depict heterogeneous neighbor associations on social media bot detection tasks.

The innovations in technologies have led to the emergence of digital finance such as online payment, online insurance, online lending, and supply chain finance. Digital finance has greatly facilitated people’s lives, accelerated the circulation of capital in various fields, and enhanced the vitality of financial markets. However, it exposes many increasing risks and hidden dangers such as stock volatility, trading fraud, credit card fraud, and privacy leakage[1],[2],[3],[4],[5],[6],[7]. How to effectively calculate, control, manage, and utilize financial big data and make full use of artificial intelligence technology to ensure financial security is an important research question. Solving it faces many challenges. These challenges not only include the complexity of data and computation but also the effectiveness of intelligent optimization algorithms and ways to deal with human behaviors and social environments[8],[9].

Multiview 3-D reconstruction holds considerable promise across a wide applications in social manufacturing. Conducting in-depth research on precise and robust multiview 3-D reconstruction holds the potential to significantly empower the domain of social manufacturing. Recently, there has been a burgeoning interest in the domain of neural implicit surfaces learning through volume rendering for the purpose of multiview reconstruction without 3-D supervision. Conventional approaches often overlook explicit multiview geometry constraints, resulting in shortcomings in generating consistent surface reconstructions and recovering fine details. To solve this, we propose geometry-guided neural implicit surface (GG-NeuS), a geometry-guided neural implicit surfaces learning method for multiview surface reconstruction. Our model places a stronger emphasis on maintaining geometry consistency, significantly enhancing the quality of reconstruction. First, we enforce multiview geometry constraints on the surface points by locating the zero-level set of signed distance function (SDF). Second, we incorporate normal cues, predicted by general-purpose monocular estimators, to substantially recover fine geometric details. Additionally, we introduce a voxel-based surface reconstruction methodology that strikes an optimal balance between training time and reconstruction quality. Through comprehensive qualitative and quantitative experiments and analyses, we demonstrate thatGG-NeuSsuccessfully reconstructs fine-grained surface details and achieves superior surface reconstruction quality than state-of-the-art approaches.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has changed the world deeply. Urban trajectory big data collected by wireless sensing devices provide great assistance for COVID-19 prevention. However, except for contact tracing, trajectory data are rarely employed in other preventative scenarios against the pandemic. In this article, we try to extend the application of trajectories auto-collected by wireless sensing devices and simulate the epidemic spread in a trajectory data-driven manner. After that, the effects of three nonpharmacological measures are quantified. In contrast to existing studies, additional requirements such as the complex topological networks are needless in our simulation, where the interactions between agents are derived by the intersections of their trajectories. Concretely, the dynamic of virus propagation among individuals is first modeled, and then an agent-based microsimulation environment is built as an artificial system to conduct the epidemic spread simulation. Finally, the trajectories are loaded into the agents as the reliance for their interactions, and the macroscopic changes under different interventions are revealed in a bottom–up way. As a case study, we conduct the simulation based on the trajectories in a real region, in which we find the following. 1) Among the three examined nonpharmacological interventions, community containment is more effective than keeping social distance, which can lower the deaths to nearly 1/9 compared to no action, while travel restrictions play limited roles. 2) There is a strong positive correlation between population densities and mortality. 3) The timing of community containment triggered by confirmed diagnoses is proportional to the number of deaths, thus early containment will significantly decrease mortality.

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.

In the context of the Societies 5.0, a series of discussions on the emerging Fukushima treated radioactive water (FTRW) event was carried out, which has an impact on sustainable development in multiple fields including the economy, culture, and society. In order to comprehensively understand emerging topics and their evolution, explore the impact of people's cognition on their participation, and focus on people's attitudes and public participation in the FTRW event, we propose an evolution analysis framework (EAF) to analyze the massive multilingual comments and news collected from social media platforms in several countries. We design a multilingual topic extraction model (XLM-topic) to detect the patterns of topics and analyze their evolution. Potential relations between the FTRW event's elements are explored by relational reasoning based on a knowledge graph, which is established by entities and relations extracted from comments and news. Moreover, we predict the public attitudes and participation toward the FTRW event by utilizing our custom-designed public opinion cellular automata (POCA). The proposed POCA simulates the information dissemination, cognitive changes, and topic evolution among social groups in virtual spaces. It collaborates with XLM-topic to analyze trends in both physical and virtual spaces. Analysis results indicate that participants in different regions and countries have different attitudes and reactions toward the FTRW event, and the public's cognition on this event will interact with itself. Our study is conducive to promoting the integration and interaction of virtual space and physical space in the context of Societies 5.0, providing decision-making support for building a more harmonious and stable social environment.

Recent years have witnessed remarkable developments and increasingly deepened integrations between blockchain as a decentralized computing architecture and auction as an efficient resource allocation approach. Typically, blockchain can help provide a secured and trusted distributed environment for various auction scenarios, while auction is particularly suitable for designing resource allocation and pricing mechanisms in blockchain systems. As such, integrative research on blockchain and auction developed rapidly and attracted widespread attention in various fields ranging from academia to financial, industrial, and social services. However, a comprehensive survey on this interdisciplinary topic is still nonexistent, which motivates our work. In this article, we aim to fill this important research gap by reviewing the related literature. We first conducted a brief overview of blockchain technology and auction theory, and then systematically discussed the research progress on the existing blockchain research based on auction theory as well as auction research enabled by blockchain. Toward the end, we presented several open research issues and directions, aiming to provide useful guidance and reference for future research efforts.

The image captioning of fine art paintings aims at generating content descriptions for the paintings. Due to the complexity of modeling both image and language, this task usually needs sufficient training data. However, different from photographic image captioning, there are few satisfactory datasets for painting captioning. In this article, we introduce a painting captioning dataset (named the ArtCap dataset), which contains 3606 paintings and five descriptions for each painting. We present the carefully designed construction pipeline of our dataset and further evaluate our dataset from two aspects of annotation quality and application effectiveness, respectively. For the annotation quality, we compare the global characteristics, annotation content, and annotation consistency of our dataset with other painting descriptions datasets. For application effectiveness, we employ our dataset and other painting descriptions datasets to train image captioning models and analyze the captioning performances. The results demonstrate the promising annotation quality and application effectiveness of our dataset.

With the rapid development of blockchain technology and industries, scalability has been widely realized as one of the primary and urgent concerns for the large-scale adoption of blockchain, especially for cryptocurrencies. In this respect, directed acyclic graph (DAG) proves to be an elegant solution to scaling blockchain but suffers from weak consistency and security issues. In this article, we designed a novel DAG-BLOCK architecture for blockchain-enabled cryptocurrency markets in order to improve the scalability. In our work, DAG is used to replace the Merkel-tree-based transaction structure within the block, and a novel design of open blocks is proposed to enable user nodes to participate in verifying the transactions in blockchain systems. On this basis, we designed a new segmented market structure, in which each miner serves only a group of users instead of all users, so as to reduce miners’ workload and thus scale transaction processing capabilities. Our work can help improve the scalability of cryptocurrencies via evolving the underlying blockchain systems to graph-based distributed ledgers and is expected to shed new light on designing blockchain-based decentralized markets.

Welcome to the second issue of IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS) of 2024. This issue showcases an impressive array of 104 regular papers alongside our Special Issue on Big Data and Computational Social Intelligence for Guaranteed Financial Security, highlighting cutting-edge research aimed at harnessing big data and computational techniques to fortify financial security amidst the digital finance evolution. With a focus on addressing the intricate challenges of financial big data, enhancing the efficacy of artificial intelligence, and covering critical topics from data mining to digital currencies, this issue underscores the vital role of cross-disciplinary efforts in mitigating financial security risks.

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have made significant progress on various NLP tasks recently. However, PLMs encounter challenges when it comes to domain-specific tasks such as legal AI. These tasks often involve intricate expertise, expensive data annotation, and limited training data availability. To tackle this problem, we propose a human-oriented artificial–natural parallel system for organized intelligence (HANOI)-Legal based on the parallel learning (PL) framework. First, by regarding the description in PL as the pretraining process based on a large-scale corpus, we setup an artificial system based on a PLM. Second, to adapt the PLM to legal tasks with limited resources, we propose UniPrompt as a prescription. UniPrompt serves as a unified prompt-based training framework, enabling the utilization of diverse open datasets for these tasks. Third, we labeled a few task-specific legal data through distributed autonomous operations (DAO-II) for further fine-tuning. By combining a scalable unified-task-format reformulation and a unified-prompt-based training pipeline, HANOI-Legal leverages PLMs’ linguistic capabilities acquired from a variety of open datasets to generate task-specific models. Our experiments in two legal domain tasks show that HANOI-Legal achieved an excellent performance in low-resource scenarios compared to the state-of-the-art prompt-based approach.

Inspired by the term “social radar,” which collects and processes information about social behaviors, this article proposed “sociolinguistic radar,” which represents an emerging branch in social investigation and evaluation system aiming to explore the dynamic correlation between sociophonetic variants and macrosociological categories, such as age, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. The classic quantitative methods in this field include sociolinguistic surveys and interview, quantitative sociophonetics, and social network analysis. These methods have been proved to be effective in tracking the cognitive correlates of phonological variables. Under the emerging framework of sociolinguistic radar, speakers are no longer passive carriers, but active agents in transforming linguistic styles in the process of forming social differentiations, thus contributing to the construction of new social meaning. With the advancement in neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI), the neurosociolinguistic and AI-based sociolinguistic radar research will thrive and empower the scope and strength of detecting linguistic variation. The working mechanism of this emerging model leverages neural and AI tool packages to radar and analyze linguistic variation, communication patterns, and diverse sociolinguistic phenomena. This interdisciplinary approach combines the principles of sociolinguistics, which will thoroughly examine the relationship between language and society.

This article proposes a novel parallel management mode based on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) for enterprises by utilizing the artificial systems, computational experiments, parallel execution (ACP) approach, parallel intelligence theory, and blockchain technologies, to realize the distributed management of an enterprise. The artificial enterprise DAO (EnDAO) corresponding to the actual enterprise is constructed, and they constitute a parallel system via virtual–real interaction and parallel execution. Through the non-fungible token (NFT)-based incentive mechanism, metaverse-based virtual learning and training, as well as DAO-based distributed management and decision-making, the management and control of the actual enterprise as well as its employees can be carried out. By virtue of the virtual–real interactions of three types of employees, as well as the virtual–real feedback of three closed loops in the parallel systems, DAO-based parallel management for enterprises can realize descriptive intelligence, predictive intelligence, and prescriptive intelligence. On this basis, this article takes the recruitment-oriented key performance indicator (KPI) management of a startup technology enterprise as the case to introduce the operation processes and illustrate the superiorities of the proposed DAO-based enterprise parallel management mode.

Digital light processing (DLP) is a popular additive manufacturing technology that uses light irradiation to fabricate 3-D devices via a projector to achieve laser-sensitive resin curing. However, the performance and reliability of DLP can be affected by internal defects such as printing errors and the accumulation of residual stress. Existing defect detection methods rely on monitoring the printed parts, which leads to resource wastage and struggles to effectively handle imbalanced defect data. In this article, we propose a defect detection method called dual neural network, which involves detecting defects in materials before the printing process to prevent resource wastage and serious consequences. Specifically, to handle the highly imbalanced class distribution problem in online DLP defect detection, dual neural network utilizes a domain learner and balance learner to effectively balance the information of the minority class and learn the generalization knowledge from the imbalanced defect dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which has also been applied to real-world production equipment successfully.

Global food market faces escalating risks and uncertainties, bringing great challenges in balancing a country's food supply and demand. Therefore, it is of great significance to carry out crop planning and reasonably divide the planting area of each crop to ensure the national food security. However, the existing planting planning methods have the problems of inaccurate crop price prediction and poor flexibility, and challenges remain on how to motivate farmers. With the rapid development of science and technology, agricultural crop planning techniques have made great progress. This study focuses on agricultural planting planning, exploring both planting area planning based on predicted crop prices and a crop allocation model within a multifarmer context. The regional planting goals are decomposed into specific allocations for individual farmers and plots, addressing objectives including maximizing farmer profits and expanding soybean cultivation for national self-sufficiency. The work employs the long short-term memory (LSTM) model to predict the prices of soybean, wheat, and maize. First, linear programming model is applied to plan planting areas of crops, incorporating constraints to encourage sustainable agricultural practices. Second, a multifarmer crop allocation model, utilizing the double deep Q network (DDQN) algorithm, is developed to enhance the fairness among farmers and assure rotational benefits. Experimental validation confirms the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms, providing valuable decision support for agricultural planning with economic and ecological sustainability.

Digital human in cyberspace can help provide humanized services in specific applications, such as question & answer systems, recommender systems, chatter robots, and intelligent assistants. While most researches focus on behavior analytics, few of them integrate the personality that is also a closely related factor. As a classic indicator for personality representation, Myers–Briggs type indicator (MBTI) categorizes an individual into mutually exclusive types from four dichotomous axes (extraversion versus introversion, sensing versus intuition, thinking versus feeling, judging versus perceiving). Traditional recognition method using MBTI simply measures the user’s preference frequency in each axis through questionnaires, treating the dominant value as the identified result. Such a paradigm, however, represents all the people with only 16 types and cannot distinguish heterogeneous users clearly. This article proposes a novel personality recognition method using fuzzy logic. Different from previous classifications, our new method categorizes the individual in a continuous space and represents one’s personality in a more fine-grained level. We have designed comparative psychological tests for 77 people. The validation experiments on such tests indicate that the fuzzy-logic-based method is not only consistent with the classic MBTI tests (in the sense of defuzzification) but also provides the uncertainty for each personality type. Therefore, it can be viewed as a generalization of the classic MBTI tests and promotes the representation of individual’s heterogeneity for fine-grained analytics of digital human.

On a passenger-freight collinear railway, the freight train operation level is comparatively low, frequently resulting in significant deviations from the original timetable and crew plan in the presence of various interferences. This article focuses on the problem of coordinated rescheduling of train timetable and crew scheme in the presence of disruptions on a double-track passenger-freight collinear railway. We develop a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) model considering the distinct priorities of passenger and freight trains, as well as crew operations, thereby surpassing the current practice of independently adjusting train timetable and crew plan to achieve a collaborative solution. The objective is to minimize delays for passenger trains and deviations in crew schedule, while maximizing the delivery rate of freight trains at railway Bureau boundary stations prior to the settlement time. Furthermore, for large-scale delays, we design a solution algorithm based on the rolling horizon approach to enhance computational efficiency. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed model, simulation experiments are conducted using actual running data from the Beijing–Shanghai railway. The experimental results illustrate that our coordinated model enhances the feasibility of adjustment outcomes during emergencies, in contrast to the model that neglects crew connections. Additionally, our proposed algorithm guarantees a solving error of under 5% and reduces solving time by over 60% compared with the results obtained by CPLEX. Moreover, three additional comparison experiments are conducted to further demonstrate the impact of crew activities on train operation adjustments, which also indicate that our approach can provide dispatchers with more feasible train operation adjustment schemes in terms of crew utilization.

The evolution of modern mobile terminals, social networks, and other intelligent services makes everyone become a ubiquitous information perceiver, producer, and propagator. Also known as “social sensor” and “social IoT,” these individuals and communities generate a huge volume of social signals, which has shown prominent value for mining. These unstructured social signals provide a new perspective in the research of complex systems, which makes the traditional cyber–physical system (CPS)-oriented information computing sublimate to the cyber–physical–social system (CPSS)-oriented knowledge computing. However, there still exist great uncertainties, ambiguities, and complexities in modeling behaviors of social individuals or groups. Especially when we apply big-data-driven learning-based models in specific fields and scenarios, the lack of domain expert knowledge and characteristics of system uncertainty severely limits the performance and accuracy of these models. The introduction of fuzzy system modeling integrates data and knowledge in the social computing area, which has shown its unique advantages in solving the above issues and has drawn more attention to this topic. In this article, we conduct a review of recent advances in social computing with fuzzy technologies in CPSS. First, we briefly review the development of social computing, and analyze the characteristics and advantages of social computing through fuzzy methods. Second, we refine core fuzzy system methods for social computing and elaborate on existing fuzzy-technology-empowered social computing methodologies. As in a range of social spaces, we also review and analyze related advances in human-in-the-loop systems. We also reveal the trend of decentralized, autonomous, and organized computing in cyber–physical–social space with fuzzy-based methods and proposed a framework to categorize related studies in CPSS. Finally, we conclude the research trends and hotspots based on current studies, and discuss the challenges for future research directions.

With the acceleration of economic globalization, a large amount of research studies have been conducted for the exploration of industrial economics. In the visualization community, common visualization tools present potential features of industrial economics. They hardly meet the various and complex user requirements for insightful analysis and decision-making. In this article, we design VIEA, a web-based visualization system that integrates a rich set of views and tailored interactions, enabling users to easily perceive economic features, such as geographical distributions, trade relationships, and pattern comparisons. Case studies and user studies based on real-world datasets have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in the exploration of industrial economics.

The insurance industry plays a crucial role of the national financial system, and the operating efficiency of insurance companies has always been a significant subject of academic research. This study proposes a multiperiod DEA model to dynamically evaluate the operating efficiency of insurance companies, which not only overcomes the defect of the traditional DEA method ignoring the internal structure of decision-making units, but also extends the limitation of the leader–follower model in evaluating single-period efficiency. By analyzing the efficiency of seven listed insurance companies in China from 2009 to 2018, the following conclusions are drawn. The multiperiod DEA model demonstrates advantages over the leader–follower model. The profitability of insurance companies during the first five years is higher compared with the last five years. There is a significant correlation between premium financing efficiency and overall efficiency. Throughout both periods, the loss ratio, loss reserve ratio, and consumer price index (CPI) are always positively correlated with the efficiency of the insurer, while the gearing ratio is negatively related to the efficiency of the insurer. The correlation among gross domestic product (GDP), total insurance value, tradable financial assets, and corporate efficiency varies over time.

Simulating human mobility contributes to city behavior discovery and decision-making. Although the sequence-based and image-based approaches have made impressive achievements, they still suffer from respective deficiencies such as omitting the depiction of spatial properties or ordinal dependency in trajectory. In this article, we take advantage of the above two paradigms and propose a semantic-guiding adversarial network (TrajSGAN) for generating human trajectories. Specifically, we first devise an attention-based generator to yield trajectory locations in a sequence-to-sequence manner. The encoded historical visits are queried with semantic knowledge (e.g., travel modes and trip purposes) and their important features are enhanced by the multihead attention mechanism. Then, we designate a rollout module to complete the unfinished trajectory sequence and transform it into an image that can depict its spatial structure. Finally, a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based discriminator signifies how “real” the trajectory image looks, and its output is regarded as a reward signal to update the generator by the policy gradient. Experimental results show that the proposed TrajSGAN model significantly outperforms the benchmarks under the MTL-Trajet mobility dataset, with the divergence of spatial-related metrics such as radius of gyration and travel distance reduced by 10%–27%. Furthermore, we apply the real and synthetic trajectories, respectively, to simulate the COVID-19 epidemic spreading under three preventive actions. The coefficient of determination metric between real and synthetic results achieves 91%–98%, indicating that the synthesized data from TrajSGAN can be leveraged to study the epidemic diffusion with an acceptable difference. All of these results verify the superiority and utility of our proposed method.

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.

As a challenge of practical significance, fraud detection has great potential for telecom fraud prevention, economic crime prevention, and personal property preservation. Fraudulent activities are always buried in massive regular transactions, making it hard to find them. Traditional rule-based approaches need multiple domain-specific rules and multistep verification, which limits their transferability and efficiency. Machine learning-based methods might ignore the intricate interactions or the temporal relations among accounts. Meanwhile, the lack of sufficient manual labels restricts their performance. To overcome the above limitations, we present a multipattern integrated network (MPIN) in this article to identify fraudulent accounts in transaction networks. Specifically, MPIN considers the interactions among nodes from three perspectives: inflows, outflows, and their mutual influences. To learn the behavior pattern of each node, MPIN first applies an attention mechanism to integrate the short-term information and then learns the long-term patterns by aggregating multiple short-term patterns. Behavior patterns from different perspectives together with long short-term modeling enable the model to precisely distinguish fraudulent accounts from the normal ones. Moreover, contrastive pretraining with temporal consistency and local tightness guarantee is adopted to alleviate the label sparsity issue and provide the model with low-variance performance. We conducted experiments on two real-world transaction networks, and the results showed the effectiveness of MPIN compared with five state-of-the-art baselines.

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.

Threshold Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) has attracted a lot of attention due to the wide applications of ECDSA in crypto asset. Although several variants of threshold signature protocols can provide functions, such as key generation and signing, they suffer from two shortfalls. First, these schemes only discuss a single signature computation task in a synchronous algorithm context, which is difficult to adapt to real crypto-asset applications, such as custody. Second, these schemes are computing intensive and not scalable, hence can hardly support large-scale processing operations in real life even after traditional optimization, such as multithreading, is applied. In this article, we propose an innovative computation method called asynchronous threshold ECDSA with batch processing, based on the interactive threshold signature protocols. The method provides a reliable solution for critical operational scenarios, such as threshold signing and distributed key generation (DKG) in crypto-asset custody, and can be a future reference in secure data distribution mechanisms. The performance and scalability of our methods are validated through a benchmark testing.

Multiple organizations in social manufacturing can collaborate on high-quality product defect detection with social networks. Federated learning (FL) is an emerging paradigm where multiple clients can collaboratively train a defect detection model in a privacy-preserving manner. A prevalent issue in FL, concept drift, is discussed in this article. Feature representations of the same label may vary at different clients which affects the performance of FL. To address this issue, a novel community aware personalized federated learning (CA-PFL) is proposed in this article. A graph structured federation social network is constructed with local model updates. Communities in federation network are discovered with community detection to ensure that the same label at different clients have similar representations in each community. Shared layers of local models are aggregated in each community and each local client keeps their personalized layers. Furthermore, a federation community contrastive loss (FedCCL) is proposed to accelerate training convergence by constraining the direction of local model updating. Experimental results on nine datasets demonstrate that CA-PFL achieves higher accuracy and faster convergence than state-of-the-art personalized federated learning methods in concept drifts scenarios.

The quality of the dataset is critical to the performance of neural networks for error prediction in 3-D printing. In order to enlarge the dataset, we propose a customized two-stage framework, cascaded cross-modality generative adversarial networks (CCMGANs), for generating dental crown meshes in an unsupervised manner. At the first stage, a displacement map-guided generative adversarial network (GAN) is used to generate coarse meshes with diverse shapes. At the second stage, fine-grained details are added to the coarse meshes using an image-based GAN. Unlike previous work that integrates a differentiable renderer into the mesh deformation process directly, we adopt a two-step strategy. First, we use a depth image refinement module to achieve the domain transformation from the rendered depth images of the generated meshes to those of the real ones. Then, we propose a mesh refinement module to optimize the coarse meshes in an image-supervised manner. To alleviate the self-intersection problem, we propose a loss to penalize the distances of point pairs in self-intersection regions. Experimental results show that our method is able to generate highly realistic meshes and outperforms the state-of-the-art point cloud generation method TreeGCN in terms of the metrics FDD, MMD-CD, MMD-EMD, and COV-EMD. Furthermore, we utilize the generated data to augment the original dataset, and demonstrate that the generated data can effectively improve the accuracy of the error prediction task in 3-D printing.

In the past few years, we have witnessed the rapid development and exponential growth of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) technologies including large language models (LLMs)-enabled ChatGPT and peripheral innovations. These technologies are designed to be humanlike intelligence and intuitive by providing direct access to systems using application programming interfaces (APIs). The GAI applications can fundamentally change economic and financial activities, through revolutionizing the ways that humans interact with machines and giving rise to new modes of production and behavior patterns. It is imperative to develop a new research paradigm that is more suitable than the currently dominating conventional research paradigms. This article presents the new paradigm for economic and financial research with GAI, covering the research objectives, scientific data, and models, and explores the underlying impact and perspective that bring to this field. We elaborate on the potential five scenarios including portfolio management, economic and financial prediction, extreme scenario analysis, policy analysis, and financial fraud detection. The new research paradigm with GAI proposed in this article can provide significant insights for a comprehensive understanding of innovation and transformation in this domain.

The independent hierarchy of train dispatching command and train operation control in the existing urban rail transit systems restricts the improvement of operational efficiency and emergency handling capability. This article focuses on integrating train regulation and speed profile optimization by utilizing a feature learning and hybrid search algorithm. Specifically, a genetic algorithm (GA) is used to optimize the train speed profile for a fixed interval running time, and then, the generated labeled sample data are used to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn and extract the features of the optimal speed profile. The nonlinear mapping relationship between input and output variables in trajectory optimization is characterized by a well-trained CNN to reduce the computation time of the optimal speed profile during train regulation. The input variables comprise line conditions and interval running times, while the output variables include the corresponding energy consumption and operating condition switching points of the optimal speed profile. An integrated model of train regulation and operation control is developed with the objective of minimizing total train delay time and energy consumption. To ensure convergence and global search capability, we design a hybrid search algorithm-based train regulation algorithm. Simulation experiments are conducted using data from the Beijing Yizhuang line to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can provide an optimal scheme for train regulation and speed profiles.

The transition from cyber-physical-system-based (CPS-based) Industry 4.0 to cyber-physical-social-system-based (CPSS-based) Industry 5.0 brings new requirements and opportunities to current sensing approaches, especially in light of recent progress in large language models (LLMs) and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Therefore, the advancement of parallel intelligence powered crowdsensing intelligence (CSI) is witnessed, which is currently advancing toward linguistic intelligence. In this article, we propose a novel sensing paradigm, namely conversational crowdsensing, for Industry 5.0 (especially for social manufacturing). It can alleviate workload and professional requirements of individuals and promote the organization and operation of diverse workforce, thereby facilitating faster response and wider popularization of crowdsensing systems. Specifically, we design the architecture of conversational crowdsensing to effectively organize three types of participants (biological, robotic, and digital) from diverse communities. Through three levels of effective conversation (i.e., interhuman, human–AI, and inter-AI), complex interactions and service functionalities of different workers can be achieved to accomplish various tasks across three sensing phases (i.e., requesting, scheduling, and executing). Moreover, we explore the foundational technologies for realizing conversational crowdsensing, encompassing LLM-based multiagent systems, scenarios engineering and conversational human–AI cooperation. Finally, we present potential applications of conversational crowdsensing and discuss its implications. We envision that conversations in natural language will become the primary communication channel during crowdsensing process, enabling richer information exchange and cooperative problem-solving among humans, robots, and AI.

This work concentrates on the initial introduction of parallel control to investigate an optimal consensus control strategy for continuous-time nonlinear multiagent systems (MASs) via adaptive dynamic programming (ADP). First, the control input is integrated into the feedback system for parallel control, facilitating an augmented system's optimal consensus control with an appropriate augmented performance index function to be established, which is identical to the original system's suboptimal control with a conventional performance index. Second, the feasibility of the proposed control scheme is evaluated based on the policy iteration algorithm, and the convergence of the algorithm is demonstrated. Then, an online learning algorithm becomes available to implement the ADP-based optimal parallel consensus control protocol without prior knowledge of the system. The Lyapunov approach is employed to indicate that the signals are convergent. Ultimately, the experimental data support the theoretical results.

This article focuses on a novel robust optimal parallel tracking control method for continuous-time (CT) nonlinear systems subject to uncertainties. First, the designed virtual controller facilitates the transformation of the original nonlinear system into an affine system with an augmented state vector, which promotes the introduction of the optimal parallel tracking control problem. Then, this article generates fresh insight into counteracting the effects of uncertainty by developing a novel parallel control system that invokes the formulated virtual control law and an auxiliary variable obtained from the relationship between the solutions of the optimal control problems for the uncertain system and the nominal one. Next, critic neural networks (NNs) approximate the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equations' solution to implement the proposed robust optimal control method via adaptive dynamic programming (ADP). Finally, simulation experiments demonstrate the proposed method's remarkable effectiveness.

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.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge acquired from the labeled source domain to the unlabeled target domain. However, the quality of samples can vary greatly. While partial samples are dominated by high-quality domain-invariant class-related information, others may only contain irrelevant domain-specific information or useless random noise. Treating all samples equally may lead to negative transfer, significantly impairing the performance. To address the issue of varying sample quality, we propose an attention module to emphasize the samples that are most suitable for transfer. Within the attention module, we have designed a fuzzy inference system to assess the quality of data based on its class and domain information. Such a fuzzy inference attention (FIA) module demonstrates strong interpretability due to its consideration of the fuzzy nature inherent in class and domain information within the data. FIA also has high flexibility and extensibility as the rule base can be easily adjusted by expert knowledge. More importantly, FIA does not use any parameters requiring training and has a low overhead. This makes it fast and applicable to most existing UDA methods. The experiments on several benchmark datasets prove that FIA can bring significant improvement to existing methods.

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.

To break the dilemma of data island, a distributed framework for trustable control is proposed toward information security and data privacy in large-scale cyber-physical systems. The federated control system consists of distinct blockchains, as such information security and data privacy are technologically guaranteed. Moreover, data are divided into private and nonprivate data. Only nonprivate data can be exchanged for a better global system performance, where the interblockchain communication is ensured by cross-blockchain technologies. Federated control framework establishes a trustable environment where each subsystem is willing to share data for optimal performance. The architecture, structure, and implementation process of federated control are discussed, together with the potential applications to smart buildings.

This paper studies a hierarchical model predictive control (MPC) strategy to optimize the powertrain and aftertreatment systems for connected diesel-powered vehicles. With the development of vehicle connectivity and autonomy, it is convenient to acquire vehicle speed prediction and future geographic information for improving driving safety and fuel economy. Inspired by such achievements, preview speed and geographic information is utilized to enhance the control performance of diesel engines and urea-based selective catalytic reduction (SCR) systems simultaneously in this work. With the short-term prediction of vehicle speed and road grade, the upper-level controller for the diesel engine could respond in advance and hence reduce fuel consumption by avoiding sudden braking and acceleration. Similarly, according to the engine-out NO$_{x}$emissions predicted through upper-level control actions, the lower-level dosing controller of SCR system could remove the NO$_{x}$emissions more efficiently as well. Finally, to explore the effectiveness of the designed predictive control strategy, several simulations are implemented based on the real experimental data. The comparison results demonstrate the remarkable improvements of our proposed approach.

The visible-light camera, which is capable of environment perception and navigation assistance, has emerged as an essential imaging sensor for marine surface vessels in intelligent waterborne transportation systems (IWTS). However, the visual imaging quality inevitably suffers from several kinds of degradations (e.g., limited visibility, low contrast, color distortion, etc.) under complex weather conditions (e.g., haze, rain, and low-lightness). The degraded visual information will accordingly result in inaccurate environment perception and delayed operations for navigational risk. To promote the navigational safety of vessels, many computational methods have been presented to perform visual quality enhancement under poor weather conditions. However, most of these methods are essentially specific-purpose implementation strategies, only available for one specific weather type. To overcome this limitation, we propose to develop a general-purpose multi-scene visibility enhancement method, i.e., edge reparameterization- and attention-guided neural network (ERANet), to adaptively restore the degraded images captured under different weather conditions. In particular, our ERANet simultaneously exploits the channel attention, spatial attention, and reparameterization technology to enhance the visual quality while maintaining low computational cost. Extensive experiments conducted on standard and IWTS-related datasets have demonstrated that our ERANet could outperform several representative visibility enhancement methods in terms of both imaging quality and computational efficiency. The superior performance of IWTS-related object detection and scene segmentation could also be steadily obtained after ERANet-based visibility enhancement under complex weather conditions.

Traffic object detection under variable illumination is challenging due to the information loss caused by the limited dynamic range of conventional frame-based cameras. To address this issue, we introduce bio-inspired event cameras and propose a novel Structure-aware Fusion Network (SFNet) that extracts sharp and complete object structures from the event stream to compensate for the lost information in images through cross-modality fusion, enabling the network to obtain illumination-robust representations for traffic object detection. Specifically, to mitigate the sparsity or blurriness issues arising from diverse motion states of traffic objects in fixed-interval event sampling methods, we propose the Reliable Structure Generation Network (RSGNet) to generate Speed Invariant Frames (SIF), ensuring the integrity and sharpness of object structures. Next, we design a novel Adaptive Feature Complement Module (AFCM) which guides the adaptive fusion of two modality features to compensate for the information loss in the images by perceiving the global lightness distribution of the images, thereby generating illumination-robust representations. Finally, considering the lack of large-scale and high-quality annotations in the existing event-based object detection datasets, we build a DSEC-Det dataset, which consists of 53 sequences with 63,931 images and more than 208,000 labels for 8 classes. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed SFNet can overcome the perceptual boundaries of conventional cameras and outperform the frame-based methods, e.g., YOLOX by 7.9% in mAP50 and 3.8% in mAP50:95. Our code and dataset will be available athttps://github.com/YN-Yang/SFNet.

Real-time transportation surveillance is an essential part of the intelligent transportation system (ITS). However, images captured under low-light conditions often suffer poor visibility with types of degradation, such as noise interference and vague edge features, etc. With the development of imaging devices, the quality of the visual surveillance data is continually increasing, like 2K and 4K, which have more strict requirements on the efficiency of image processing. To satisfy the requirements on both enhancement quality and computational speed, this paper proposes a double domain guided real-time low-light image enhancement network (DDNet) for ultra-high-definition (UHD) transportation surveillance. Specifically, we design an encoder-decoder structure as the main architecture of the learning network. In particular, the enhancement processing is divided into two subtasks (i.e., color enhancement and gradient enhancement) via the proposed coarse enhancement module (CEM) and LoG-based gradient enhancement module (GEM), which are embedded in the encoder-decoder structure. It enables the network to enhance the color and edge features simultaneously. Through the decomposition and reconstruction on both color and gradient domains, our DDNet can restore the detailed feature information concealed by the darkness with better visual quality and efficiency. The evaluation experiments on standard and transportation-related datasets demonstrate that our DDNet provides superior enhancement quality and efficiency compared with state-of-the-art methods. Besides, the object detection and scene segmentation experiments indicate the practical benefits for higher-level image analysis under low-light environments in ITS. The source code is available at https://github.com/QuJX/DDNet.

Vehicle carbon emission models are essential for monitoring and managing transportation emissions. Considering the numerous vehicle types and diverse driving conditions, modeling each vehicle individually is not possible. A generalized carbon emission module (GCEM) is proposed to realize fast model transfer across both light-duty gasoline and heavy-duty diesel vehicles. It has five main components: normalized torque function, category-specified fuel consumption rate function, denormalized function, emission-standard correction, and fuel-specified conversion. GCEM estimates carbon emissions based on the engine bench results of a reference vehicle, avoiding time-consuming and costly experiments. By normalizing engine torque, the significant power disparities within the same vehicle category can be effectively addressed. Integrating GCEM within the parallel transportation system is a feasible solution for monitoring complex traffic emissions. Through comprehensive comparisons, GCEM demonstrates a superior generalized ability in this data-limited scenario than three baseline models, both for various test vehicles and diverse driving conditions. As real-world traffic is a typical data-limited scenario, GCEM is a promising and practical transfer method for estimating vehicle carbon emissions.

Affected by people’s dynamic social activities, the imbalance between vehicle supply and demand in the Mobility-On-Demand(MOD) system is a common phenomenon. To improve traffic efficiency, an Auxiliary Network Enhanced Hierarchical Graph Reinforcement Learning (AHGRL) method is proposed for vehicle repositioning. Firstly, a hierarchical graph reinforcement learning (HGRL) framework is designed. The complex vehicle repositioning problem in real road networks is divided into many sub-tasks and multiple reinforcement learning algorithms are designed to solve decision problems of different levels. Traffic congestion is also considered and road nodes are clustered dynamically. And then an auxiliary graph reinforcement learning (AGRL) algorithm is designed for the actuator. It contains the prediction branch and the repositioning branch. States and rewards of agents could be designed accurately with the support of the prediction branch. The two branches cooperate in an auxiliary way to achieve excellent forecasting and repositioning effects. Finally, to enable efficient multi-vehicle coordination, a discrete Soft Actor-Critic algorithm is adopted in the repositioning branch, which learns multiple optimal actions for vehicles in the same area. Comparative experiments with real data demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. And ablation experiments verify the effectiveness and universality of the HGRL framework and the AGRL algorithm.

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.

Traffic prediction is a keystone for building smart cities in the new era and has found wide applications in traffic scheduling and management, environment policy making, public safety, and so on. Instead of creating a traffic predictor for each city, this article focuses on designing a unified network model that could be directly applied for traffic prediction in any city, by learning the essential spatial-temporal dependencies, i.e., the mutual relationship between traffic and the corresponding fine-grained road network. To achieve this goal, this article proposes a joint knowledge- and data-driven mechanism that novelly divides dependencies into three kinds of correlations, i.e., road segment, intra-intersection, and inter-intersection correlation, which capture the microcosmic, middle, and macroscopic dependencies between traffic and the road network, respectively. Specifically, we first construct traffic datasets that could cover all road segments from real-world trajectory datasets, which makes it possible to model the whole road network as a graph, with the help of fine-grained road topology. Then, we propose meta road segment learner, connection-aware spatial-temporal graph convolutional network (GCN), and multiscale residual networks for capturing the microcosmic, middle, and macroscopic dependencies, respectively. Our experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed method could: 1) achieve better prediction accuracy compared with several approaches and 2) capture the mutual relationship between traffic and the fine-grained road network since our model trained only using data from the source city achieves good performance when it is directly applied for traffic prediction in the target city, without any fine-tuning. The codes will be made publicly available.

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.

Although value decomposition networks and the follow on value-based studies factorizes the joint reward function to individual reward functions for a kind of cooperative multiagent reinforcement problem, in which each agent has its local observation and shares a joint reward signal, most of the previous efforts, however, ignored the graphical information between agents. In this article, a new value decomposition with graph attention network (VGN) method is developed to solve the value functions by introducing the dynamical relationships between agents. It is pointed out that the decomposition factor of an agent in our approach can be influenced by the reward signals of all the related agents and two graphical neural network-based algorithms (VGN-Linear and VGN-Nonlinear) are designed to solve the value functions of each agent. It can be proved theoretically that the present methods satisfy the factorizable condition in the centralized training process. The performance of the present methods is evaluated on the StarCraft Multiagent Challenge (SMAC) benchmark. Experiment results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art value-based multiagent reinforcement algorithms, especially when the tasks are with very hard level and challenging for existing methods.

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.

Visual reasoning between visual images and natural language remains a long-standing challenge in computer vision. Conventional deep supervision methods target at finding answers to the questions relying on the datasets containing only a limited amount of images with textual ground-truth descriptions. Facing learning with limited labels, it is natural to expect to constitute a larger scale dataset consisting of several million visual data annotated with texts, but this approach is extremely time-intensive and laborious. Knowledge-based works usually treat knowledge graphs (KGs) as static flattened tables for searching the answer, but fail to take advantage of the dynamic update of KGs. To overcome these deficiencies, we propose a Webly supervised knowledge-embedded model for the task of visual reasoning. On the one hand, vitalized by the overwhelming successful Webly supervised learning, we make much use readily available images from the Web with their weakly annotated texts for an effective representation. On the other hand, we design a knowledge-embedded model, including the dynamically updated interaction mechanism between semantic representation models and KGs. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed model significantly achieves the most outstanding performance compared with other state-of-the-art approaches for the task of visual reasoning.

In security games, the patrolling problem is usually modeled as a Stackelberg game to obtain patrol schemes. However, solving Stackelberg games is challenging, as the player strategy space grows exponentially with patrolling scenarios that expand in space and time. Recent work on reducing the player strategy space does not consider adversarial graph features, making the process of solving the Stackelberg game inefficient. To address this issue, we propose a novel algorithm called “Digger,” and the following important findings are made: the defender's optimal strategy can prevent an attacker from reaching a target, and this is achieved by a set of available interdiction vertices that separate the attacker from the target. The defender can arrive at the interdiction vertices earlier than the attacker. After arriving at the set of interdiction vertices, the next defender action subgraphs are not all useful, and the expected utility of the related player's pure strategy is not optimal. Finally, we build a player support set that does not contain useless strategies to improve the speed of the security game algorithm. An experimental evaluation of warehouse graphs demonstrates that Digger dramatically improves the existing algorithms.

Since the 1990s, the automated process within open-pit mines has been rapidly advanced. However, mineral transportation, as the most costly and dangerous production process, has not witnessed efficient achievements. Adverse weather conditions and complex work environments are two critical bottlenecks that impede the development and deployment of autonomous transportation of open-pit mines. To alleviate this issue, this research proposes a novel paradigm, named IMAPeM, designed to enable safe and efficient autonomous transportation with humans in the loop. IMAPeM includes three categories of miners: 1) biological miners; 2) digital miners; and 3) robotic miners, as well as three operational modes: 1) autonomous model (AM); 2) parallel model (PM); and 3) expert/emergency model (EM). IMAPeM employs these miners and modes depend on the complexity of the task, optimizing the utilization of digital and robotic miners while reducing the workload for biological miners. In addition, we developed the YUGONG system based on IMAPeM. The empirical implementation demonstrates the exceptional performance of the YUGONG system in autonomous transportation across diverse open-pit mines. This system contributes to the advancement of sustainable mining practices, which also carries profound significance for achieving long-term environmentally responsible mining operations.

Despite recent advancements in robotic exploration, estimating the three-dimensional (3-D) motion of unknown dynamic objects, which are prevalent in chaotic construction sites, remains an unresolved challenge. In this work, we studied the problem of detecting and tracking the six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) motion of unknown moving objects using only a stereo camera. The fundamental idea of our approach is to estimate the positions of map points at each timestamp and model their uncertainty in position, such that the correlation between map points can be found by segmenting point clouds that are parts of moving objects into different groups. By analyzing the correlation between map points, we can detect the dynamic objects in the scene without making any assumptions about the type of objects. Thus, this approach enables tracking of both known and unknown moving objects, such as a robot carrier with stacked luggage. It surpasses the performance of existing appearance-based methods, which often face difficulties when dealing with unknown objects. Through extensive real-world experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in accurately tracking moving objects, highlighting its potential for various applications. In addition, we successfully deploy our object motion estimation algorithm in an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) for the purpose of avoiding unknown moving objects in real-world scenarios. This practical implementation underscores the applicability of our approach in real-world settings.

In industrial applications where computational resources are finite and data noises are prevalent, the representation power of deep neural networks (DNNs) is crucial. Traditional network structures often require a significant increase in the parameter amount to enhance the representation power, making it difficult to achieve effective representation under parameter amount constraints. In order to alleviate this problem, this work leverages the ordinary differential equation (ODE) interpretation of deep residual networks, elucidating the relationship between the fine-grained connectivity modes of blocks in DNNs and the representation power. We build a bridge from the order of numerical methods and the order of ODEs to the representation power of DNNs. Besides, we show that higher-order ODEs can be approximated by k-step methods incorporating trainable coefficients. Empirically, we validate our theoretical insights by demonstrating the superior representation power of our proposed network structures through enhanced performance on industrial tasks, such as surface defect detection, critical temperature prediction of superconductors, and image classification under noises. The proposed method provides a new approach to the design of network structures for robust and accurate DNNs, enhancing the representation power with a negligible number of additional parameters. The code is publicly available athttps://github.com/LongJin-lab/Order-and-Representation-Power.

As the next-generation Internet characterized by readability, writability, and ownability, Web 3.0 necessitates the fusion of blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to realize its vision of decentralization, user autonomy, and intelligent openness. To this end, this article proposes the integration of “AI for blockchain” and “blockchain for AI” to form a bidirectional enhancement loop, for establishing genuinely intelligent blockchains and ushering in a new paradigm referred to as blockchain intelligence. On this basis, the technical architecture of intelligent blockchains is proposed, which infuses intelligence into every layer of traditional blockchain architectures while enables the parallel execution between virtual and artificial intelligent blockchain systems. This architecture facilitates blockchain systems to cultivate an ecosystem of intelligence, extending from foundation intelligence to application intelligence. Moreover, the core attributes of blockchain intelligence are examined, from the perspectives of smart contracts, data, identity, and governance. Furthermore, the main challenges and research issues faced by blockchain intelligence are outlined. This article is committed to the advancement of blockchain intelligence, laying the groundwork for Web 3.0 and the impending era of smart societies.

In this article, a novel multistep look-ahead policy iteration with isoperimetric constraints (MLPIIC) method is developed to solve infinite horizon optimal control problems (OCPs) with isoperimetric constraints for discrete-time nonlinear systems. In order to overcome the difficulty that Bellman’s principle of optimality does not hold directly in OCPs with isoperimetric constraints, a method to approximate OCPs with isoperimetric constraints by OCPs with new constraints is developed. For the MLPIIC method initialized with an admissible control law, the convergence and optimality of the iterative value function and the feasibility of the iterative control law are proven. Utilizing the function approximator, the implementation of the MLPIIC method is described. Finally, simulation results are provided.

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.

In the era of Industry 5.0 and the emerging metaverses, this study proposes Meta-Services, a novel paradigm that evolves a traditional service system into a multistage ecosystem. In the proposed paradigm, we develop a parallel intelligence-based management framework that enables stakeholders to control and manage the complex dynamics of service delivery in the metaverse. The management framework involves the following three stages: 1) service systems in metaverses; 2) elementary parallel service systems; and 3) parallel intelligence empowered ecosystems. The third stage evolves from the first two stages by incorporating the approach of “designer in the loop”, contributing to more human-centered, adaptive, and resilient service systems. Moreover, a case study in the retail sector is provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed paradigm and show its practical potential.

Multitask learning has led to great success in many deep learning applications during the last decade. However, recent experiments have demonstrated that the performance of multitask learning depends on how to balance the relationship between different tasks. Therefore, many approaches have been proposed to adjust per-task gradient directions or design a more appropriate task reweighting scheme based on task-level statistics. In this article, we discuss how to boost the performance of multitask learning by using more fine-grained sample gradient information. To this end, we propose the concept of sample gradient similarity, which measures the agreement between the sample gradient for a task and the true gradient. Based on this concept, greater weight is assigned to more consistent tasks and more robust training samples to improve the training process of multitask learning. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms on a series of challenging multitask datasets.

With the advent of Web 3.0, the evolution of cities and societies is increasingly oriented toward virtual spaces. This shift signifies an inevitable trend where the integration of virtual and real elements becomes vital to their development. Such a transition will bring huge changes to the organizational structure and methods, development modes, as well as operating mechanisms of cities and societies. In the virtual-real integrated cities and societies, traditional economic and management principles and models are no longer applicable. Consequently, it is crucial to explore new economic and management models tailored to Web 3.0. This article integrates virtual cities/societies with actual cities/societies, and proposes the innovative paradigm of MetaCities/MetaSocieties. Based on parallel intelligence theory and metaverse technologies, the research framework of MetaCities/MetaSocieties is established, and its main participants and operating mode are discussed. In addition, in view of the new economic and management issues faced in MetaCities/MetaSocieties, the innovative paradigms of MetaEconomics and MetaManagement are proposed, and the operational logic and models of MetaEconomics, as well as the MetaManagement big models and management-oriented operating systems, are proposed. This work aims to offer valuable insights for the evolution of cities and societies in the upcoming intelligent era, and inspire the development of new MetaEconomics and MetaManagement models in MetaCities/MetaSocieties.

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.

The era has been witnessing our entering into a more professional and cooperative society and also a bloom of various digital humans that help us complete more challenging industrial work than ever. As a major human-machine communication channel, virtual-real interaction between digital and real humans is an efficient way to adjust the mismatch between specialized tasks and participants with unsuitable personalities, elevating the overall performance of such human participated systems. This article proposes a new paradigm for temporary personality shaping by prescriptively interacting the human operator/user with his “digital assistant” in cyber space. As a first proposed personality shaping with AI-aided approach, the new paradigm involves digital human modeling with uncertain personality, computational experiments on personality evolution, and prescriptive interaction with user counterpart. By iteratively and repeatedly executing the three steps, the personality of human participants is gradually tailored and prescribed so that he can well undertake specific tasks. Experiments based on online social media data and human-machine shared driving have indicated that our new personality shaping paradigm is feasible and effective in performing representative tasks.

While texts related to images convey fundamental messages for scene understanding and reasoning, text-based visual question answering tasks concentrate on visual questions that require reading texts from images. However, most current methods add multimodal features that are independently extracted from a given image into a reasoning model without considering their inter- and intra-relationships according to three modalities (i.e., scene texts, questions, and images). To this end, we propose a novel text-based visual question answering model, multimodal graph reasoning. Our model first extracts intramodality relationships by taking the representations from identical modalities as semantic graphs. Then, we present graph multihead self-attention, which boosts each graph representation through graph-by-graph aggregation to capture the intermodality relationship. It is a case of “so many heads, so many wits” in the sense that as more semantic graphs are involved in this process, each graph representation becomes more effective. Finally, these representations are reprojected, and we perform answer prediction with their outputs. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach realizes substantially better performance compared with other state-of-the-art models.

This paper presents Management-Oriented Operating Systems (M2OS) that leverages the power of parallel intelligence theory, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and foundation models to revolutionize the manner of management in Cyber-Physical-Social Systems (CPSS). The parallel architecture on M2OS is proposed, including the parallel interactive actual M2OS and artificial M2OS. Among them, the artificial M2OSs provide digital infrastructures for organizations to operate, collaborate, and make decisions in the virtual space, and conduct computational experiments to evaluate management decisions and predict future states of the actual M2OS. Through parallel execution and closed-loop feedback between the artificial and actual M2OSs, the management and control, experimentation and evaluation, as well as learning and training of the actual M2OS can be realized. Moreover, the functional layers of M2OS, including the infrastructure layer, data layer, scenario layer, modeling layer, decision layer, and application layer, are discussed. These layers work together to support the intelligent, autonomous, collaborative, and adaptive nature of the M2OS, and facilitate data-driven decision-making, optimize business operations, and empower managers with real-time actionable insights. The proposed M2OS paradigm has great potential to transform the management paradigm and opens up new possibilities for intelligent and collaborative decision-making.

The rapid advancement of intelligence and connectivity technology (ICT) has enhanced the efficiency and safety of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). However, this also increases the complexity of the transportation systems, especially the social complexity, and poses new challenges for their management. This paper discusses the emergence of social transportation, as part of natural evolutionary adaptation to new traffic conditions and technology, which is a paradigm shift from engineering-centered technical systems to society-centered ecosystems. In social transportation systems, all participants including administrators, individual travelers and other stakeholders play a more proactive role in the operation and management of transportation systems. Therefore, we propose to employ a decen-tralized autonomous organization (DAO) as a model for the social transportation system that allows participants to collaborate and coordinate without relying on a central authority. To meet the challenges brought by this transition, we propose to apply ACP-based parallel system theory to restructure the methodology of transportation management. Finally, we present a case study of personal carbon trading system where economic incentives are used to manage traffic demand, affecting others' travel behaviors, and reduce carbon emissions. In the conclusive remarks, we provide our visions and future directions of social transportation systems.

The rise of Artificial Intelligence for Science (AI4S) has highlighted the importance and urgency of ensuring open-ness, fairness, impartiality, diversity, and sustainability in scientific systems. Existing scientific systems, referred to as Centralized Science (CeSci), are built on centralized organizational structures and top-down institutional frameworks, which are lagging behind the development and practical requirements of AI4S. To address these limitations, AI4S needs to embrace a new scientific organizational and operational paradigm, namely Decentralized Science (DeSci). It can provide strong support to AI4S via effectively addressing issues such as information silos, biases, unfair distribution, and monopolies and promoting multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and trans disciplinary cooperation in science. Based on these considerations, this paper presents the framework of AI4S based on DeSci and explores its potential application scenarios and research issues. The research can provide effective guidance for the development of scientific systems.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) have been gaining popularity in recent years due to their promise of realizing the decentralized Web 3.0. However, most DAOs rely heavily on token-centric value systems as well as allocate decision-making authority and yield-sharing rights according to the held tokens, which often lead to monopolization of power and rights. To address this issue, this paper contributes to propose a truly democratic organization model, named True Autonomous Organizations and Operations (TAOs), that does not count upon tokens and is guided by principles of contribution-based and on-demand allocation. We first discuss the design of TAOs, including their infrastructures, power structures, and value systems, and then provide a technical roadmap for implementing TAOs in the DeSci context. This research can provide a valuable guidance for the construction and application of TAOs.

In recent years, quadratic optimizations have become increasingly popular in engineering. However, conventional methods that investigate this problem from the perspective of a canonical form with linear constraints are not effective in dealing with the significant challenges posed by quadratic constraints in practice. This paper proposes a solution framework for the quadratic optimization with quadratic constraints (QOQC) based on innovative artificial societies, computational experiments, and parallel execution (ACP) framework. Then, a gradient projection differential neural solution (GPDNS) is proposed to address this. To illustrate the effectiveness of the GPDNS model in solving the QOQC system, numerical simulations are provided. Overall, this paper presents the potential of innovative approaches like the ACP framework to enhance our capabilities in addressing challenging optimization systems.

Rational allocation of medical resources can help more people access medical services. To allocate medical resources efficiently and fairly, we need to optimize the layout of healthcare facilities, which helps improve residents' health levels. In this paper, we use the theory of Artificial Scenarios, Computational Experiments, and Parallel Execution (ACP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to optimize the health-care facilities' accessibility in a parallel health care system. To illustrate the feasibility of our proposed method, a case study in Gulou, Nanjing, is taken. The results reveal that the existing healthcare facilities are scattered with limited continuity, which fails to meet the demands adequately. With the layout optimization based on the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm, approximately 95 % of residential areas can be covered by adding 15 additional facilities. It not only reduces the standard deviation of accessibility from 0.06 to 0.04 but also significantly improves the fairness and efficiency of healthcare facilities. From an accessibility perspective, optimizing the layout of healthcare facilities ensures fair access to public services and aligns the supply with the demand. The research also provides a reference for the utilization and optimization of public service facilities.

With the exacerbation of bridge aging issues, the demand for efficient and cost-effective bridge inspection solutions becomes increasingly urgent. Currently, most methods for surface damage detection on bridges employ single-modal, image-based object detection models. Despite their overall effectiveness on specific datasets, such methods frequently encounter error detection issues during actual inspection processes. This study proposes a multimodal (image and text) model for surface damage detection in bridge structures by combining the CLIP model with the YOLOv8 model. By conducting tests on the composite concrete bridge of the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge, Qingdao, the effectiveness of bridge detection using drones is validated, and the common issue of false positive detections in traditional object detection models is successfully addressed.

The development of Internet Hospital attracts growing attention worldwide to improve medical service quality and efficiency. However, the existing Internet Hospital failed to fully allocate the patients' consultation demands and improve the level of satisfaction, which is mainly caused by an overlong online waiting time during the diagnostic process. The emergence of Large-Language-Model (LLM) technology provides an opportunity to improve the existing synchronous and sequential online diagnostic process towards an asynchronous and concurrent process. With the consideration of applying LLM technology in developing the Internet Hospital, a conversational-AI-enhanced intelligent diagnostic process framework is proposed in this paper. By hierarchically decomposing the online diagnostic service into three layers, namely the AI doctor, the rotating doctor, and the expert doctor, the diagnostic process is capable of providing instant treatments with a lower misdiagnosis rate, meanwhile relieving the workload of human doctors. In addition, a case study of the Internet Hospital operated by Jiangsu Provincial Hospital is conducted, which reveals the importance of boosting the diagnostic progress by the proposed framework. Further, the proposed framework is examined by a numerical experiment based on statistical data. The experiment results indicate that both the patient waiting time and the misdiagnosis rate can be significantly reduced, which suggests a great potential for applying the proposed framework in practice.

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.

Data trading has been hindered by privacy concerns associated with user-owned data and the infinite reproducibility of data, making it challenging for data owners to retain exclusive rights over their data once it has been disclosed. Traditional data pricing models relied on uniform pricing or subscription-based models. However, with the development of Privacy-Preserving Computing techniques, the market can now protect the privacy and complete transactions using progressively disclosed information, which creates a technical foundation for generating greater social welfare through data usage. In this study, we propose a novel approach to modeling multi-round data trading with progressively disclosed information using a matchmaking-based Markov Decision Process (MDP) and introduce a Social Welfare-optimized Data Pricing Mechanism (SWDPM) to find optimal pricing strategies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to model multi-round data trading with progressively disclosed information. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the SWDPM can increase social welfare 3 times by up to 54 % in trading feasibility, 43 % in trading efficiency, and 25 % in trading fairness by encouraging better matching of demand and price negotiation among traders.

The imbalance between the supply and demand of healthcare resources is a global challenge, which is particularly severe in developing countries. Governments and academic communities have made various efforts to increase healthcare supply and improve resource allocation. However, these efforts often remain passive and inflexible. Alongside these issues, the emergence of the parallel healthcare system has the potential to solve these problems by unlocking the data value. The parallel healthcare system comprises Medicine-Oriented Operating Systems (MOOS), Medicine-Oriented Scenario Engineering (MOSE), and Medicine-Oriented Large Models (MOLMs), which could collect, circulate, and empower data. In this paper, we propose that achieving equilibrium in medical resource allocation is possible through parallel healthcare systems via data empowerment. The supply-demand relationship can be balanced in parallel healthcare systems by (1) increasing the supply provided by digital and robotic doctors in MOOS, (2) identifying individual and potential demands by proactive diagnosis and treatment in MOSE, and (3) improving supply-demand matching using large models in MOLMs. To illustrate the effectiveness of this approach, we present a case study optimizing resource allocation from the perspective of facility accessibility. Results demonstrate that the parallel healthcare system could result in up to 300% improvement in accessibility.

Abstract Covering array generation (CAG) is the key research problem in combinatorial testing and is an NP‐complete problem. With the increasing complexity of software under test and the need for higher interaction covering strength t , the techniques for constructing high‐strength covering arrays are expected. This paper presents a hybrid heuristic memetic algorithm named QSSMA for high‐strength CAG problem. The sub‐optimal solution acceptance rate is introduced to generate multiple test cases after each iteration to improve the efficiency of constructing high‐covering strength test suites. The QSSMA method could successfully build high‐strength test suites for some instances where t up to 15 within one day cutoff time and report five new best test suite size records. Extensive experiments demonstrate that QSSMA is a competitive method compared to state‐of‐the‐art methods.

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%.

Crowd counting has important applications in public safety and pandemic control. A robust and practical crowd counting system has to be capable of continuously learning with the newly incoming domain data in real-world scenarios instead of fitting one domain only. Off-the-shelf methods have some drawbacks when handling multiple domains: (1) the models will achieve limited performance (even drop dramatically) among old domains after training images from new domains due to the discrepancies in intrinsic data distributions from various domains, which is called catastrophic forgetting; (2) the well-trained model in a specific domain achieves imperfect performance among other unseen domains because of domain shift; (3) it leads to linearly increasing storage overhead, either mixing all the data for training or simply training dozens of separate models for different domains when new ones are available. To overcome these issues, we investigate a new crowd counting task in incremental domain training setting called lifelong crowd counting. Its goal is to alleviate catastrophic forgetting and improve the generalization ability using a single model updated by the incremental domains. Specifically, we propose a self-distillation learning framework as a benchmark (forget less, count better, or FLCB) for lifelong crowd counting, which helps the model leverage previous meaningful knowledge in a sustainable manner for better crowd counting to mitigate the forgetting when new data arrive. A new quantitative metric, normalized Backward Transfer (nBwT), is developed to evaluate the forgetting degree of the model in the lifelong learning process. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed benchmark in achieving a low catastrophic forgetting degree and strong generalization ability.

Depression is a critical problem in modern society that affects an estimated 350 million people worldwide, causing feelings of sadness and a lack of interest and pleasure. Emotional disorders are gaining interest and are closely entwined with depression, because one contributes to an understanding of the other. Despite the achievements in the two separate tasks of emotion recognition and depression detection, there has not been much prior effort to build a unified model that can connect these two tasks with different modalities, including multimedia (text, audio, and video) and unobtrusive physiological signals (e.g., electroencephalography). We propose a noveltemporal convolutional transformer with knowledge embeddingto address the joint task of depression detection and emotion recognition. This approach not only learns multimodal embeddings across domains via the temporal convolutional transformer but also exploits special-domain knowledge from medical knowledge graphs to improve the performance of detection and recognition. It is essential that the features learned by our method can be perceived as a priori and are suitable for increasing the performance of other related tasks. Our method illustrates the case of “two birds with one stone” in the sense that two or more tasks can be efficiently handled with our unique model, which captures effective features. Experimental results on ten real-world datasets show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches. On the other hand, experiments in which our methodology is applied to other reasoning tasks show that our approach effectively supports model reasoning related to emotion and improves its performance.

Serious games (SGs) are a practice of growing importance due to their high potential as an educational tool for augmented learning. However, little effort has been devoted to address student learning optimization in an SG from a systematic point of view. This article tackles this challenge by developing a learning-embedded attribute Petri net (LAPN) model to represent game flow and student learning decision-makings. The dynamics of learner behaviors in game are then addressed through the incorporation of learning mechanisms (i.e., reinforcement learning (RL) and random forest classification) into the Petri net model for knowledge reasoning and learning. Finally, an algorithm based on LAPN is proposed, aiming to guide learners to achieve a faster and better solution to problem-solving in game. The benefit of the proposed model and algorithm is then demonstrated in the SG Gridlock.

By regarding the Chinese financial and economic sectors as a system, this article studies the stock volatility spillover in the system and explores its effects on the overall performance of the macroeconomy in China. The recent outbreak of COVID-19, U.S.–China trade friction, and three historical financial turbulences are involved to distinguish the changes in the spillover in these distinct crises, which has seldom been unveiled in the literature. By considering that the stock volatility spillover may vary over distinct timescales, the spillovers are disclosed through innovatively constructing the multi-scale spillover networks, followed by connectedness computation, based on variational mode decomposition (VMD) and generalized vector autoregression (GVAR) process. Our empirical analysis first demonstrates the different levels of increases in the total sectoral volatility spillover and changes in the roles of the sectors in the system under the aforementioned crises. Besides, the increases in the sectoral spillover in the long-term are verified to negatively impact the macroeconomy and can thereby act as warning signals.

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.

To provide off-chain federations with complete privacy services to realize on-chain federated learning (FL), this article proposes a novel privacy framework for FL based on blockchain and smart contracts, named Artificial Identification. It consists of two modules: private peer-to-peer identification and private FL, using two scalable smart contracts to manage the identification and learning process, respectively. Based on Ethereum and interplenary file systems (IPFS), we implement our framework and comprehensively analyze its performance. Experiments show that the proposed framework has acceptable collaboration costs and offers advantages in terms of privacy, security, and decentralization. Furthermore, combined with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, the framework has the potential to realize automatic on-chain identification and autonomous FL of machine clusters composed of Internet of Things (IoT) devices or distributed participants.

Accurate forecasting of future traffic is a critical contemporary problem for transportation research. However, it is difficult to understand the feature patterns of traffic events due to the complexity of the traffic environment, heterogeneous factors, and lack of abnormal samples. This article proposes a framework to integrate the social traffic data and use the TabNet model to facilitate the representation learning task in traffic event prediction. With the tabular learning and model interpretability analysis, the importance of common traffic external factors toward traffic events is studied. The study has practical significance for regulating traffic planning and the development of the operational boundary for autonomous driving systems.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) with cyber–physical–social systems (CPSS) creates new research opportunities and challenges with major societal implications. The behavioral and cognitive enhancement of intelligent systems promotes a productive and creative partnership and collaboration between humans and machines. Advancements in these areas enable adaptability, scalability, resiliency, safety, security, and usability that expand the horizons of CPSS.

Welcome to the second issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SYSTEMS (TCSS) of 2023. According to the latest update of CiteScoreTracker from Elsevier Scopus released on February 5, 2023, the CitesSore of TCSS has reached a historical high of 9.6. Many thanks to all for your great effort and support.

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.

A brain–computer interface (BCI) establishes a direct communication pathway between the human brain and a computer. It has been widely used in medical diagnosis, rehabilitation, education, entertainment, and so on. Most research so far focuses on making BCIs more accurate and reliable, but much less attention has been paid to their privacy. Developing a commercial BCI system usually requires close collaborations among multiple organizations, e.g., hospitals, universities, and/or companies. Input data in BCIs, e.g., electroencephalogram (EEG), contain rich privacy information, and the developed machine learning model is usually proprietary. Data and model transmission among different parties may incur significant privacy threats, and hence, privacy protection in BCIs must be considered. Unfortunately, there does not exist any contemporary and comprehensive review on privacy-preserving BCIs. This article fills this gap, by describing potential privacy threats and protection strategies in BCIs. It also points out several challenges and future research directions in developing privacy-preserving BCIs.

The intelligent manufacturing is a complex engineering system, and the cyber–physical systems (CPSs) and the industrial Internet are the preliminary infrastructures. When cyber–physical–social systems (CPSSs) are formed by extending CPS into the social aspect, Societies 5.0 era is coming. In the Societies 5.0 era, social manufacturing (SM) is an innovative manufacturing solution for intelligent manufacturing. In this article, a survey on SM is introduced. It includes the definition and theory of SM, and comparison between SM and other manufacturing paradigms. Moreover, the key supporting technologies are presented, which can be used to realize SM, such as blockchain, 3-D printing, and big data. Then, the applications of SM to industries are illustrated. The SM has broad application prospects in the high-end customized, distributed manufacturing, and other intelligent manufacturing. Finally, the challenges and future trends are discussed.

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.

The wide application of deep neural networks (DNNs) has significantly improved the performance of hashing models on multimodal retrieval issues. DNN-based deep models can automatically learn semantic features from raw data to make human-level decisions. However, the superior generalization leads to potential privacy leakage risks. Strong DNN-based retrieval models enable malicious crawlers to search for nontag private information based on semantic similarity matching. Hence, executing effective privacy protection mechanisms against those retrieval software is essential for reliable social website construction. In this article, we propose a retrieval task-based adversarial perturbation generation method called Hashing Fake to meet this request. Specifically, DNNs are recently found to be vulnerable to a specific set of attacks called adversarial perturbations, which denote some magnitude-restricted signals added on objective samples to misguide well-crafted DNN models, and perturbations’ magnitudes are small enough that will not induce humans’ perception. Moreover, since existing adversarial perturbation generation methods are designed for supervised tasks, Hashing Fake constructs a differential approximation substitution for perturbation production on unsupervised retrieval tasks. Through extensive experiments on several deep retrieval benchmarks, we demonstrate that well-crafted perturbations using Hashing Fake can effectively misguide objective models’ recognitions to make false predictions. The added norm-restricted perturbations on objective samples will not alter humans’ perception; hence, Hashing Fake can be applied on real-world social websites to protect subscribers’ privacy against malicious retrieval software.

Setting up guidance equipment and leaders is widely used as an effective measure to improve the operation and evacuation efficiency of subway stations for the safety of passengers. Cooperation among different kinds of guidance modals can benefit the passenger evacuation process and reduce the operating and management costs as well as the risk of injury to people in subway stations. This article proposes a framework of multimodal cooperative guidance (MMCG) systems for commanding the crowd evacuation in case of emergency, where three types of guidance modes are considered. The bi-level MMCG optimization models are constructed to determine the optimal quantities and initial locations of multimodal guidance. The MMCG schemes are designed by minimizing cost functions taking into account the constraints of the number of guidance, valid coverage, and guiding expectation. An extended social force (SF) model is proposed to study crowd evacuation dynamics with multimodal guidance. The computational experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed cooperative guidance schemes at the subway platform scenario. Three unimodal guidance schemes and a contrasted scheme without guidance are also proposed as comparison schemes. The results show that the crowd evacuation efficiency and the utilization ratio of exits are improved by taking into account the cooperation among different guidance modals.

This article uses parallel control to investigate the problem of event-triggered near-optimal control (ETNOC) for unknown discrete-time (DT) nonlinear systems. First, to achieve parallel control, an augmented nonlinear system (ANS) with an augmented performance index (API) is proposed to introduce the control input into the feedback system. The control stability relationship between the ANS and the original system is analyzed, and it is shown that, by choosing a proper API, optimal control of the ANS with the API can be seen as near-optimal control of the original system with the original performance index (OPI). Second, based on parallel control, a novel event-triggered scheme is proposed, and then a novel ETNOC method is developed using the time-triggered optimal value function of the ANS with the API. The control stability is proved, and an upper bound, which is related to the design parameter, is provided for the actual performance index in advance. Then, to implement the developed ETNOC method for unknown DT nonlinear systems, a novel online learning algorithm is developed without reconstructing unknown systems, and neural network (NN) and adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) techniques are employed in the developed algorithm. The convergence of the signals in the closed-loop system (CLS) is shown using the Lyapunov approach, and the assumption of boundedness of input dynamics is not required. Finally, two simulations justify the theoretical conjectures.

In this article, a novel linear parallel control method is developed for output regulation problems with disturbances. The traditional feedback regulators are passive regulation methods. In order to solve this problem, the parallel controllers are presented, where the time variation of the control is constructed instead of the control value itself, to stabilize the output of the system. The main contributions of the developed method include two aspects: 1) a novel parallel regulator structure is presented, which can provide greater flexibility comparing with traditional methods and 2) the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of parallel regulators are analyzed. First, the structure of the linear parallel regulators is provided. Next, considering the situations that the full system information is obtained and the information of error is obtained, respectively, the properties of the parallel regulators are analyzed, and the regulator designs for the two situations are provided. Finally, numerical examples are provided to verify the correctness of the present method.

Large-scale data processing based on limited computing resources has always been a difficult problem in data mining, where feature selection is often used as an effective data compressing mechanism. For granular computing of Big Data, discernibility matrix and dependency degree are the most representative methods for matrix-based and feature-importance-degree-based feature selection, respectively. However, their temporal and space complexities are high and often lead to poor performance. In this article, a novel feature selection framework for large-scale data processing with linear complexities was proposed for the first time. First, a much more concise fuzzy granule set, called fuzzy arithmetic covering, was introduced to reduce computational costs. Then, a new matrix-based feature selection framework, namely consistent matrix, was proposed for general rough set models. As a result, a heuristic attribute reduction algorithm, i.e., HARCM, was designed accordingly. Compared with six state-of-the-art algorithms for feature selection, the average running time of the newly proposed algorithm was reduced up to 2913 times, with a comparable or even better classification performance.

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.

Pseudo supervision is regarded as the core idea in semi-supervised learning for semantic segmentation, and there is always a tradeoff between utilizing only the high-quality pseudo labels and leveraging all the pseudo labels. Addressing that, we propose a novel learning approach, called Conservative-Progressive Collaborative Learning (CPCL), among which two predictive networks are trained in parallel, and the pseudo supervision is implemented based on both the agreement and disagreement of the two predictions. One network seeks common ground via intersection supervision and is supervised by the high-quality labels to ensure a more reliable supervision, while the other network reserves differences via union supervision and is supervised by all the pseudo labels to keep exploring with curiosity. Thus, the collaboration of conservative evolution and progressive exploration can be achieved. To reduce the influences of the suspicious pseudo labels, the loss is dynamic re-weighted according to the prediction confidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CPCL achieves state-of-the-art performance for semi-supervised semantic segmentation.

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.

Traffic forecasting aims to capture complex spatial-temporal dependencies and non-linear dynamics, which plays an indispensable role in intelligent transportation systems and other domains like neuroscience, climate, etc. Most recent works rely on graph convolutional networks (GCN) to model the dependencies and the dynamics. However, the over-smoothing issue of GCN would produce indistinguishable features among nodes, leading to poor expressivity and weak capability of modeling complex dependencies and dynamics. To address this issue, we present a novel clustering spatial-temporal (ClusterST) unit, which incorporates unsupervised learning into GCN for extracting discriminative features. Specifically, we first exploit a neural network to learn a dynamic clustering, i.e., learning to partition the neighbors of each node into clusters at each time step. Two probabilistic losses are proposed to improve the separability of clusters. Then, the extracted features of different clusters can be distinguished. Based on the dynamically formed clusters, a vanilla GCN is applied to aggregate features within each cluster. By purely exploiting such a ClusterST unit, large improvements over the state-of-the-art are achieved. Furthermore, ClusterST units with a different number of clusters can be regarded as basic components to construct an inception-like ClusterST network for going deeper. We evaluate the framework on two real-world large-scale traffic datasets and observe an average improvement of 18.19% and 7.62% over state-of-the-art baselines, respectively. The code and models will be publicly available.

In 2014, IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society established a Technical Committee on Transportation 5.0 with the mission of promoting and transforming the deployment of advanced and innovative technologies, especially Artificial Intelligence in transportation. This paper briefly summarizes our main research and findings over the last decade. Transportation Foundation Models, Transportation Scenarios Engineering, and Transportation Operating Systems have been identified as the main directions for the research and development of next-generation intelligent transportation systems.

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.

Estimating absolute 3D poses of multiple people from monocular image is challenging due to the presence of occlusions and the scale variation among different persons. Among the existing methods, the top-down paradigms are highly dependent on human detection which is prone to the influence from inter-person occlusions, while the bottom-up paradigms suffer from the difficulties in keypoint feature extraction caused by scale variation and unreliable joint grouping caused by occlusions. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel multi-person 3D pose estimation framework, aided by multi-scale feature representations and human depth perceiving. Firstly, a waterfall-based architecture is incorporated for multi-scale feature representations to achieve a more accurate estimation of occluded joints with a better detection of human shapes. Then the global and local representations are fused for handling the effects of inter-person occlusion and scale variation in depth perceiving and keypoint feature extraction. Finally, with the guidance of the fused multi-scale representations, a depth-aware model is exploited for better 2D joint grouping and 3D pose recovering. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on benchmark datasets of MuCo-3DHP and MuPoTS-3D prove the effectiveness of our proposed method. Furthermore, we produce an occluded MuPoTS-3D dataset and the experiments on it validate the superiority of our method for overcoming the occlusions.

Improving the generalization performance of deep neural networks (DNNs) trained by minibatch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has raised lots of concerns from deep learning practitioners. The standard simple random sampling (SRS) scheme used in minibatch SGD treats all training samples equally in gradient estimation. In this article, we study a new data selection method based on the intrinsic property of the training set to help DNNs have better generalization performance. Our theoretical analysis suggests that this new sampling scheme, called the nontypicality sampling scheme, boosts the generalization performance of DNNs through biasing the solution toward wider minima, under certain assumptions. We confirm our findings experimentally and show that more variants of minibatch SGD can also benefit from the new sampling scheme. Finally, we discuss an extension of the nontypicality sampling scheme that holds promise to enhance both generalization performance and convergence speed of minibatch SGD.

Interest in autonomous driving (AD) and intelligent vehicles (IVs) is growing at a rapid pace due to the convenience, safety, and economic benefits. Although a number of surveys have reviewed research achievements in this field, they are still limited in specific tasks and lack systematic summaries and research directions in the future. Our work is divided into three independent articles and the first part is a survey of surveys (SoS) for total technologies of AD and IVs that involves the history, summarizes the milestones, and provides the perspectives, ethics, and future research directions. This is the second part (Part I for this technical survey) to review the development of control, computing system design, communication, high-definition map (HD map), testing, and human behaviors in IVs. In addition, the third part (Part II for this technical survey) is to review the perception and planning sections. The objective of this article is to involve all the sections of AD, summarize the latest technical milestones, and guide abecedarians to quickly understand the development of AD and IVs. Combining the SoS and Part II, we anticipate that this work will bring novel and diverse insights to researchers and abecedarians, and serve as a bridge between past and future.

A growing interest in autonomous driving (AD) and intelligent vehicles (IVs) is fueled by their promise for enhanced safety, efficiency, and economic benefits. While previous surveys have captured progress in this field, a comprehensive and forward-looking summary is needed. Our work fills this gap through three distinct articles. The first part, a “survey of surveys” (SoS), outlines the history, surveys, ethics, and future directions of AD and IV technologies. The second part, “Milestones in AD and IVs Part I: Control, Computing System Design, Communication, high-definition map (HD map), Testing, and Human Behaviors” delves into the development of control, computing system, communication, HD map, testing, and human behaviors in IVs. This part, the third part, reviews perception and planning in the context of IVs. Aiming to provide a comprehensive overview of the latest advancements in AD and IVs, this work caters to both newcomers and seasoned researchers. By integrating the SoS and Part I, we offer unique insights and strive to serve as a bridge between past achievements and future possibilities in this dynamic field.

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have become an indispensable part of digital infrastructure in recent years. The unique organizational characteristics and functional structure empower them to become an effective tool for solving corporate governance issues, including contract risks, principal-agent dilemmas, etc. However, DAOs themselves also face a variety of governance issues. On one hand, as a new economic organization model, the existing corporate governance theories and methods are no longer fully applicable to DAOs. On the other hand, unpredictable logic vulnerabilities and code loopholes in the governance mechanism might cause devastating damage to DAOs. The parallel intelligence theory based on the ACP method (i.e., artificial systems, computational experiments, and parallel execution) is an elegant research paradigm and a practical approach tailored to solving these challenges. As such, we propose a novel parallel governance framework for DAOs based on the parallel intelligence theory and further discuss its technical methodology and implementation model. Furthermore, we construct a parallel governance system for GnosisDAO and conduct computational experiments to validate the effectiveness of its governance mechanism. The experimental results not only confirm the defects of the GnosisDAO governance mechanism but also illustrate parallel governance as a useful research direction to solve existing governance problems of DAOs.

The new generation of digital intelligence technology enables knowledge creation, dissemination, and application to undergoing parallel changes. Scientific systems face an increasingly uncertain, diverse, and complex environment, making adopting multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches to research issues inevitable. Existing scientific systems follow linear value streams, leading to problems, such as inefficiency, unfairness, and knowledge monopoly. Decentralized science (DeSci) is a new scientific development paradigm based on Web3, Metaverses, and decentralized autonomous organizations and operations (DAOs) technologies, that can solve organizational and management problems in scientific systems through organizing, coordinating, and executing techniques. However, new economic theories and methods are still needed to effectively solve the problem of linear value flow in scientific systems. Metaeconomics based on the parallel intelligence theory, also known as decentralized economics (DeEco), provides a new approach and idea for redesigning the economic system of scientific markets. Thus, this article proposes a research framework and core mechanisms of DeSci MetaMarkets based on parallel economic theory to provide effective and practical methodologies for scientific system governance.

Effective road maintenance can not only achieve a balance between limited resources and long-term high-efficiency performance of road but also reduce the loss of life and property caused by road damage to vehicles and pedestrians. Due to the lack of a multidimensional dynamic monitoring system and enough extremely special data, the existing road maintenance system cannot accurately assess the road surface condition and provide timely early warning of sudden road damage. In this article, the M-RM system is proposed, that is, a metaverse-enabled road maintenance system based on cyber–physical–social systems (CPSSs), which fully utilizes the social and artificial system information of CPSS, as well as the simulation, monitoring, diagnosis and prediction functions of road systems in the virtual world of the metaverse. Then, in the road damage detection of system model in the virtual world, for the virtual data of the core assets of the metaverse, we propose an adaptive and information-preserving data augmentation (AIDA) algorithm-based nonclassical receptive field suppression and enhancement, an algorithm developed from human visual cognition. This algorithm enables the generation of a large amount of scarce fidelity data and avoids the introduced noise from impairing the performance of nonaugmented data. Finally, a crack detection algorithm named pay attention twice (PAT) is proposed, which uses the generated virtual data for training, and achieves secondary attention to high-frequency targets by fusing frequency-division convolution and mixed-domain attention mechanism. The detection performance of small targets in uncertain environments is enhanced. The metaverse system built in the current research can not only be used for road maintenance but also empower the traffic metaverse by using the traffic flow prediction module embedded in the algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can be applied to the road damage detection task under different noise and weather conditions, and the performance outweighs other state-of-the-art algorithms.

Agricultural metaverse (AgriVerse) aims to optimize the production chain by saving costs, increasing efficiencies, and breaking information silos, in order to achieve sustainable agriculture. While AgriVerse is featured by the virtual-real interaction of the agriculture-related processes based on heterogeneous data, knowledge, and models, the link between AgriVerse and the intensively studied plant modeling is vague. This article presents briefly the research contents of plant modeling, analyzes the ongoing transition at the age of artificial intelligence (AI), and envisions future AgriVerse with the support of the agricultural foundation model, the decentralized agricultural organization (DAO) and the decentralized science (DeSci) of the plant model. Three AgriVerse application scenarios are presented. The opportunities and challenges of AgriVerse are discussed. This work is expected to identify the key research issues of AgriVerse and bring practitioners of diverse backgrounds together into the AgriVerse community.

Replacing traffic signals with roadside vehicle-to-infrastructure systems in the era of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) is promising. Managing CAVs in a signal-free intersection, known as autonomous intersection management (AIM), controls the driving behavior of each intersection-traverse CAV to maximize the throughput. Although AIM improves the gross throughput, the fairness of each individual vehicle in its right of way is not seriously considered. This study sets up an AIM system in the cyber–physical–social space to trade traverse priorities quantitatively and fairly. To that end, one needs an AIM method that is optimal and stable, otherwise no convincing trades of traverse priorities could be made. This study proposes a near-optimal lane-free AIM method based on numerical optimal control, wherein log-exp functions are deployed to convexify nondifferentiable collision-avoidance constraints. Besides that, a parameterized social force model (SFM) is proposed to provide a tunable initial guess for numerical optimal control. By tuning the urgency weights in SFM, one may get cooperative trajectories in different homotopy classes, which are further utilized to decide the amount of virtual currency to reward those CAVs who tend to share their traverse priorities. The overall method improves the traverse throughput with individual fairness respected. In experiencing this system, passengers learn how to behave with politeness when they drive manually. Experiments show the efficiency and robustness of the AIM method and also show the efficacy of the overall priority-sharing system.

In the future, management in smart societies will revolve around knowledge workers and the works they produce. This article is committed to explore new management framework, model, paradigm, and solution for organizing, managing, and measuring knowledge works. First, the parallel management framework is presented that would allow for the virtual-real interactions of humans in social space, robots in physical space, and digital humans in cyberspace to realize descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive intelligence for management. Then, the management foundation models are proposed by fusing scenarios engineering with artificial intelligence foundation models and cyber–physical-social systems. Moreover, the new management paradigm driven by decentralized autonomous organizations and operations is formulated for the advancement of smart organizations and intelligent operations. On these basis, the management operating systems that highlight features of simple intelligence, provable security, flexible scalability, and ecological harmony are finally put forward as new management solution.

Foundation models are used to train a broad system of general data to build adaptations to new bottlenecks. Typically, they contain hundreds of billions of hyperparameters that have been trained with hundreds of gigabytes of data. However, this type of black-box vulnerability places foundation models at risk of data poisoning attacks that are designed to pass on misinformation or purposely introduce machine bias. Moreover, ordinary researchers have not been able to completely participate due to the rise in deployment standards. This study introduces the theoretical framework of scenarios engineering (SE) for building accessible and reliable foundation models in metaverse, namely, “SE-enabled foundation models in metaverse.” Particularly, the research framework comprises a six-layer architecture (infrastructure layer, operation layer, knowledge layer, intelligence layer, management layer, and interaction layer), which can provide controllability, trustworthiness, and interactivity for the foundation models in metaverse. This creates closed-loop, virtual–real, and human–machine environments that provides the best indices and goals for the foundation models, which allows us to fully validate and calibrate the corresponding models. Then, examples of use cases from the automotive industry are listed to provide transparency on the possible use and benefits of our approach. Finally, the open research topics of related frameworks are discussed.

Virtual simulated scenes are becoming a critical part of autonomous driving. In the context of knowledge automation and machine learning, simulated images are widely used for visual environmental perception. However, even the most inspirational applications have not fully exploited the potential of simulated images in solving real-world problems. In this article, we propose a novel framework “ParallelEye Pipeline,” which uses image-to-image translation and simulated images to automatically generate realistic synthetic images with multiple ground-truth annotations. Specifically, this method has three steps: first, we use Unity3D software to simulate driving scenarios and generate simulated image pairs (including raw images and six ground-truth labels) from the simulated scenes; second, advanced image-to-image translation algorithms can generate realistic and high-resolution synthetic images from simulated image pairs; third, we exploit publicly datasets, simulated images, and synthetic images to conduct experiments for visual perception. The experimental results suggest: 1) synthetic images and simulated images can improve the performance of detectors in real autonomous driving scenarios and 2) image-to-image translation algorithms can be affected by occlusion condition.

Mines are one of the important energy sources in the world. Due to mining areas are often affected by adverse weather and environmental conditions (sand, dust, extreme cold, heavy snow, etc.), the efficiency and security of mining are low. As a new, efficient, prospective mode, Metaverse has been studied and successfully applied in various industries. However, there is still no research about its usage in mines. In this article, we apply Metaverse to mining and propose MetaMining. We present its definition and analyze the functions it could perform. Furthermore, we propose its development phases and architecture. Specifically, MetaMining is a mode, which aims to achieve high-efficiency, high-security mining in the physical world through the interaction between the physical world and the virtual world. Its development phases involve three steps: 1) digital twins; 2) digital natives; and 3) surreality. Its architecture consists of three components: 1) human world; 2) virtual mining system; and 3) physical mining system. In addition, we analyze key technologies and possible challenges in the construction of MetaMining.

Lecturers, as the guidance of the classroom, play a significant role in the teaching process. However, the lecturers’ sense of space immersion has been ignored in current virtual teaching systems. In this article, we explore the cyber–physical–social intelligence for Edu-Metaverse in cyber–physical–social space and specially design a lecturer-centered immersive teaching system, taking the social and lecturers’ factors into consideration. We call this system VirtualClassroom (V-Classroom). Specifically, we first introduce the cyber–physical–social system (CPSS) paradigm of V-Classroom so that the workflow is standardized and significantly simplified, and the systems can be constructed with off-the-shelf hardware. The key component of V-Classroom is a cyber-world representation of a physical-world classroom instrumented with sparse consumer-grade RGBD cameras for capturing the 3-D geometry and texture of the classrooms. We provide each V-Classroom lecturer with a physical device for sending 6DoF view-change messages and showing view-dependent content of the remote classroom. Following the above paradigm, we develop the V-Classroom algorithms, including V-Classroom depth algorithm (V-DA) and V-Classroom view algorithm (V-VA), to achieve the real-time rendering of remote classrooms. V-DA is dedicated to recovering accurate depth information of the classrooms while V-VA is devoted to real-time novel view synthesis. Finally, we illustrate our implemented CPSS-driven V-Classroom prototype, based on real-world classroom scenarios we collected, and discuss the main challenges and future direction.

Transformational development in science and engineering rapidly integrates machine intelligence and human intelligence to form cyber–physical–social intelligence (CPSI), underpinning the growing interactions of cyberspace, physical space, and social space. A multidimensional reality is emerging and evolving with these interactions, leading to the creation of many new concepts and frameworks, such as parallel intelligence, digital twin, and metaverse. Meanwhile, new challenges continue to arise when we seek to reveal the fundamental principles for command and control of the new and extended reality by identifying and characterizing the relations of machines, humans, and nature. To meet these challenges, it is important for us to understand and explore algorithmic theories and processes that constitute CPSI, and to build cyber–physical–social systems (CPSS)[1]with the features of agility, focus, and convergence that are vital to ensure an inclusive, sustainable, equitable, and resilient future for people and our planet.

This article presents a novel data-based fault-tolerant control method for multicontroller linear systems via distributed policy iteration. The traditional fault-tolerant control methods based on policy iteration may cause a huge-computational burden under the situation of high-dimension control laws. In order to solve this problem, a novel distributed policy iteration method is presented, where only one iterative control law is updated in each iteration, to realize the fault-tolerant control of multicontroller linear systems. The main contributions can be highlighted as follows: 1) a novel data-based distributed policy iteration method is presented to reduce the computational burden; 2) the fault-tolerant control method is presented via designing fault compensators; and 3) the developed data-based method only requires the partial system information. First, the model-based fault-tolerant control via distributed policy iteration and fault compensation is provided. Based on the model-based method, a data-based fault-tolerant control method is presented. Finally, numerical experiments are given to show the performance of the presented method.

Metaverse and intelligent transportation system (ITS) are disruptive technologies that have the potential to transform the current transportation system by decreasing traffic accidents and improving driving safety. The integration of Metaverse and transportation technology, called metaverse transportation system (MTS), can greatly improve the intelligence of real transportation system. The digital models built in MTS help to simulate the full life cycle of physical entities, which equip the virtual space with controllability and flexibility. In this article, we concentrate on the field of environment perception, which is the basic function of intelligent vehicles in MTS. To overcome the poor scalability of traditional environment perception methods, we develop the framework of parallel vision for ITS in metaverse (PVITS), consisting of construction of virtual transportation space, model learning based on computational experiments, and feedback optimization based on parallel execution. This article highlights opportunities brought by PVITS in terms of model precision and generalization improvement. Then, the challenges of PVITS are discussed, i.e., distribution difference between virtual and real transportation space, structure design and theoretical interpretation of vision models, and data security and privacy in virtual transportation space. After that, we present several solutions to tackle the application challenges and fully exploit the superior characteristics of PVITS while attenuating their negative side effects. Some potential applications are also given to represent the effectiveness and reliability of PVITS.

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.

As a key infrastructural technology, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and its related techniques have emerged in the age of Industrial Internet. Among them, an increasing popular and attractive federated edge learning (FEL) mechanism, which performs data analysis and inference at the edge devices distributedly, and aggregates local FEL units at a centralized controller, is introduced to meet the stringent data privacy and low-latency requirements for high-stake IIoT devices. Due to the bandwidth limitation, only parts of the IIoT devices can be selected to transmit their local FEL models to the centralized controller at each learning step. However, the centralized controller prefers to collect all the local FEL models to generate the global FL model since each IIoT device has a differential data set. Existing works mainly focus on selecting an appropriate subset of IIoT devices through advanced scheduling mechanisms without extending the resource bandwidth. However, the new radio in unlicensed spectrum (NR-U) technology in the 5G network opens up new possibilities for FEL since it is a privately owned network with fruitful bandwidth resources. We thus propose a novel communication-efficient FEL mechanism for NR-U-based IIoT networks, which aims to select data importance IIoT devices for local training under relatively sufficient unlicensed resources. The objective function is formulated as a tradeoff between total FEL data importance and the transmission latency via joint learning, device selection, and resource management scheduling, which is a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP). To deal with this problem, an alternating direction method of multipliers and block coordinate update (ADMM-BCU) algorithm with low computational complexity has been used. Closed-form expressions for both optimal device selection and resource management are derived, which highlighted significant insights. Numerical results demonstrate the algorithmic advantages and structural benefits of the proposed strategies.

As an essential component of Internet of Things, GPS-enabled devices record tremendous digital traces, which provide a great convenience for understanding human mobility. How to discover transportation modes efficiently from such valuable sources has come into the spotlight. In this article, the transportation mode detection is treated as a dense classification task, and a similarity entropy-based encoder-decoder (SEED) model is proposed. We first design an encoder-decoder backbone for end-to-end mode detection. Then, a semi-supervised learning module based on similarity entropy is proposed to exploit numerous unlabeled data. Specifically, we stack several convolutional layers as an encoder to capture hierarchical features from fixed-length trajectories, and then adopt transposed convolutional layers as a decoder. For a semi-supervised module, inspired by entropy regularization, we use the${K}$-Means algorithm to cluster prototype vectors from the encoder’s predictions. We then fine-tune the encoder by sharpening the similarity distribution between unlabeled predictions and prototypes, aiming to make the former close to one prototype only while staying away from others. A majority-voting post-processing method is used to alleviate jitter impact when inferring. The Experimental results show that SEED significantly outperforms segmentation-then-inference methods. Furthermore, the similarity entropy-based module can improve the generalization performance of the model, and the metrics such as intersection over union can be increased by 5% over baselines. All of these verify the superiority of our method.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been witnessed to provide valuable solutions to all walks of life. However, data island and computing resources limitations in the centralized AI architectures have increased their technical barriers, and thus distributed AI collaboration in data, models, and resources has attracted intensive research interests. Since the existing trust-based collaboration models are no longer applicable for the large-scale distributed collaboration among trustless machines in open and dynamic environments, this article proposes a novel decentralized AI collaboration framework, i.e., learning markets (LM), in which blockchain provides a trustless environment for collaboration and transaction, while smart contracts serve as software-defined agents to encapsulate and process scalable collaboration relationships and market mechanisms. LM can not only help those participants without mutual trust realize collaborative mining with dynamic and quantitative rewards but also build an AI market with natural auditability and traceability for trading trusted and verified models. We implement and comprehensively analyze LM based on the Ethereum interplenary file system platform (IPFS), and the results prove that it has advantages in collaboration fairness, transparency, security, decentralization and universality. Based on our collaboration framework, distributed AI contributors are expected to cooperate and complete those learning tasks that cannot be done previously due to lack of complete data, sufficient computing resources and state-of-the-art models.

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.

In this paper, we aim to illustrate the concept of mutually trustworthy human-machine knowledge automation (HM-KA) as the technical mechanism of hybrid augmented intelligence (HAI) based complex system cognition, management, and control (CMC). We describe the historical development of complex system science and analyze the limitations of human intelligence and machine intelligence. The need for using human-machine HAI in complex systems is then explained in detail. The concept of “mutually trustworthy HM-KA” mechanism is proposed to tackle the CMC challenge, and its technical procedure and pathway are demonstrated using an example of corrective control in bulk power grid dispatch. It is expected that the proposed mutually trustworthy HM-KA concept can provide a novel and canonical mechanism and benefit real-world practices of complex system CMC.

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.

Decentralized science (DeSci) is a hot topic emerging with the development of Web3 or Web3.0 and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and operations. DeSci fundamentally differs from the centralized science (CeSci) and Open Science (OS) movement built in the centralized way with centralized protocols. It changes the basic structure and legacy norms of current scientific systems via reshaping the cooperation mode, value system, and incentive mechanism. As such, it can provide a viable path for solving bottleneck problems in the development of science, such as oligarchy, silos, and so on, and make science more fair, free, responsible, and sensitive. However, DeSci itself still faces many challenges, including scaling, balancing the quality of participants, system suboptimal loops, lack of accountability mechanism, and so on. Taking these into consideration, this article presents a systematic introduction of DeSci, proposes a novel reference model with a six-layer architecture, addresses the potential applications, and also outlines the key research directions in this emerging field. This article is committed to providing helpful guidance and reference for future research efforts on DeSci.

The high-speed train control system is essential to the safety and efficiency of train operation. With the rapid increase of high-speed railway (HSR) operating mileage and development of information technology, the disposal flow and methods in emergency response are still based on dispatchers and drivers’ experience within the “layered” architecture of current system. There is a certain gap between current processing methods and effective resolution, which may even cause the spread of delay along with the railway networks. Therefore, we propose an integration system of operation control and online rescheduling to improve the recovery ability of HSR carrying capacity. We first describe the framework, information flow, and disposal process of the current system and analyze the shortcomings in handling emergencies. Then, the basic concept, system structure, and framework of the integration system are introduced. Finally, taking temporary speed restriction caused by strong wind as an example, we also analyze the principle of why and how the integration system can promote the recovery ability of HSR carrying capacity.

Driver’s emotion recognition is vital to improving driving safety, comfort, and acceptance of intelligent vehicles. This article presents a cognitive-feature-augmented driver emotion detection method that is based on emotional cognitive process theory and deep networks. Different from the traditional methods, both the driver’s facial expression and cognitive process characteristics (age, gender, and driving age) were used as the inputs of the proposed model. Convolutional techniques were adopted to construct the model for driver’s emotion detection simultaneously considering the driver’s facial expression and cognitive process characteristics. A driver’s emotion data collection was carried out to validate the performance of the proposed method. The collected dataset consists of 40 drivers’ frontal facial videos, their cognitive process characteristics, and self-reported assessments of driver emotions. Another two deep networks were also used to compare recognition performance. The results prove that the proposed method can achieve well detection results for different databases on the discrete emotion model and dimensional emotion model, respectively.

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 third issue of IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS) of 2022. According to the latest update of CiteScoreTracker from Elsevier Scopus released on April 6, 2022, the CitesSore of IEEE TCSS has reached a historical high of 8.4. Many thanks to all for your great effort and support.

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.

Any successful change in an organization requires an appropriate change management method and a process for involved staff and department to accept the change and become engaged in order to achieve its success. It is even more important and difficult to adopt a novel change management method to bring multiple organizations across the business value chain into the change implementation. This research does not focused on change management within a single organization but rather emphasizes a change management method, including an appropriate change framework, well-defined critical success factors (CSFs), and related tools for implementing change in multiple organizations. This article introduces one kind of change management method to support a process change through global value chain (GVC) in multiple organizations, and the method is used in a case study to achieve a successful change. In order to succeed in optimizing GVC performance, this research applies the proposed change management method to the case GVC, to support technical change by obtaining the staff’s full commitment and engagement. The achieved results from the case study prove that successful change comes not only through technical solutions implemented in the problem process throughout the GVC but also through strong support and engagement from all organizations and involved staff. The proposed change management method not only helped the case GVC to implement change successfully but also can help the relevant multiple organizations to improve the GVC performance and add value by optimizing their problem process.

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.

Under the condition of network operation of high-speed railways (HSRs), the influence of disruptions on the train control and dispatching at the current line and related lines is more and more significant. This article focuses on the timetable cooperative rescheduling problem with multidispatching sections of HSRs from a macroscopic perspective in the case of large disruptions. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) model on the objectives of minimizing the weighted sum of the arrival delay time of trains, the delay time of depart trains at the handover station, and the number of delays of trains at all stations. The strategies of retiming and reordering are adopted to generate the rescheduling scheme and reduce delay propagation by making full use of three kinds of buffer time reserved in the timetable, i.e., buffer times of train operation in the station, train running in the section, and electric multiple unit (EMU) connection. A case study of the timetable rescheduling at the two adjacent dispatching sections of the Beijing–Shanghai HSRs line is conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed integrated rescheduling approach. The relationship between computing time and the quality of rescheduling schemes is also investigated. The computational results show that the proposed approach can generate a conflict-free timetable with the minimum arrival delay time and the number of delays of all trains at all stations compared to the nonintegrated rescheduling approach and the benchmark solution of the first-come-first-serve (FCFS) approach. The propagation of delay between dispatching sections is also greatly suppressed. The results can provide support for dispatchers to making reasonable rescheduling decisions in the case of large disruptions.

Facial expression synthesis has gained increasing attention with the development of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, it is still very challenging to generate high-quality facial expressions since the overlapping and blur commonly appear in the generated facial images especially in the regions with rich facial features such as eye and mouth. Generally, existing methods mainly consider the face as a whole in facial expression synthesis without paying specific attention to the characteristics of facial expressions. In fact, according to the physiological and psychological research, the differences of facial expressions often appear in crucial regions such as eye and mouth. Motivated by this observation, a novel end-to-end facial expression synthesis method called Local and Global Perception Generative Adversarial Network (LGP-GAN) with a two-stage cascaded structure is proposed in this paper which is designed to extract and synthesize the details of the crucial facial regions. LGP-GAN can combine the generated results from the global network and local network into the corresponding facial expressions. In Stage I, LGP-GAN utilizes local networks to capture the local texture details of the crucial facial regions and generate local facial regions, which fully explores crucial facial region domain information in facial expressions. And then LGP-GAN uses a global network to learn the whole facial information in Stage II to generate the generate final facial expressions building upon local generated results from Stage I. We conduct qualitative and quantitative experiments on the commonly used public database to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art methods.

Given$m~d$-dimensional responsors and$n~d$-dimensional predictors, sparse regression finds at most$k$predictors for each responsor for linear approximation,$1\leq k \leq d-1$. The key problem in sparse regression is subset selection, which usually suffers from high computational cost. In recent years, many improved approximate methods of subset selection have been published. However, less attention has been paid to the nonapproximate method of subset selection, which is very necessary for many questions in data analysis. Here, we consider sparse regression from the view of correlation and propose the formula of conditional uncorrelation. Then, an efficient nonapproximate method of subset selection is proposed in which we do not need to calculate any coefficients in the regression equation for candidate predictors. By the proposed method, the computational complexity is reduced from$O([{1}/{6}]{k^{3}}\!+(m+1)k^{2}\!+\!mkd)$to$O([{1}/{6}]{k^{3}}\!+[{1}/{2}](m+1)k^{2})$for each candidate subset in sparse regression. Because the dimension$d$is generally the number of observations or experiments and large enough, the proposed method can greatly improve the efficiency of nonapproximate subset selection. We also apply the proposed method in real scenarios of dental age assessment and sparse coding to validate the efficiency of the proposed method.

Calibration of agent-based models (ABM) is an essential stage when they are applied to reproduce the actual behaviors of distributed systems. Unlike traditional methods that suffer from the repeated trial and error and slow convergence of iteration, this article proposes a new ABM calibration approach by establishing a link between agent microbehavioral parameters and systemic macro-observations. With the assumption that the agent behavior can be formulated as a high-order Markovian process, the new approach starts with a search for an optimal transfer probability through a macrostate transfer equation. Then, each agent's microparameter values are computed using mean-field approximation, where his complex dependencies with others are approximated by an expected aggregate state. To compress the agent state space, principal component analysis is also introduced to avoid high dimensions of the macrostate transfer equation. The proposed method is validated in two scenarios: 1) population evolution and 2) urban travel demand analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with the machine-learning surrogate and evolutionary optimization, our method can achieve higher accuracies with much lower computational complexities.

Population synthesis is the foundation of the agent-based social simulation. Current approaches mostly consider basic population and households, rather than other social organizations. This article starts with a theoretical analysis of the iterative proportional updating (IPU) algorithm, a representative method in this field, and then gives an extension to consider more social organization types. The IPU method, for the first time, proves to be unable to converge to an optimal population distribution that simultaneously satisfies the constraints from individual and household levels. It is further improved to a bilevel optimization, which can solve such a problem and include more than one type of social organization. Numerical simulations, as well as population synthesis using actual Chinese nationwide census data, support our theoretical conclusions and indicate that our proposed bilevel optimization can both synthesize more social organization types and get more accurate results.

Public concerns on image encryption grow significantly as the development and application of edge computing and the Internet of Things intensified recently. However, most existing image cryptosystems are not sophisticated enough to resist the two major attack strategies available currently, that is: 1) differential attacks and 2) chosen-plaintext attacks, which are famous for their destructive power, especially their capability of exploiting cryptosystems' features to recover the secret key. In this article, we propose an artificial image, computational experiment, and parallel execution (ACP)-based color image encryption approach using redundant blocks. First, a redundant blocks strategy with redundant spaces is proposed to prevent differential attacks and accelerate operating speed while guaranteeing the security of image cryptosystems. Second, real-world chaotic data (e.g., stock data) are obtained to generate artificial images and conduct computational experiments. Furthermore, artificial images are encrypted via real-world chaos, while the original images are encrypted via simulated chaos (such as Chen's hyperchaos). Finally, we design the process of parallel execution for image encryption and use DNA XOR to merge two groups of encrypted subimages to fuse the effect of the chaotic characteristics in both the real world and the simulation. The final encrypted image is realized through the recovery of redundant blocks. The ACP mechanism of color image encryption achieves the goal of improving the sophistication of chaos-based cryptosystems and resists both the differential and chosen-plaintext attacks. Experimental results and security analysis show that our approach provides not only excellent encryption but also security sufficient to prevent known attacks.

Deep learning is a compelling technique for feature extraction due to its adaptive capacity of processing and providing deeper image information. However, for the task of leaf cultivar classification, the deep learning-based classifier model is unable to extract contour features of leaf images deeply due to the lack of large specialized datasets and expert knowledge annotations. Also, the scale/size of the current leaf cultivar dataset does not meet the needs of deep neural networks (DNNs). In particular, the high model complexity of DNNs implies that deep-learning-based neural networks seem to must require a large dataset to achieve good performance, but facing the fact that the leaf cultivar dataset often is small, even some classes in this kind of datasets contain less than ten images/examples. To overcome these problems and inspired by the resounding success of fuzzy logic, we propose a novel fuzzy ensemble model for leaf cultivar classification. To extract the contours of leaves, we first propose generative adversarial networks-based methods. Second, to improve the ability of feature representation, we present a data augmentation method to transform our contour features. Third, to get the essential features of leaves, we design a novel generation of thefuzzy random forest. Finally, to achieve accurate classification, we design a novel deep learning strategy, namelydeep fuzzy representation learning, integrating and cascading a lot of our fuzzy random forests. Experimental results show that our model outperforms other existing state-of-the-arts on three real-world datasets, and performs much better than the original deep forest and DNN-based algorithms particularly.

This article presents a novel event-triggered near-optimal control (ETNOC) method for discrete-time (DT) constrained nonlinear systems. First, the tracking error system is constructed to convert the tracking control problem to the regulation problem. By introducing the tracking error system, the asymmetric control constraints design for the original constrained system can be converted to the symmetric control constraints design for the tracking error system. Second, a novel triggering condition is developed using the time-triggered optimal value function and control law. It is proven that the closed-loop system (CLS) is asymptotically stable under the developed ETNOC method, and there exists a predetermined upper bound for the real performance index. Then, to implement the developed ETNOC method, a parallel control approach with neural networks (NNs) and adaptive dynamic programming techniques is proposed to predict the next state of the system and obtain the optimal value function and control law. The stability analysis of the CLS is provided in the consideration of the estimation errors of the NN weights and state. Finally, the effectiveness of the developed ETNOC method is validated by an application to a boiler-turbine system.

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.

Accurate traffic prediction under various conditions is an important but challenging task. Due to the complicated non-stationary temporal dynamics in traffic flow time series and spatial dependencies on roadway networks, there is no particular method that is clearly superior to all others. Here, we focus on investigating ensemble learning that benefits from multiple base models, and propose a traffic-condition-aware ensemble approach that acts as a decision maker by stacking multiple predictions based on dynamic traffic conditions. To sense traffic conditions, we apply the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model to capture the spatiotemporal patterns embedded in traffic flow. Then, the high-level features extracted by CNN are used to generate weights to ensemble multiple predictions of different models. Extensive experiments are performed with a real traffic dataset from the Caltrans Performance Measurement System. We compare the proposed approach with competitive models, including Gradient Boosting Regression Tree (GBRT) model, Weight Regression model, Support Vector Regression (SVR) model, Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) model, Historical Average (HA) model and CNN model. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively improve the performances of traffic flow prediction.

This paper proposes a parallel recommendation engine, PRECOM, for traffic control operations to mitigate congestion of road traffic in the metropolitan area. The recommendation engine can provide, in real-time, effective and optimal control plans to traffic engineers, who are responsible for manually calibrating traffic signal plans especially when a road network suffers from heavy congestion due to disruptive events. With the idea of incorporating expert knowledge in the operation loop, the PRECOM system is designed to include three conceptual components: an artificial system model, a computational experiment module, and a parallel execution module. Meanwhile, three essential algorithmic steps are implemented in the recommendation engine: a candidate generator based on a graph model, a spatiotemporal ranker, and a context-aware re-ranker. The PRECOM system has been deployed in the city of Hangzhou, China, through both offline and online evaluation. The experimental results are promising, and prove that the recommendation system can provide effective support to the current human-in-the-loop control scheme in the practice of traffic control, operations, and management.

Road link speed is often employed as an essential measure of traffic state in the operation of an urban traffic network. Not only real-time traffic demand but also signal timings and other local planning factors are major influential factors. This paper proposes a short-term traffic speed prediction approach, called PL-WGAN, for urban road networks, which is considered an important part of a novel parallel learning framework for traffic control and operation. The proposed method applies Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Nets (WGAN) for robust data-driven traffic modeling using a combination of generative neural network and discriminative neural network. The generative neural network models the road link features of the adjacent intersections and the control parameters of intersections using a hybrid graph block. In addition, the spatial-temporal relations are captured by stacking a graph convolutional network (GCN), a recurrent neural network (RNN), and an attention mechanism. A comprehensive computational experiment was carried out including comparing model prediction and computational performances with several state-of-the-art deep learning models. The proposed approach has been implemented and applied for predicting short-term link traffic speed in a large-scale urban road network in Hangzhou, China. The results suggest that it provides a scalable and effective traffic prediction solution for urban road networks.

It is indispensable for professional traffic signal engineers to perform manual operations of traffic signal control (TSC) to mitigate traffic congestion, especially with complicated scenarios. However, such a task is time-consuming, and the level of congestion mitigation heavily relies on individual expertise in engineering practice. Therefore, it is cost-effective to learn traffic engineers’ knowledge to enhance the problem-solving skills for a large-scale urban traffic network. In this paper, a data augmented deep behavioral cloning (DADBC) method is proposed to imitate the problem-solving skills of traffic engineers. The method is under a conceptual framework, parallel learning (PL) framework, that incorporates machine learning techniques for solving decision-making problems in complex systems. The DADBC method enhances a hybrid demonstration by exploiting a generative adversarial network (GAN) and then uses the deep behavioral cloning (DBC) model to learn traffic engineers’ control schemes. According to the validation results using the real manipulation data from Hangzhou, China, our method can imitate complex human behaviors in intervening traffic signal control operations to improve traffic efficiency in urban areas.

The accurate and robust prediction of vessel traffic flow is gaining importance in maritime intelligent transportation system (ITS), such as vessel traffic services, maritime spatial planning, and traffic safety management, etc. To achieve fine-grained vessel traffic flow prediction, we will first generate the maritime traffic network (which is essentially a graph), and then propose a graph-driven neural network. In particular, to represent various correlations among spatio-temporal vessel traffic flow, we tend to extract the feature points (i.e., starting, way and ending points) by utilizing the knowledge of vessel positioning data. These feature points are essentially related to the geometrical structures of massive vessel trajectories collected from massive automatic identification system (AIS) records, contributing to the generation of maritime traffic network. We then propose a spatio-temporal multi-graph convolutional network (STMGCN)-based vessel traffic flow prediction method by exploiting multiple types of inherent correlations in the generated maritime graph. The proposed STMGCN mainly contains one spatial multi-graph convolutional layer and two temporal gated convolutional layers, beneficial for extracting spatial and temporal traffic flow patterns. The main benefit of our graph-driven prediction method is that it takes full advantage of the maritime graph and multi-graph learning. Comprehensive experiments have been implemented on realistic AIS dataset to compare our method with several state-of-the-art prediction methods. The fine-grained prediction results have demonstrated our superior performance in terms of both accuracy and robustness.

Driver model adaptation (DMA) plays an essential role for driving behaviour modelling when there is a lack of sufficient data for training the new model. A new data-driven DMA method is proposed in this paper to realise the instance-level knowledge transfer between individual drivers. Using the importance-weighted transfer learning (IWTL), the data collected from one driver (source driver) can be directly used to train the model of another driver (target driver). Under the framework of IWTL, the relationship between two different drivers can be modelled by the importance weight (IW). Two estimation methods Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence and least-squares (LS), are used to estimate IW for each data instance by modelling the importance-weight function as a radial basis function (RBF). Experiments based on the driving simulator and real vehicle are carried out to test the performance of TL for steering behaviour adaptation during the overtaking manoeuvre. The experimental results show that the TL method can transfer the knowledge observed from one driver to another when training the new driver model without sufficient data by keeping the modelling error at a low level.

Accurate spatial-temporal prediction is a fundamental building block of many real-world applications such as traffic scheduling and management, environment policy making, and public safety. This problem is still challenging due to nonlinear, complicated, and dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies. To address these challenges, we propose a novel embedded spatial-temporal network (ESTNet), which extracts efficient features to model the dynamic correlations and then exploits three-dimension convolution to synchronously model the spatial-temporal dependencies. Specifically, we propose multi-range graph convolution networks for extracting multi-scale static features from the fine-grained road network. Meanwhile, dynamic features are extracted from real-time traffic using a gated recurrent unit network. These features can be applied to identify the dynamic and flexible correlations among sensors and make it possible to exploit a three-dimension convolution unit (3DCon) to simultaneously model the spatial-temporal dependencies. Furthermore, we propose a residual network by stacking multiple 3DCon to capture the nonlinear and complicated dependencies. The effectiveness and superiority of ESTNet are verified on two real-world datasets, and experiments show ESTNet outperforms the state-of-the-art with a significant margin. The code and models will be publicly available.

This paper proposes a novel train trajectory optimization approach for high-speed railways. We restrict our attention to single train operation scenarios with different scheduled/rescheduled running times aiming at generating optimal train recommended trajectories in real time, which can ensure punctuality and energy efficiency of train operation. A learning-based approach deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) is designed to generate optimal train trajectories based on the offline training from the interaction between the agent and the trajectory simulation environment. An allocating running time and selecting operation modes (ARTSOM) algorithm is proposed to improve train punctuality and give a series of discrete operation modes (full traction, cruising, coasting, full braking), and thus to produce a feasible training set for DDPG, which can speed up the training process. Numerical experiments show that an optimized speed profile can be generated by DDPG within seconds on a realistic railway line. In addition, the results demonstrate the generalization ability of trained DDPG in solving TTO problems with different running times and line conditions.

The number of vehicles is rapidly increasing. An effective control strategy for Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs) is important. In this paper, we present a two-level control strategy that combines the Adaptive-Equivalent Consumption Minimization Strategy (A-ECMS) and the Adaptive Dynamic Programming (ADP). At the lower level, the A-ECMS is used to convert the consumed charge into Equivalent Fuel Consumption (EFC) for every sample moment, and a PI controller is used to adjust the values of the equivalent factor of the A-ECMS. At the upper level, the ADP is used to find the minimum of EFC corresponding to equivalent factor for every sample moment, and it maintains the State of Charge (SOC) of battery to charge and discharge smoothly in a high-efficiency field for the HEV. As by the ADP, we look into the future and then we can have a better estimate for the equivalent factor than the ordinary A-ECMS. In this way, we can save energy as well as calculate instantaneous parameters for the control strategy. Compared with a typical rule-based control strategy, the proposed control method saves EFC up to 10.3% and the stability of the SOC is increased by more than 60%, tested on benchmarks.

Varying density of point clouds increases the difficulty of 3D detection. In this paper, we present a context-aware dynamic network (CADNet) to capture the variance of density by considering both point context and semantic context. Point-level contexts are generated from original point clouds to enlarge the effective receptive filed. They are extracted around the voxelized pillars based on our extended voxelization method and processed with the context encoder in parallel with the pillar features. With a large perception range, we are able to capture the variance of features for potential objects and generate attentive spatial guidance to help adjust the strengths for different regions. In the region proposal network, considering the limited representation ability of traditional convolution where same kernels are shared among different samples and positions, we propose a decomposable dynamic convolutional layer to adapt to the variance of input features by learning from the local semantic context. It adaptively generates the position-dependent coefficients for multiple fixed kernels and combines them to convolve with local features. Based on our dynamic convolution, we design a dual-path convolution block to further improve the representation ability. We conduct experiments on KITTI dataset and the proposed CADNet has achieved superior performance of 3D detection outperforming SECOND and PointPillars by a large margin at the speed of 30 FPS.

The imbalance of vehicle supply and demand is a common phenomenon that influences the efficiency of online ride-hailing systems greatly. To address this problem, a three-level hierarchical mixed deep reinforcement learning method (HMDRL) is proposed to reposition idle vehicles. A manager operates at the top level, where action-abstraction is conducted from the time dimension and is adaptive for spatially scalable and time-varying systems. Coordinators locate at the middle level and a parallel coordination mechanism that is independent of the decision order is designed to improve the efficiency of the repositioning. The bottom level is composed of executive workers to reposition vehicles with mixed states and the states contain spatiotemporal information of agents’ neighbor areas. Two reward functions are designed for the manager and the coordinators, respectively, aiming to improve the training effect by avoiding sparse rewards. A simulator based on real orders is designed and HMDRL is compared with six methods. Experimental results demonstrate that HMDRL outperforms all the other methods. In three comparison experiments, the order response rate is increased by 0.62% to 8.29%, 1.5% to 7.78%, 1.18% to 4.75%, respectively.

As an important national initiative, China’s public transport priority development strategy is conducive to the development of the public transport industry and urban economic construction. However, current public transport operation is inefficient due to the information asymmetry between the government and public transport enterprises, thereby inevitably generating losses. To address the issue of information asymmetry, this study designs a public transport subsidy allocation method from the perspective of incentives and discusses the allocation results using this method through a case study. The rationality of the proposed method and the scientificity and authenticity of the conclusions, are fully explained and demonstrated via the experimental simulation. Based on real published data of public transport enterprises, the proposed method can motivate public transport enterprises to improve their performance. In the case of reporting false data, the proposed method can motivate public transport enterprises to report accurate data.

Object detection in traffic scenes has attracted considerable attention from both academia and industry recently. Modern detectors achieve excellent performance under a simple constrained environment while performing poorly under the actual complex and open traffic environment. Therefore, the capability of adapting to new and unseen domains is a key factor for the large-scale application and proliferation of detectors in autonomous driving. To this end, this paper proposes a novel category-induced coarse-to-fine domain adaptation approach (C2FDA) for cross-domain object detection, which consists of three pivotal components: (1) Attention-induced coarse-grained alignment module (ACGA), which strengthens the distribution alignment across disparate domains within the foreground features in category-agnostic way by the minimax optimization between the domain classifier and the backbone feature extractor; (2) Attention-induced feature selection module, which assists the model to emphasize the crucial foreground features and enables the ACGA to focus on the relevant and discriminative foreground features, without being affected by the distribution of inconsequential background features; (3) Category-induced fine-grained alignment module (CFGA), which reduces the domain shift in category-aware way by minimizing the distance of centroids with the same category from different domains and maximizing that of centroids with disparate categories. We evaluate the performance of our approach in various source/target domain pairs and comprehensive results demonstrate that C2FDA significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on multiple domain adaptation scenarios, i.e., the synthetic-to-real adaptation, the weather adaptation, and the cross camera adaptation.

Recognizing and locating objects by algorithms are essential and challenging issues for Intelligent Transportation Systems. However, the increasing demand for much labeled data hinders the further application of deep learning-based object detection. One of the optimal solutions is to train the target model with an existing dataset and then adapt it to new scenes, namely Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA). However, most of existing methods at the pixel level mainly focus on adapting the model from source domain to target domain and ignore the essence of UDA to learn domain-invariant feature learning. Meanwhile, almost all methods at the feature level ignore to make conditional distributions matched for UDA while conducting feature alignment between source and target domain. Considering these problems, this paper proposes the ParaUDA, a novel framework of learning invariant representations for UDA in two aspects: pixel level and feature level. At the pixel level, we adopt CycleGAN to conduct domain transfer and convert the problem of original unsupervised domain adaptation to supervised domain adaptation. At the feature level, we adopt an adversarial adaption model to learn domain-invariant representation by aligning the distributions of domains between different image pairs with same mixture distributions. We evaluate our proposed framework in different scenes, from synthetic scenes to real scenes, from normal weather to challenging weather, and from scenes across cameras. The results of all the above experiments show that ParaUDA is effective and robust for adapting object detection models from source scenes to target scenes.

Taxi demand prediction is valuable for the decision-making of online taxi-hailing platforms. Data-driven deep learning approaches have been widely utilized in this area, and many complex spatiotemporal characteristics of taxi demand have been studied. However, the heterogeneity of demand patterns among different taxi zones has not been taken into account. To this end, this paper explores zone clustering and how to utilize the inter-zone heterogeneity to improve the prediction. First, based on the pairwise clustering theory, a taxi zone clustering algorithm is designed by considering the correlations among different taxi zones. Then, both the cluster-level and the global-level prediction modules are developed to extract intra- and inter-cluster characteristics, respectively. Finally, a Multi-Level Recurrent Neural Networks (MLRNN) model is proposed by combining the two modules. Experiments on two taxi trip records datasets from New York City demonstrate that our model improves the prediction accuracy compared with other state-of-the-art methods.

Deep learning has become the most powerful machine learning tool in the last decade. However, how to efficiently train deep neural networks remains to be thoroughly solved. The widely used minibatch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) still needs to be accelerated. As a promising tool to better understand the learning dynamic of minibatch SGD, the information bottleneck (IB) theory claims that the optimization process consists of an initial fitting phase and the following compression phase. Based on this principle, we further study typicality sampling, an efficient data selection method, and propose a new explanation of how it helps accelerate the training process of the deep networks. We show that the fitting phase depicted in the IB theory will be boosted with a high signal-to-noise ratio of gradient approximation if the typicality sampling is appropriately adopted. Furthermore, this finding also implies that the prior information of the training set is critical to the optimization process, and the better use of the most important data can help the information flow through the bottleneck faster. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate our conclusions.

Image ordinal estimation is to predict the ordinal label of a given image, which can be categorized as an ordinal regression (OR) problem. Recent methods formulate an OR problem as a series of binary classification problems. Such methods cannot ensure that the global ordinal relationship is preserved since the relationships among different binary classifiers are neglected. We propose a novel OR approach, termed convolutional OR forest (CORF), for image ordinal estimation, which can integrate OR and differentiable decision trees with a convolutional neural network for obtaining precise and stable global ordinal relationships. The advantages of the proposed CORF are twofold. First, instead of learning a series of binary classifiers independently, the proposed method aims at learning an ordinal distribution for OR by optimizing those binary classifiers simultaneously. Second, the differentiable decision trees in the proposed CORF can be trained together with the ordinal distribution in an end-to-end manner. The effectiveness of the proposed CORF is verified on two image ordinal estimation tasks, i.e., facial age estimation and image esthetic assessment, showing significant improvements and better stability over the state-of-the-art OR methods.

Bitcoin is gaining ground in recent years. In the Bitcoin system, miners provide computing power to confirm transactions in pursuit of transaction fees, while users compete by bidding transaction fees for faster confirmation. This process is in essence analogous to online ad auctions, where advertisers bid for more prominent ad slots. Therefore, inspired by ad auction research, we propose to apply the Generalized Second Price (GSP) auction mechanism in the dynamic confirmation game on Bitcoin transactions. Our model is targeted to deal with the problems caused by instability and low efficiency in the currently-adopted Generalized First Price (GFP) auction model in Bitcoin confirmation games. Besides, we use the “rank-by-cost” rule to replace the “rank-by-fee” rule, where each transaction’s cost is calculated by the user-submitted fee and the waiting time. Aiming to probe users’ equilibrium strategy, we first discuss the GSP game with complete information under synchronous submissions, and show that it has the Locally Envy-Free equilibrium. Then, we study the GSP game with incomplete information under asynchronous submissions, and define two types of strategies, i.e., the Farsighted Balanced (FB) strategy and the Instant Balanced (IB) strategy. The FB strategy is in line with users’ practical needs of determining fees so as to maximize the long-term payoffs; however it cannot generate a stable equilibrium. Alternatively, the IB strategy focuses on the instant payoff maximization, and if all users follow the IB strategy, their equilibrium fees can finally converge to a stable profile. Finally, we design computational experiments to validate our theoretical models and analysis. Our research findings indicate that this novel GSP mechanism is superior to the currently adopted GFP mechanism. Besides, the convergence of the GSP game under the IB strategy has also been illustrated by the computational experiments.

Many complex nonlinear optimization or control issues can be transformed into the solving of time-varying nonlinear equations (TVNEs), playing a fundamental role in the control and management of complex systems. As a result, a robust and high-precision online solution method is significant for TVNE. However, there are three main challenges for handling TVNE via the existing methods: First, short-time invariance assumption frequently leveraged in the existing methods leads to lagging errors that are difficult to eliminate. Second, it is difficult in dealing with unknown noise disturbance during the solution process, which causes low solution accuracy or solution failure. Third, existing continuous-time methods are hard to be implemented on digital equipments. In this article, an anti-noise discrete-time neural dynamics (DTND) is designed and studied to overcome the above issues systematically. The theoretical analysis and numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed model effectively eliminates the lagging errors and achieves the accurate solution of the TVNE in a noisy environment. Moreover, to verify the superior numerical computational property of the DTND model, the intention recognition of lower limbs is explored from the artificial systems, computational experiments, and parallel execution (ACP) framework. Specifically, a nonlinear artificial dynamic system (NADS) concerning the human surface electromyogram (sEMG) signals and joint information is established, which performs in parallel with the actual human lower limb physical experiments. Simulation results illustrate that, within the acceptable range of the digital computer, the controller designed by the DTND model can well guide the NADS to accurately recognize the motion intention of the human lower limb.

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.

A novel event-triggered optimal tracking control (ETOTC) method is developed for discrete-time nonlinear systems in this study. For the time-invariant desired trajectory, we prove that the tracking error is asymptotically stable, and an upper bound of the real performance index can be predetermined by a design parameter. For the time-varying desired trajectory, the developed triggering condition reduces communication costs by relaxing the restriction of the asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system, and we prove that the tracking error is uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB). The developed ETOTC method entails obtaining the next state of the real system. Therefore, a parallel control approach is proposed to predict the next state by constructing a parallel system for the real system. Neural networks (NNs) and adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) techniques are utilized in the parallel control approach. Moreover, the stability analysis of the closed-loop system is shown, and the tracking error and NN weight estimation errors are proved to be UUB using the Lyapunov approach. Finally, we validate the developed ETOTC method through two simulations.

In this article, a new self-learning parallel control method, which is based on adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) technique, is developed for solving the optimal control problem of discrete- time time-varying nonlinear systems. It aims to obtain an approximate optimal control law sequence and simultaneously guarantees the convergence of the value function. Establishing the time-varying artificial system by neural networks in a certain time-horizon, a control-sequence-improvement ADP algorithm is developed to obtain the control law sequence. For the first time, the criteria of the parallel execution are presented, such that the value function is proven to converge to a finite neighborhood of the optimal performance index function. Finally, numerical results and analysis are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the parallel control method.

How to learn effective features from large-scale point clouds for semantic segmentation has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Addressing this problem, we propose a learnable module that learns Spatial Contextual Features from large-scale point clouds, called SCF in this paper. The proposed module mainly consists of three blocks, including the local polar representation block, the dual-distance attentive pooling block, and the global contextual feature block. For each 3D point, the local polar representation block is firstly explored to construct a spatial representation that is invariant to the z-axis rotation, then the dual-distance attentive pooling block is designed to utilize the representations of its neighbors for learning more discriminative local features according to both the geometric and feature distances among them, and finally, the global contextual feature block is designed to learn a global context for each 3D point by utilizing its spatial location and the volume ratio of the neighborhood to the global point cloud. The proposed module could be easily embedded into various network architectures for point cloud segmentation, naturally resulting in a new 3D semantic segmentation network with an encoder-decoder architecture, called SCF-Net in this work. Extensive experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that the proposed SCF-Net performs better than several state-of-the-art methods in most cases.

Even with a still image, humans can ratiocinate various visual cause-and-effect descriptions before, at present, and after, as well as beyond the given image. However, it is challenging for models to achieve such task–the visual event ratiocination, owing to the limitations of time and space. To this end, we propose a novel multi-modal model, Hypergraph-Enhanced Graph Reasoning. First it represents the contents from the same modality as a semantic graph and mines the intra-modality relationship, therefore breaking the limitations in the spatial domain. Then, we introduce the Graph Self-Attention Enhancement. On the one hand, this enables semantic graph representations from different modalities to enhance each other and captures the inter-modality relationship along the line. On the other hand, it utilizes our built multi-modal hypergraphs in different moments to boost individual semantic graph representations, and breaks the limitations in the temporal domain. Our method illustrates the case of "two heads are better than one" in the sense that semantic graph representations with the help of the proposed enhancement mechanism are more robust than those without. Finally, we re-project these representations and leverage their outcomes to generate textual cause-and-effect descriptions. Experimental results show that our model achieves significantly higher performance in comparison with other state-of-the-arts.

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.

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.

Urban transportation systems are shaped by factors that include people, vehicles, roads, and the environment, forming a complex and giant system with dynamics, diversity, and uncertainty. Physical signal-driven intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) typically lack the ability to capture social behaviors or crowd willingness, and they achieve only information automation for transportation decision support. The crowdsourcing social signals consist of timely, extensive, comprehensive, and rich intelligence that concern urban dynamics, social behaviors, and traffic environments. Such social signals provide a new paradigm for operating ITS with unstructured semantic data, making knowledge automation for decision intelligence a possibility. This article reviews the knowledge automation paradigms for cyber-physical-social systems (CPSSs) compared with traditional information automation paradigms for cyber-physical systems (CPSs) in ITS, from the perspective of data-driven, modeling space, analytical methodologies, and decision support services. To investigate the key methodology in social spaces that enhance information automation into knowledge automation, we summarize the current research into a multisource heterogeneous social signal-based traffic decision knowledge automation framework and further exploit the computational paradigm and applications scenarios of this framework. Finally, we discuss future challenges for designing and realizing knowledge automation on CPSS in transportation.

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 fifth issue of Ieee Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS) of 2021. As usual, we would like to share some great news first. Since April 2021, IEEE TCSS has been added to the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) database in Clarivate Web of Science. We are excited to report that all TCSS articles published since 2018 have been backtracked and indexed by SCIE.

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.

Multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) has recently attracted considerable attention from both academics and practitioners. Core issues, e.g., the curse of dimensionality due to the exponential growth of agent interactions and nonstationary environments due to simultaneous learning, hinder the large-scale proliferation of MARL. These problems deteriorate with an increased number of agents. To address these challenges, we propose an adversarial collaborative learning method in a mixed cooperative-competitive environment, exploiting friend-or-foe Q-learning and mean-field theory. We first treat neighbors of agent i as two coalitions ( i 's friend and opponent coalition, respectively), and convert the Markov game into a two-player zero-sum game with an extended action set. By exploiting mean-field theory, this new game simplifies the interactions as those between a single agent and the mean effects of friends and opponents. A neural network is employed to learn the optimal mean effects of these two coalitions, which are trained via adversarial max and min steps. In the max step, with fixed policies of opponents, we optimize the friends' mean action to maximize their rewards. In the min step, the mean action of opponents is trained to minimize the friends' rewards when the policies of friends are frozen. These two steps are proved to converge to a Nash equilibrium. Then, another neural network is applied to learn the best response of each agent toward the mean effects. Finally, the adversarial max and min steps can jointly optimize the two networks. Experiments on two platforms demonstrate the learning effectiveness and strength of our approach, especially with many agents.

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.

In this article, we propose a key secret-sharing technology based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) to address three major problems in the blockchain: 1) low security; 2) hard recovery of lost keys; and 3) low communication efficiency. In our scheme, the proposed network plays the role of a dealer and treats the secret-sharing process as a classification issue. The key idea is to view the secret as an image during the secret-sharing process. If the user's private key is text, we can covert the key text into an image called the original image. Specifically, we first divide the original image into original subimages by the image segmentation. Next, we encode each original subimage by DNA coding. Finally, we train the proposed network to find the key secret-sharing results. Our proposed scheme is not only a significant extension of the GANs but also a new direction for the key secret-sharing technology. The simulation results show that the scheme is secure, and both flexible and efficient in communication.

Vehicle and pedestrian detection is one of the critical tasks in autonomous driving. Since heterogeneous techniques have been proposed, the selection of a detection system with an appropriate balance among detection accuracy, speed and memory consumption for a specific task has become very challenging. To deal with this issue and to provide guidance for model selection, this paper analyzes several mainstream object detection architectures, including Faster R-CNN, R-FCN, and SSD, along with several typical feature extractors, such as ResNet50, ResNet101, MobileNet_V1, MobileNet_V2, Inception_V2 and Inception_ResNet_V2. By conducting extensive experiments using the KITTI benchmark, which is a commonly used street dataset, we demonstrate that Faster R-CNN ResNet50 obtains the best average precision (AP) (58%) for vehicle and pedestrian detection, with a speed of 8.6 FPS. Faster R-CNN Inception_V2 performs best for detecting cars and detecting pedestrians respectively (74.5% and 47.3%). ResNet101 consumes the highest memory (9907 MB) and has the largest number of parameters (64.42 millions), and Inception_ResNet_V2 is the slowest model (3.05 FPS). SSD MobileNet_V2 is the fastest model (70 FPS), and SSD MobileNet_V1 is the lightest model in terms of memory usage (875 MB), both of which are suitable for applications on mobile and embedded devices.

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.

Intelligent vehicle testing received quickly increasing attention due to the intermittent accidents of intelligent vehicle prototypes that occurred recently. In this paper, we investigate the theoretical underpinnings of such testing and establish a rigid analyzing framework for general intelligence testing problems by borrowing the ideas of Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) learning. Our focus is on the relationship between the number of sampled scenarios and the testing efficiency. We explain various existing algorithms within this new framework and clarify some misconceptions about the reasoning underpinning these methods. We show that intelligent vehicles are testable if the testing scenarios are well defined and appropriately sampled. Moreover, we propose a sampling strategy to generate new challenging scenarios to boost testing efficiency.

The past decades have witnessed the rise and power of big data, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and parallel systems. These advanced techniques have great potential and capacity to enable new methodology, applications, and dramatic improvements for current intelligent transportation systems (ITS). To this end, developing new concepts/methodology/tools/algorithms/applications for future ITS with these technologies become more important and promising.

Object instance segmentation in traffic scenes is an important research topic. For training instance segmentation models, synthetic data can potentially complement real data, alleviating manual effort on annotating real images. However, the data distribution discrepancy between synthetic data and real data hampers the wide applications of synthetic data. In light of that, we propose a virtual-real interaction method for object instance segmentation. This method works over synthetic images with accurate annotations and real images without any labels. The virtual-real interaction guides the model to learn useful information from synthetic data while keeping consistent with real data. We first analyze the data distribution discrepancy from a probabilistic perspective, and divide it into image-level and instance-level discrepancies. Then, we design two components to align these discrepancies, i.e., global-level alignment and local-level alignment. Furthermore, a consistency alignment component is proposed to encourage the consistency between the global-level and the local-level alignment components. We evaluate the proposed approach on the real Cityscapes dataset by adapting from virtual SYNTHIA, Virtual KITTI, and VIPER datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that it achieves significantly better performance than state-of-the-art methods.

Research on intelligent vehicles has been popular in the past decade. To fill the gap between automatic approaches and man-machine control systems, it is indispensable to integrate visual human-computer interactions (VHCIs) into intelligent vehicles systems. In this article, we review existing studies on VHCI in intelligent vehicles from three aspects: 1) visual intelligence; 2) decision making; and 3) macro deployment. We discuss how VHCI evolves in intelligent vehicles and how it enhances the capability of intelligent vehicles. We present several simulated scenarios and cases for future intelligent transportation system.

Visual reasoning between visual image and natural language description is a long-standing challenge in computer vision. While recent approaches offer a great promise by compositionality or relational computing, most of them are oppressed by the challenge of training with datasets containing only a limited number of images with ground-truth texts. Besides, it is extremely time-consuming and difficult to build a larger dataset by annotating millions of images with text descriptions that may very likely lead to a biased model. Inspired by the majority success of webly supervised learning, we utilize readily-available web images with its noisy annotations for learning a robust representation. Our key idea is to presume on web images and corresponding tags along with fully annotated datasets in learning with knowledge embedding. We present a two-stage approach for the task that can augment knowledge through an effective embedding model with weakly supervised web data. This approach learns not only knowledge-based embeddings derived from key-value memory networks to make joint and full use of textual and visual information but also exploits the knowledge to improve the performance with knowledge-based representation learning for applying other general reasoning tasks. Experimental results on two benchmarks show that the proposed approach significantly improves performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods and guarantees the robustness of our model against visual reasoning tasks and other reasoning tasks.

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.

Image-to-image translation aims to learn the mapping between two visual domains. At the beginning of designing the existing image-to-image translation method, it was not considered whether the generated image is realistic or not. In this work, we present a novel approach to address the problem of generating fidelity in the area of image-to-image translation. In particular, humans judge whether an image is realistic or not with unique human vision's feeling rather than paying attention to the real-world semantics. Inspired by this, we propose an effective network loss to capture the pixel-level representations and human vision system information for verisimilar image-to-image translation. To enforce both structural and translation-model consistency during adaptation, we propose a novel Just-Noticeable-Difference loss based on a visual recognition task. The Just-Noticeable-Difference loss not only guides the overall representation to be discriminative, but also enforces our cycle loss before and after mapping between domains. Qualitative results show that our model can generate realistic images on a wide range of tasks without paired training data. For quantitative comparisons, we measure realism with user study and diversity with a perceptual distance metric. We apply the proposed model to domain adaptation and show competitive performance when compared to the state-of-the-art on many datasets.

Due to its ill-posed nature, single image dehazing is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end feature aggregation attention network (FAAN) for single image dehazing. It incorporates the idea of attention mechanism and residual learning and can adaptively aggregate different level features. In particular, in the proposed FANN, we design a novel block structure consisting of feature attention module, smoothed dilated convolution and local residual learning. The local residual learning allows the less useful information to be bypassed through multiple skip connections. The feature attention module is designed to assign more weight to important features. The smoothed dilated convolution is adopted to enlarge the receptive field without the negative influence of gridding artifacts. The experiments on the RESIDE dataset show that the proposed approach acquires state-of-the-art performance in both qualitative and quantitative measures.

With more than 300 million people depressed worldwide annually, depression is a global problem. The goal of depression detection is to improve diagnostic accuracy and availability, leading to faster intervention. The most important and challenging problem here is to design an effective and robust depression detection model. To this end, there are two challenges to overcome: 1) Multi-modal (audio, image, text, etc.) information must be jointly considered to make accurate inferences. 2) Existing deep learning-based work suffers from multi-modal data sufficiency problem. To address these issues, we propose a graph attention model embedded with multi-modal knowledge for depression detection. This approach learns not only reasonable embeddings for nodes in the knowledge graph, but also exploits medical knowledge to improve the performance of classification and prediction with the knowledge attention mechanism. Experimental results on the real-world datasets show that the proposed approach significantly improves the classification and prediction performance compared with other major state-of-the-art approaches, with guaranteed the robustness with each modality of multi-modal data. Overall, this paper shows how multi-modal knowledge attention mechanism and deep-learning-based networks can be combined to assist mental health patients and practitioners.

3D face reconstruction from a single 2D facial image is a challenging and concerned problem. Recent methods based on CNN typically aim to learn parameters of 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) from 2D images to render face alignment and 3D face reconstruction. Most algorithms are designed for faces with small, medium yaw angles, which is extremely challenging to align faces in large poses. At the same time, they are not efficient usually. The main challenge is that it takes time to determine the parameters accurately. In order to address this challenge with the goal of improving performance, this paper proposes a novel and efficient end-to-end framework. We design an efficient and lightweight network model combined with Depthwise Separable Convolution and Muti-scale Representation, Lightweight Attention Mechanism, named Mobile-FRNet. Simultaneously, different loss functions are used to constrain and optimize 3DMM parameters and 3D vertices during training to improve the performance of the network. Meanwhile, extensive experiments on the challenging datasets show that our method significantly improves the accuracy of face alignment and 3D face reconstruction. Model parameters and complexity of our method are also improved greatly.

Initialization is essential to monocular Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) problems. This paper focuses on a novel initialization method for monocular SLAM based on planar features. The algorithm starts by homography estimation in a sliding window. It then proceeds to a global plane optimization (GPO) to obtain camera poses and the plane normal. 3D points can be recovered using planar constraints without triangulation. The proposed method fully exploits the plane information from multiple frames and avoids the ambiguities in homography decomposition. We validate our algorithm on the collected chessboard dataset against baseline implementations and present extensive analysis. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the ne-tuned baselines in both accuracy and real-time.

In this paper, we propose a feature selection method that characterizes the difference between two kinds of probability distributions. The key idea is to view the feature selection problem as a sparsest k-subgraph problem that considers Wasserstein distance between the studied two probability distributions. Our method does not presume any specific parametric models on the data distribution and is non-parametric. It outperforms existing Kullback-Leibler divergence based approaches, since we do not require two distributions to overlap. This relaxation makes our method work in many problems in which Kullback-Leibler divergence based methods fail. We also design a fast calculation algorithm using dynamic programming. Our experimental results show that our method outperforms the current method in both computation accuracy and speed.

Credit card transaction fraud costs billions of dollars to card issuers every year. Besides, the credit card transaction dataset is very skewed, there are much fewer samples of frauds than legitimate transactions. Due to the data security and privacy, different banks are usually not allowed to share their transaction datasets. These problems make traditional model difficult to learn the patterns of frauds and also difficult to detect them. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework termed as federated meta-learning for fraud detection. Different from the traditional technologies trained with data centralized in the cloud, our model enables banks to learn fraud detection model with the training data distributed on their own local database. A shared whole model is constructed by aggregating locallycomputed updates of fraud detection model. Banks can collectively reap the benefits of shared model without sharing the dataset and protect the sensitive information of cardholders. To achieve the good performance of classification, we further formulate an improved triplet-like metric learning, and design a novel meta-learning-based classifier, which allows joint comparison with K negative samples in each mini-batch. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves significantly higher performance compared with the other state-of-the-art approaches.

This paper deals with a challenging task of learning from different modalities by tackling the difficulty problem of jointly face recognition between abstract-like sketches, cartoons, caricatures and real-life photographs. Due to the significant variations in the abstract faces, building vision models for recognizing data from these modalities is an extremely challenging. We propose a novel framework termed as Meta-Continual Learning with Knowledge Embedding to address the task of jointly sketch, cartoon, and caricature face recognition. In particular, we firstly present a deep relational network to capture and memorize the relation among different samples. Secondly, we present the construction of our knowledge graph that relates image with the label as the guidance of our meta-learner. We then design a knowledge embedding mechanism to incorporate the knowledge representation into our network. Thirdly, to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, we use a meta-continual model that updates our ensemble model and improves its prediction accuracy. With this meta-continual model, our network can learn from its past. The final classification is derived from our network by learning to compare the features of samples. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves significantly higher performance compared with other state-of-the-art approaches.

This article proposes a new solution for end-to-end autonomous mining operations: Internet of Things (IoT)-based parallel mining, consisting of the concept definition, the solution given, and the concrete realization. The proposed parallel mining is inspired by the artificial societies (A) for modeling, computational experiments (C) for analysis, and parallel execution (P) for control (ACP) approach. The basic framework of parallel mining is given and its advantages are expounded. Then, the solution of parallel mining is proposed, which is mainly composed of four parts: 1) the management and control center for autonomous mining; 2) the autonomous transportation platform of truck; 3) the semiautonomous mining/shovel platform; and 4) the remote takeover platform. Key technologies of IoT-based parallel mining are discussed in detail, namely, network communication, virtual parallel mining construction, mining environment perception over-the-horizon for the moving area and obstacle detection, collaborative decision making, planning, and control for unmanned mining equipment, and parallel taking-over and remote control. Finally, the performance of IoT-based parallel mining, including fusion perception, collaborative decision making, planning, and control, is evaluated. The realization of parallel mining can fundamentally improve the safety of personnel and equipment, reduce the cost of mining operation, and increase the production rate.

Parallel end-to-end driving aims to improve the performance of end-to-end driving models using both simulated- and real-world data. However, how to efficiently utilize the data from both the simulated world and the real world remains a difficult issue, since these data are usually not well aligned. In this article, we build a data set called the parallel end-to-end driving data set (PED) for parallel end-to-end driving research. PED consists of 13 000 images from the simulated world and 13 000 images from the real world that are used to train the model, as well as 2700 images from the real world that are used to test the model. The simulated-world data in PED are constructed according to the real world, and each simulated-world image corresponds to a real-world image. PED also contains the vehicle measurement data (GPS, speed, steering angle, and heading direction of the vehicle) related to both the simulated- and real-world images, which are not available in some other data sets. We conduct two types of experiments to illustrate the effectiveness and the superiority of PED and explore some ways to mix the simulated-world data with the real-world data to improve the performance of end-to-end driving models.

Automatic diagnosis based on medical imaging necessitates both lesion segmentation and disease classification. Lesion segmentation requires pixel-level annotations while disease classification only requires image-level annotations. The two tasks are usually studied separately despite the latter problem relies on the former. Motivated by the close correlation between them, we propose a mixed-supervision guided method and a residual-aided classification U-Net model (ResCU-Net) for joint segmentation and benign-malignant classification. By coupling the strong supervision in the form of segmentation mask and weak supervision in the form of benign-malignant label through a simple annotation procedure, our method efficiently segments tumor regions while simultaneously predicting a discriminative map for identifying the benign-malignant types of tumors. Our network, ResCU-Net, extends U-Net by incorporating the residual module and the SegNet architecture to exploit multilevel information for achieving improved tissue identification. With experiments on a public mammogram database of INbreast, we validate the effectiveness of our method and achieve consistent improvements over state-of-the-art models.

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.

In proof-of-work (PoW) consensus protocol-based blockchain mining, the pools can increase their rewards by utilizing block withholding attack. As such, how much computational power should be used to attack other pools becomes an important decision issue faced by the pools. This article mainly studies the block withholding attack issue faced by mining pools. Considering the case that there are two pools, where only one pool can attack the other pool, we propose an optimal block withholding strategies for pools. We also illustrate that attacking is not always the optimal strategies for the pools and present the conditions for attacking. With computational experiment approach, we designed several experiments to validate our proposed strategies, and our results can provide important managerial insights for pools in blockchain mining.

Traditional organization management typically follows a top-down pyramid structure, which is widely believed to have many problems in releasing innovation potentials. In the new era of intelligent technologies, knowledge automation is required to meet the urgent demand for rapid acquisition and application of knowledge. With the rapidly deepened integration of the real world and the virtual society, cyber-physical-social system (CPSS)-oriented parallel management proves to be an effective and efficient way in solving these problems. In this article, we utilize blockchain technology and smart contracts in knowledge automation and investigate blockchain-based knowledge automation, which can be used for CPSS-oriented parallel management. We also propose a management framework based on the smart contract and discuss a case study.

Technological advancement has given education a new definition-parallel intelligent education-resulting in fundamentally new ways of teaching and learning. This article exemplifies an important component of parallel intelligent education-artificial education system in a narrative game environment to offer personalized learning. The system collects data on the player's actions while they play, assessing their concept knowledge via k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) classification, and provides tailored feedback to that student as they play the game. Based on an empirical evaluation, the kNN-based game system is shown to accurately provide players with differentiated instructions to guide them through the learning process based on the estimation of their knowledge levels.

Welcome to the second issue of IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS) this year. First of all, I would like to report that, as of this March, the CiteScore of TCSS has reached to 5.15, a historic high, especially considering the fact that the numbers of published articles had increased significantly in the last two years. Congratulations and thanks to all of you, for your professional support and dedication.

Welcome to the new issue of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS). I am grateful to report that, as of April 9, 2020,the Citescore of TCSS has reached to 5.26, a new high. Many thanks to all of you for your great effort and support.

Welcome to the new issue of IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS). First, I would like to share the news of my resignation from the position of Editor-in-Chief (EiC) due to my new position as the Vice President (VP) for Human Machine Systems of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society (SMCS). SMCS requires its Transactions EiC to have no membership in its Executive Committee or Board of Governors (BoG). In 2017, I offered my resignation from the BoG in order to be the EiC of TCSS, and now I need to resign my EiC position since I have been elected as SMCS’s VP in the end of 2019. Thank you all for this extremely valuable three-and-half year experience in a field I truly love and enjoy, but it is time to let new leadership to lead TCSS to a new level of quality and excellence. A call for new EiC was announced by VP for Publication at the end of May, and I am happy to inform you that, by the deadline of June 10, seven scholars from North America, Europe, and Asia have been recommended for the EiC position. A decision will be made by the Selection Committee in July and I will announce the result in the next issue.

Welcome to the new issue of IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS). First of all, on behalf of the Board of Governors and Prof. Enrique Herrera Viedma, Vice President for Publication, of the IEEE SMCS, I would like to announce and introduce the new Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE TCSS, Prof. Bin Hu, our Associate Editor since 2017 and a member of BoG since 2018. Currently, Bin Hu is the Director of the Gansu Provincial Key Laboratory of Wearable Computing, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China, and an Adjunct Professor with the Computing Department, The Open University, Milton Keynes, U.K. He is the Chair of the IEEE SMC Technical Committee on Computational Psychophysiology at IEEE SMC and the Vice- Chair of the China Committee of the International Society for Social Neuroscience. He is also serving as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transaction on Affective Computing. I am sure that IEEE TCSS will march to a new level of excellence under Prof. Bin Hu’s leadership. Congratulations to him and TCSS for the beginning of a new chapter!

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.

Welcome to the last issue of IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS) this year. This is also the last time I am serving as the Editor-in-Chief of this great journal, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your great help and support during the last three and half years. A special thank must go to my “Executive Editorial Task Force”: Professor Yong Yuan of People's University of China; Drs. Rui Qin, Xiao Wang, and Xueliang Zhao of The State Key Laboratory for Management and Control of Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences; and Dr. Juanjuan Li of Beijing Institute of Technology, for their hardworking and dedication within my term as EiC. We have rejuvenated TCSS in a very short period and maintained its state of healthy growth, and this is a great team I must remember and will be proud of.

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.

Breast cancer diagnosis based on medical imaging necessitates both fine-grained lesion segmentation and disease grading. Although deep learning (DL) offers an emerging and powerful paradigm of feature learning for these two tasks, it is hampered from popularizing in practical application due to the lack of interpretability, generalization ability, and large labeled training sets. In this article, we propose a hierarchical fused model based on DL and fuzzy learning to overcome the drawbacks for pixelwise segmentation and disease grading of mammography breast images. The proposed system consists of a segmentation model (ResU-segNet) and a hierarchical fuzzy classifier (HFC) that is a fusion of interval type-2 possibilistic fuzzy c-means and fuzzy neural network. The ResU-segNet segments the masks of mass regions from the images through convolutional neural networks, while the HFC encodes the features from mass images and masks to obtain the disease grading through fuzzy representation and rule-based learning. Through the integration of feature extraction aided by domain knowledge and fuzzy learning, the system achieves favorable performance in a few-shot learning manner, and the deterioration of cross-dataset generalization ability is alleviated. In addition, the interpretability is further enhanced. The effectiveness of the proposed system is analyzed on the publicly available mammogram database of INbreast and a private database through cross-validation. Thorough comparative experiments are also conducted and demonstrated.

The eighteen papers in this special section focus on emerging techniques and applications supported by fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence (AI). AI has become the focus of the day and attracted much attention from researchers, industries, and governments. This special issue serves as a forum to bring together all emerging techniques for fuzzy logic and fuzzy set-based AI and foster new advancements along this important direction. Actually, there have been a number of research pursuits that position themselves at the junction of AI and fuzzy logic. For example, natural language processing, viewed as the jewel in the crown of AI, has been one of the focal points in the domain of fuzzy logic and fuzzy sets. Fuzzy sets can offer an effective paradigm supporting accurate understanding of natural language and build efficient linkages to human intelligence through concepts and computing with membership functions, in particular type-2 fuzzy sets for explainable AI.

We propose Mask SSD, an efficient and effective approach to address the challenging instance segmentation task. Based on a single-shot detector, Mask SSD detects all instances in an image and marks the pixels that belong to each instance. It consists of a detection subnetwork that predicts object categories and bounding box locations, and an instance-level segmentation subnetwork that generates the foreground mask for each instance. In the detection subnetwork, multi-scale and feedback features from different layers are used to better represent objects of various sizes and provide high-level semantic information. Then, we adopt an assistant classification network to guide per-class score prediction, which consists of objectness prior and category likelihood. The instance-level segmentation subnetwork outputs pixel-wise segmentation for each detection while providing the multi-scale and feedback features from different layers as input. These two subnetworks are jointly optimized by a multi-task loss function, which renders Mask SSD direct prediction on detection and segmentation results. We conduct extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC, SBD, and MS COCO datasets to evaluate the performance of Mask SSD. Experimental results verify that as compared with state-of-the-art approaches, our proposed method has a comparable precision with less speed overhead.

Traffic data imputation is critical for both research and applications of intelligent transportation systems. To develop traffic data imputation models with high accuracy, traffic data must be large and diverse, which is costly. An alternative is to use synthetic traffic data, which is cheap and easy-access. In this paper, we propose a novel approach using parallel data and generative adversarial networks (GANs) to enhance traffic data imputation. Parallel data is a recently proposed method of using synthetic and real data for data mining and data-driven process, in which we apply GANs to generate synthetic traffic data. As it is difficult for the standard GAN algorithm to generate time-dependent traffic flow data, we made twofold modifications: 1) using the real data or the corrupted ones instead of random vectors as latent codes to generator within GANs and 2) introducing a representation loss to measure discrepancy between the synthetic data and the real data. The experimental results on a real traffic dataset demonstrate that our method can significantly improve the performance of traffic data imputation.

This paper provides a critical review on the state-of-the-art pedestrian and evacuation dynamics so as to comprehensively comprehend the motion behaviors of pedestrians from observations to simulation aspects. Types of typical data collection methods, namely the field survey, the controlled experiment, and the animal experiment, are classified, and the connections and differences of these three observation methods are explored. Pedestrians' complex behaviors characterized by the self-organization phenomena and movement data characterized by the fundamental diagram are then studied after the data collections, which can be used to calibrate and validate the pedestrian models. The mathematical models for pedestrian dynamics from both tactical level and operational level are also highlighted. The simulation data produced by the mathematical models could further reproduce pedestrian behaviors during the observations and contribute to decision makings for improving the evacuation efficiency. The applications of pedestrian models for behavior analysis, evacuation simulation, and layout design are also presented. Some challenges and future directions in the pedestrian and evacuation dynamics are also put forward. Findings presented in this study are helpful for researchers who want to understand the pedestrian and evacuation dynamics and to perform further research in this field.

In 2015, the Board of Governors of IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society had approved the proposal to name the Best Paper Award in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems as the George N. Saridis Best Transactions Paper Award. After nearly five years of preparation and planning, and almost one year of hard and concentrated effort by the Award Committee, we are pleased to announce the 2014–2017 George N. Saridis Best Transactions Paper Award for papers published in the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

Social relationships have a strong influence on individual travel behavior and, consequently, on travel demand. However, most current literatures on population synthesis, which is the fundamental building block of disaggregated travel demand forecasting and agent-based traffic simulation, only considers the household impact. This paper makes two contributions in this regard. First, a methodological issue is identified: the existence of multiple social relationships (e.g., a dual set of constraints from social institutions or structures) makes it more difficult to generate a consistent synthetic population, meaning that this population satisfies constraints from more than one type of social organizations. A tensor decomposition method is then proposed to generate a consistent population with multi-social relationships. To our knowledge, this is the first time that this type of methodological issue has been addressed. Our sample-based method constitutes an improvement compared to existing approaches in that it can respect constraints from multiple social organizations without reducing accuracy. A numerical test concerning individual, household, and enterprise, using Chinese national population and economic census data, indicates that the new method can lead to stable and relatively small errors in total. The source code is available from https://github.com/PeijunYe/MulSocPopSyn.git.

Although 3-D reconstruction of dynamic road environment by moving cameras has been broadly applied in recognition and navigation systems, this task is still considered challenging, especially under circumstances with moving objects, where the reconstruction precision is strongly harassed by the ghosting problem. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel approach for reconstructing 3-D maps of complete static scenes, based on a combination of an elaborately designed moving-object filtering mechanism and a map repairing and blank refilling procedure, where both plausible color and depth information from stereo image pairs are utilized. In this approach, first, we employ the planarity knowledge into the initial depth map based on the simple linear iterative cluster (SLIC) superpixel segmentation. The dynamic area in the image is determined under the supervision of odometry calculation. After wiping off moving objects, by collaboratively repairing color and depth information, the final 3-D map containing only static scene is obtained. The experimental results on extensive challenging real-world scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach.

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.

We present a system for sensing and reconstructing facial expressions of the virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) user. The HMD occludes a large portion of the user's face, which makes most existing facial performance capturing techniques intractable. To tackle this problem, a novel hardware solution with electromyography (EMG) sensors being attached to the headset frame is applied to track facial muscle movements. For realistic facial expression recovery, we first reconstruct the user's 3D face from a single image and generate the personalized blendshapes associated with seven facial action units (AUs) on the most emotionally salient facial parts (ESFPs). We then utilize pre-processed EMG signals for measuring activations of AU-coded facial expressions to drive pre-built personalized blendshapes. Since facial expressions appear as important nonverbal cues of the subject's internal emotional states, we further investigate the relationship between six basic emotions - anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise, and detected AUs using a fern classifier. Experiments show the proposed system can accurately sense and reconstruct high-fidelity common facial expressions while providing useful information regarding the emotional state of the HMD user.

Machine learning, especially deep neural networks, has developed rapidly in fields, including computer vision, speech recognition, and reinforcement learning. Although minibatch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most popular stochastic optimization methods for training deep networks, it shows a slow convergence rate due to the large noise in the gradient approximation. In this article, we attempt to remedy this problem by building a more efficient batch selection method based on typicality sampling, which reduces the error of gradient estimation in conventional minibatch SGD. We analyze the convergence rate of the resulting typical batch SGD algorithm and compare the convergence properties between the minibatch SGD and the algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that our batch selection scheme works well and more complex minibatch SGD variants can benefit from the proposed batch selection strategy.

As one of the efficient approaches to deal with big data, divide-and-conquer distributed algorithms, such as the distributed kernel regression, bootstrap, structured perception training algorithms, and so on, are proposed and broadly used in learning systems. Some learning theories have been built to analyze the feasibility, approximation, and convergence bounds of these distributed learning algorithms. However, less work has been studied on the stability of these distributed learning algorithms. In this paper, we discuss the generalization bounds of distributed learning algorithms from the view of algorithmic stability. First, we introduce a definition of uniform distributed stability for distributed algorithms and study the distributed algorithms' generalization risk bounds. Then, we analyze the stability properties and generalization risk bounds of a kind of regularization-based distributed algorithms. Two generalization distributed risks obtained show that the generalization distributed risk bounds for the difference between their generalization distributed and empirical distributed/leave-one-computer-out risks are closely related to the size of samples n and the amount of working computers m as O(m/n1/2) . Furthermore, the results in this paper indicate that, for a good generalization regularized distributed kernel algorithm, the regularization parameter λ should be adjusted with the change of the term m/n1/2. These theoretic discoveries provide the useful guidance when deploying the distributed algorithms on practical big data platforms. We explore our theoretic analyses through two simulation experiments. Finally, we discuss some problems about the sufficient amount of working computers, nonequivalence, and generalization for distributed learning. We show that the rules for the computation on one single computer may not always hold for distributed learning.

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.

Stereo matching methods consist of matching cost computation and several post processing steps. Deep learning methods have greatly raised the accuracy of matching cost and achieved the lowest error rate on several public datasets. However, their generality capabilities are not the best due to potential overfitting, which is the common problem of supervised learning approaches. This paper proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN) based cost estimation method for computing the similarity of image patches. In consideration of accuracy and generalization capability, small size convolution kernels are chosen in the convolution layer and dropout in the decision layer is used for preventing overfitting. After obtaining stereo matching cost from the output of the CNN, several post-processing operations are adopted for disparity optimization, which includes semi-global matching in 1-D from different directions, a left-right consistency check, and the slanted plane smoothing method. The method is evaluated on KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015, and Middlebury stereo datasets and the experimental results on the KITTI benchmark demonstrate the competitive accuracy performance of the approach. Additionally, to test the generalization of the method, a series of extended crossover experiments are conducted in which the training samples and testing samples come from different datasets. The results indicate superior generalization capability of our method than other supervised learning methods.

Blockchain, as an emerging decentralized architecture and distributed computing paradigm underlying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, has attracted intensive attention in both research and applications recently. Blockchain, especially powered by chain-coded smart contracts, has the full potential of revolutionizing increasingly centralized cyber-physical-social systems (CPSSs) for constructions and applications, and reshaping traditional knowledge automation workflows. The key advantage of blockchain technology lies in the fact that it can enable the establishment of secured, trusted, and decentralized autonomous ecosystems for various scenarios, especially for better usage of the legacy devices, infrastructure, and resources.

Face super-resolution has been studied for decades, and many approaches have been proposed to upsample low-resolution face images using information mined from paired low-resolution (LR) images and high-resolution (HR) images. However, most of this kind of works only simply sharpen the blurry edges in the upsampled face images and typically no photo-realistic face is reconstructed in the final result. In this paper, we present a GAN-based algorithm for face super-resolution which properly synthesizes photo-realistic super-recovered face. To this end, we introduce semi-dual optimal transport to optimize our model such that the distribution of its generated data can match the distribution of a target domain as much as possible. This way would endow our model with learning the mapping of distribution from unpaired LR images and HR images with desired properties. We demonstrate the robustness of our algorithm by testing it on Color FERET database and show that its performance is considerably superior to all state-of-the-art approaches.

Caricature is a simple and abstract description of a person using her/his exaggerated characteristics. Due to amplified facial variations in the caricatures and significant differences among caricature and real face modalities, building vision models for recognizing each other between these modalities is an extremely challenging task. In addition, it is not easy to collect abundant samples of real faces and corresponding caricatures for training vision models, which makes the recognition more difficult. In this paper, we propose a novel relation network via meta learning to address the problem of few-shot caricature face recognition. In particular, we present a deep relation network to capture and memorize the relation among different samples. To employ the prior knowledge, we combine learned deep and handcrafted features to form the hybrid-prior representation via joint meta learning. Final recognition is derived from our relation network by learning to compare between the hybrid-prior features of samples. Experimental results on three caricature datasets of WebCaricature, IIIT-CFW, and Caricature-207 demonstrate that our method performs better than many existing ones for few-shot caricature recognition.

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.

Object instance segmentation can achieve preferable results, powered with sufficient labeled training data. However, it is time-consuming for manually labeling, leading to the lack of large-scale diversified datasets with accurate instance segmentation annotations. Exploiting the synthetic data is a very promising solution except for domain distribution mismatch between synthetic dataset and real dataset. In this paper, we propose a synthetic-to-real domain adaptation method for object instance segmentation. At first, this approach is trained to generate object detection and segmentation using annotated data from synthetic dataset. Then, a feature adaptation module (FAM) is applied to reduce data distribution mismatch between synthetic dataset and real dataset. The FAM performs domain adaptation from three different aspects: global-level base feature adaptation module, local-level instance feature adaptation module, and subtle-level mask feature adaptation module. It is implemented based on novel discriminator networks with adversarial learning. The three modules of FAM have positive effects on improving the performance when adapting from synthetic to real scenes. We evaluate the proposed approach on Cityscapes dataset by adapting from Virtual KITTI and SYNTHIA datasets. The results show that it achieves a significantly better performance over the state-of-the-art methods.

With the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), big data, and IoT technologies, the industrial systems are evolving fast into a class of Cyber-Physical-Social Systems (CPSS), which provide a wide range of challenges and opportunities for enterprise management. In this presentation, I will first outline the trend of intelligence, and discuss the evolution from Industrie 4.0 to Industries 5.0. The core of Industrie 4.0 is ICT+ CPS and it is previously interpreted as “Information and Communication Technology+CyberPhysical Systems However, in the era of Industries 5.0, its interpretation has changed to “Intelligence and Connectivity Technology +Cyber-Physical-Social” Then, I will introduce the Parallel Industrial Systems (PIS) based on the ACP approach within the framework of Industries 5.0. The basic ideas of PIS are 1) modeling and representing real industrial systems using artificial industrial systems; 2) analyzing and evaluating industrial situations by computational experiments; and 3) controlling and managing industrial systems by parallel execution through interactions of real and artificial industrial systems. The ACP based PIS provides a platform to generate big data from small data, and then characterize big data to small intelligence for specific tasks via various AI methods, which enables seamless integration of AI techniques into industrial operations. Finally, I will summarize our real-world practices and case studies of PIS over the last two decades in China.

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.

Proof of work and proof of stake (PoS) are commonly used in the current permissionless blockchains. These consensus protocols can be abstracted into a random process of selecting a node for accounting in a blockchain ledger. However, they are generally faced with resource consumption and vulnerability issues. We present proof of credit (PoC), a fair blockchain protocol based on the PoC blockchain protocol. It is a special PoS protocol where the credit is a special kind of stake quantifying whether the node's activity is beneficial to the system. Any nodes cannot change their credits arbitrarily. We demonstrate that our PoC protocol satisfies the security properties, including common prefix, chain quality, and chain growth, under the assumption that the total credit the honest held is majority. In addition, we propose a self-audit mechanism and a hybrid incentive mechanism to enhance the security and stability. Finally, we explain the method by which the PoC protocol resists the double-spending attacks and the selfish mining attacks.

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.

Decentralized autonomy is a long-standing research topic in information sciences and social sciences. The self-organization phenomenon in natural ecosystems, the Cyber Movement Organizations (CMOs) on the Internet, and the Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI), and so on, can all be regarded as its early manifestations. In recent years, the rapid development of blockchain technology has spawned the emergence of the so-called Decentralized Autonomous Organization [DAO, sometimes labeled as Decentralized Autonomous Corporation (DAC)], which is a new organization form that the management and operational rules are typically encoded on blockchain in the form of smart contracts, and can autonomously operate without centralized control or third-party intervention. DAO is expected to overturn the traditional hierarchical management model and significantly reduce organizations’ costs on communication, management, and collaboration. However, DAO still faces many challenges, such as security and privacy issue, unclear legal status, and so on. In this article, we strive to present a systematic introduction of DAO, including its concept and characteristics, research framework, typical implementations, challenges, and future trends. Especially, a novel reference model for DAO which employs a five-layer architecture is proposed. This article is aimed at providing helpful guidance and reference for future research efforts.

Welcome to the fifth issue of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS) this year. Seventeen regular articles and a brief discussion on social manufacturing (SM) are presented here. In addition, a special issue on “Human-Centric Cyber Social Computing” is included.We would like to take the opportunity to thank the Guest Editors for their time and effort devoted to the special issue.

We are making good progresses in our impact and reputation over the last year. According to the latest data released by Scopus on February 11, 2019, our CiteScore hits its historical high to 3.94, and TCSS ranks 8th out of the 226 journals (top 3.54%) in the field of social sciences. This is a solid improvement compared with the corresponding data in 2017 (CiteScore: 2.36, Rank: 17/226, top 8%). Thanks and congratulations to our authors, reviewers, and members of our editorial board. The current issue includes 17 regular papers and a brief discussion on social education.

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.

Welcome to the last issue of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS) of this year, with a special focus on “blockchainbased secure and trusted computing for IoT.” Here, we have 18 regular articles and a brief discussion on social intelligence. I would like to take this opportunity to thank and congratulate everyone, especially our editorial board for a great job well done. Looking forward to working with you all in 2020!

Welcome to the third issue of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS) in 2019. Thanks to the efforts of the editors, reviewers, authors, and readers of TCSS, the influence of TCSS is rapidly increasing. According to the latest statistics released by Elsevier, the CiteScore of TCSS in 2018 reaches 4.00, and ranks eighth out of the 255 journals (top 3%) in the field of social sciences. This is a solid improvement compared with the corresponding data in 2017 (CiteScore: 2.36, Rank: 17/226, and top 8%). Thanks and congratulations to our authors, reviewers, and members of our editorial board. The current issue includes 20 regular papers and a brief discussion on social energy.

The sales of agricultural products are an important component of the product supply chain. The price of agricultural products, a social signal of product supply and demand, is affected by many factors, such as climate, price, policy, and so on. Due to the asymmetry between production and marketing information, the price of many agricultural products fluctuates greatly. Horticultural products are especially sensitive to price since they are not suitable for long-term storage. Therefore, forecasting the price of horticultural products is very helpful in designing a cropping plan. In this paper, AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model, back propagation (BP) network method, and recurrent neural network (RNN) method were tested to forecast the price of agricultural products (cucumber, tomato, and eggplant) in short term (several days) and long term (several weeks or months). A large-scale price data of agricultural products were collected from the website based on web crawler technology. Since ARIMA requires continuous and periodic data, it is suitable for small-scale periodic data. It gave good performance for average monthly data but not for daily data. Instead, the neural network methods (including BP network and RNN) can predict well daily, weekly, and monthly trend of price fluctuation. It is more suitable for large-scale data. It is expected that the deep learning method represented by a neural network will become the mainstream method of agricultural product price forecasting.

In this paper, we study the testing tasks evaluation and testees ranking problem, in which tasks have different difficulty levels, and testees have different capabilities.We assume that a testee may have a probability to pass a certain task so as to allow certain uncertainty. The goal of this problem is to simultaneously determine the relative difficulty level of each testing task and the relative capability of every testee, purely based on the test outcome. We design two models to solve this problem. The first one assumes that the test outcome follows a certain Bernoulli distribution; while the second one assumes that the test outcome follows a certain Bernoulli distribution with the beta distribution-type a priori knowledge. Then, we form the original problem into likelihood estimation problems and solve them by using coordinate descent algorithms. We show that the beta distribution-type a priori knowledge is needed, when we only carry out a limited number of tests due to time and financial budgets. All these findings are useful to intelligence tests. Finally, we discuss how to extend this statistical learning model for more general cases as well as in a specific case in the field of Computational Social Systems like artificial social cognition evaluation.

To give a high-level summary to current approaches for implementing artificial intelligence (AI), we explain the key commonalities and major differences between Turing's approach and Wiener's approach in this perspective. Especially, the problems, successful achievements, limitations, and future research directions of existing approaches that follow Weiner's ideas are addressed, respectively, aiming to provide readers with a good start point and a roadmap. Some other related topics, for example, the role of human experts in developing AI, are also discussed to seek potential solutions for some existing difficulties.

As a typical cyber-physical system, 3D printing has developed very fast in recent years. There is a strong demand for mass customization, such as printing dental crowns. However, the accuracy of the 3D printed objects is low compared with traditional methods. The main reason is that the model to be printed is arbitrary and usually the quantity is small. The deformation is affected by the shape of the object and there is a lack of a universal method for the error compensation. It is neither easy nor economical to perform the compensation manually. In this paper, we present a framework for the automatic error compensation. We obtain the shape by technologies such as 3D scanning. And we use the "3D deep learning" method to train a deep neural network. For a specific task, such as dental crown printing, the network can learn the function of deformation when a large amount of data is used for training. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of the deep neural network to the error compensation in 3D printing. And we propose the "inverse function network" to compensate for the error. We use four types of deformations of the dental crowns to verify the performance of the neural network: 1) translation; 2) scaling up; 3) scaling down; and 4) rotation. The convolutional AutoEncoder structure is employed for the end-to-end learning. The experiments show that the network can predict and compensate for the error well. By introducing the new method, we can improve the accuracy with little need for increasing the hardware cost.

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.

As demand for rail transportation continues to increase rapidly, significant challenges have emerged in many railway systems in terms of Capacity, Safety and Customer Satisfaction. To deal with these challenges, intelligent technologies, such as artificial intelligence, big data, and machine learning, have been gradually introduced to rail transportation. It is therefore timely and appropriate to have a focused investigation and discussion about Intelligent Rail Transportation. This special issue provides a forum for scientists and engineers working in academia, industry, and government to present their latest research findings and engineering experiences in developing and applying intelligent technologies to improve railway’s autonomy, cooperation, and integration.

Dataset plays an essential role in the training and testing of traffic vision algorithms. However, the collection and annotation of images from the real world is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and error-prone. Therefore, more and more researchers have begun to explore the virtual dataset, to overcome the disadvantages of real datasets. In this paper, we propose a systematic method to construct large-scale artificial scenes and collect a new virtual dataset (named “ParallelEye”) for the traffic vision research. The Unity3D rendering software is used to simulate environmental changes in the artificial scenes and generate ground-truth labels automatically, including semantic/instance segmentation, object bounding boxes, and so on. In addition, we utilize ParallelEye in combination with real datasets to conduct experiments. The experimental results show the inclusion of virtual data helps to enhance the per-class accuracy in object detection and semantic segmentation. Meanwhile, it is also illustrated that the virtual data with controllable imaging conditions can be used to design evaluation experiments flexibly.

Traffic flow prediction is one of the most popular topics in the field of the intelligent transportation system due to its importance. Powered by advanced machine learning techniques, especially the deep learning method, prediction accuracy noticeably increases in recent years. However, most existing methods applied a data-driven paradigm and tend to ignore the outliers, which result in poor performance while handling burst phenomena in the traffic system. To overcome this problem, the prediction model needs to recognize different patterns and handle them in different ways. In this paper, we propose a new prediction model (called pattern sensitive network) that can handle different traffic patterns automatically. By using adversarial training, our model can make more accurate predictions in unusual states without compromising its performance in usual states. Experiments demonstrate that our method can work well in both usual traffic states and unusual traffic states.

The adoption of passenger leaders could make crowd evacuation in urban railway transit (URT) stations more efficient. The number, location, and the actions of the leaders are the most important elements in an evacuation strategy and have a great impact on evacuation efficiency. This paper proposes a hybrid bi-level model to optimize the number and initial locations of leaders as well as the routes of leaders during the evacuation, which explicitly incorporates the passengers' guidance demand and multi-leader coordination mechanism. The leaders' initial locations are generated by solving the maximal covering location problem (upper level model) and their evacuation routes are determined by a co-simulation heuristic approach (lower level model). The social force model and its modifications are used to model the dynamics of common evacuees, leaders, and followers in simulation models. The convergence performance of the proposed co-simulation heuristic approach and the effectiveness of the optimal evacuation strategy have been investigated and demonstrated using a case study of a typical island platform of Beijing's URT station. Three other evacuation strategies are considered for comparison purposes in order to show the influence of the number and initial locations of leaders as well as the multi-leader coordination mechanism during the evacuation process. Our analysis supported by simulations shows the following: 1) the optimal number of leaders exists for a given human cost and guidance demand constraints; 2) the distribution of leaders for maximal covering makes the evacuation of the followers more efficient; and 3) the proposed optimal evacuation strategy has better performance in terms of shorter evacuation time and higher utilization of exits compared with other considered strategies.

In recent years, the rapid development of cryptocurrencies and their underlying blockchain technology has revived Szabo’s original idea of smart contracts, i.e., computer protocols that are designed to automatically facilitate, verify, and enforce the negotiation and implementation of digital contracts without central authorities. Smart contracts can find a wide spectrum of potential application scenarios in the digital economy and intelligent industries, including financial services, management, healthcare, and Internet of Things, among others, and also have been integrated into the mainstream blockchain-based development platforms, such as Ethereum and Hyperledger. However, smart contracts are still far from mature, and major technical challenges such as security and privacy issues are still awaiting further research efforts. For instance, the most notorious case might be “The DAO Attack” in June 2016, which led to more than $50 million Ether transferred into an adversary’s account. In this paper, we strive to present a systematic and comprehensive overview of blockchain-enabled smart contracts, aiming at stimulating further research toward this emerging research area. We first introduced the operating mechanism and mainstream platforms of blockchain-enabled smart contracts, and proposed a research framework for smart contracts based on a novel six-layer architecture. Second, both the technical and legal challenges, as well as the recent research progresses, are listed. Third, we presented several typical application scenarios. Toward the end, we discussed the future development trends of smart contracts. This paper is aimed at providing helpful guidance and reference for future research efforts.

Image based eye detection and gaze estimation have a wide range of potential applications, such as medical treatment, biometrics recognition, human-computer interaction. Though a large number of researchers have attempted to solve the two problems, they still exist some challenges due to the variation in appearance and lack of annotated images. In addition, most related work perform eye detection first, followed by gaze estimation via appearance learning. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to execute the gaze estimation and the eye detection simultaneously by learning the cascade regression models from appearance around the eye related key points. Intuitively, there is coupled relationship among location of eye center, shape of eye related key points, appearance representation and gaze information. To incorporate these information, at each cascade level, we first learn a model to map the shape and appearance around current eye related key points to the three dimension gaze update. Then, with the help of estimated gaze, we further learn a regression model to map the gaze, shape and appearance information to eye location update. By leveraging the power of cascade learning, the proposed method can alternatively optimize the two tasks of eye detection and gaze estimation. The experiments are conducted on benchmarks of GI4E and MPIIGaze. Experimental results show that our proposed method can achieve preferable results in gaze estimation and outperform the state-of-the-art methods in eye detection.

The provenance (tracing) system of agricultural products is important for ensuring food safety. However, the stakeholders (growers, farmers, sellers etc.) are numerous and physically dispersed, making it difficult to manage data and information with a centralized approach. As a result, the production procedure remains non-transparent and trust is hard to build. In this paper, we propose an agricultural provenance system based on techniques of blockchain, which is featured by decentralization, collective maintenance, consensus trust and reliable data, in order to solve the trust crisis in product supply chain. Recorded information includes the management operations (fertilizing, irrigation, etc.) with certain data structure. Applying blockchain techniques to the provenance of agricultural product not only widens the application domain of blockchain, but also supports building a reliable community among different stakeholders around agriculture production.

Recent years have witnessed much interest in Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies, which are gaining unprecedented momentum and commercial interest towards the realisation of the Internet of Things (IoT). Long Range (LoRa), as a representative LPWA technology, has the potential to satisfy the growing demand for the longer range and larger amount connectivities in vehicular communication networks. In this paper, LoRa is firstly applied into two typical vehicular networks, namely Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I)and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), and performance of LoRa schemes with different parameter configurations are evaluated and compared. Further, Monte Carlo simulations indicate that the schemes equipped with higher bandwidth or lower spreading factor exhibit significant advantages in combating the fast fading caused by Doppler effect in networks.

Offline training and testing are playing an essential role in design and evaluation of intelligent vehicle vision algorithms. Nevertheless, long-term inconvenience concerning traditional image datasets is that manually collecting and annotating datasets from real scenes lack testing tasks and diverse environmental conditions. For that virtual datasets can make up for these regrets. In this paper, we propose to construct artificial scenes for evaluating the visual intelligence of intelligent vehicles and generate a new virtual dataset called “ParallelEye-CS”. First of all, the actual track map data is used to build 3D scene model of Chinese Flagship Intelligent Vehicle Proving Center Area, Changshu. Then, the computer graphics and virtual reality technologies are utilized to simulate the virtual testing tasks according to the Chinese Intelligent Vehicles Future Challenge (IVFC) tasks. Furthermore, the Unity3D platform is used to generate accurate ground-truth labels and change environmental conditions. As a result, we present a viable implementation method for constructing artificial scenes for traffic vision research. The experimental results show that our method is able to generate photorealistic virtual datasets with diverse testing tasks.

Bitcoin is a novel protocol with the potential of enabling a decentralized and trustless cryptographic currency, and its underlying technology named blockchain operates on a worldwide basis via a complex set of rules originally proposed by Nakomoto in 2008. In Bitcoin blockchain, miners provide computational services (i.e. mining) to get profits from the fixed rewards of newly found block and also transaction fees from recording the users’ transactions to the blocks. With the decreasing of the fixed new block reward, transaction fees will play the role as the main profit source of miners, thus provide important supports for the sustainability and vitality of the Bitcoin system. Therefore, it is of great necessity to research transaction fees. In this paper, we investigate transaction fees in a queuing game with non-preemptive priority, in which both the miners’ mining rewards and the users’ time cost are highlighted. Then, we conduct theoretical analysis of the game, getting five types of Nash equilibria of the game. We also find that the over-long waiting time will bring negative marginal profits on transaction fees to some users with low time cost, therefore, they will not be willing to offer transaction fees.

This paper proposes a learning-based predictive control technique for self-driving hybrid electric vehicle (HEV). This approach is a hierarchical framework. The higher-level is a human-like driver model, which is applied to predict accelerations in the car following situation to replicate a human driver's demonstrations. The lower-level is a reinforcement learning (RL)-based controller, which enforces the battery and fuel consumption constraints to improve energy efficiency of HEV. In addition, we present induced matrix norm (IMN) to handle cases that the training data cannot provide sufficient information on how to operate in current driving situation. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed method can reproduce human driver's driving style and promote fuel economy.

With the rapid development of social media, fast transition of organizational management modes, as well as the increasing security risks caused by human intervention and operations, the existing organizational management systems suffer a severe problem of lowered efficiency and security. This motivates our research. In this paper, we strive to design a new solution to this problem, via instantiating the traditional PDCA cycle theory and using software robots powered by blockchain and smart contracts. In our framework, blockchain and smart contracts can guarantee privacy-protected, traceable, and tamper-resistant data access, and can also help reduce the human intervention. Based on the PDCA cycle theory, we propose the PDCA closed-loop ecological chain on the basis of blockchain. We also validate our work in a real-world scenario, and the results can prove the effectiveness of our model.

With the development of the blockchain technology, Bitcoin mining has become more and more popular. This paper aims to provide a three-level framework of the economic issues in Bitcoin mining research, from the levels of mining pools, individual miners and blockchain network. We also offer an overview of relevant research efforts in literature. Considering the uncertainty, diversity and complexity of the Bitcoin ecosystems, we propose a novel research framework based on the ACP theory, which can be used to explore the economic issues in the Bitcoin ecosystems. This paper aims to provide a preliminary investigation to the economic issues faced by participants in the Bitcoin ecosystems, and stimulate the attentions and interests of researchers in this field.

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.

Drivers' decision and their corresponding behaviors are important aspects that can affect the driving safety, and it is necessary to understand the driver behaviors in real-time. In this study, an end-to-end driving-related tasks recognition system is proposed. Specifically, seven common driving activities are identified, which are normal driving, right mirror checking, rear mirror checking, left mirror checking, using in-vehicle video device, texting, and answering mobile phone. Among these, the first four activities are regarded as normal driving tasks, while the rest three are divided into distraction group. The images are collected using a consumer range camera, namely, Kinect. In total, five drivers are involved in the naturalistic data collection. Before training the identification model, the raw images are first segmented using a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to extract the driver region from the background. Then, a pre-trained deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model is trained to classify the behaviors, which directly takes the processed RGB images as the input and outputs the identified label. In this work, the AIexNet is selected as the pre-trained CNN model. Then, to reduce the training cost, the transfer learning mechanism is applied to the CNN model. An average of 79% detection accuracy is achieved for the seven driving tasks. The proposed integration model can be used as a low-cost driver distraction and dangerous tasks recognition modeL.

In recent years, social media platforms and instant messaging applications have been witnessed to play an increasingly important role as a communication channel among employees to build effective organizations, which results in a considerably large part of individual activities moving onto the cyber-based workspace. The online behaviors of employees rely heavily on the policies or mechanisms formulated for the cyber-space, and are expected to impose a significant influence on their performance appraisal in the physical world. In this paper, we focus on the typical online reporting behavior, and empirically study how the work reporting policies formulated by supervisors influence the employees' strategies and in turn their performance, using a unique real-world dataset collected from the Chinese social media platform called WeChat. We consider two types of work reporting policies: the one is concerned with the reporting time and the other with the duplication degree of reporting contents. First, we establish an optimization model, taking both the reputation-based and performance-related utilities into consideration, so as to examine the employees' reporting strategies and their actual work performance. On this basis, we make further discussions about the reporting policy optimization from the perspective of organization supervisors. Then, an empirical study on a median-size organization in China is conducted to validate our proposed model and analysis. The results prove our conclusion that the reporting policy will influence not only employees' reporting strategies, but also their actual work performance.

With the increasing difficulty of solo mining in blockchain mining, pool mining has become more and more popular, and most of the miners would like to join a mining pool and contribute their computational power to the pool. When the pool finds a valid block and get the reward from the blockchain network, it will distribute the reward to its miners according to its reward mechanism. In practice, the Pay-Per-Last-N-Shares (PPLNS) mechanism is one of the most commonly used mechanisms by pools, and the pool adopting PPLNS mechanism will distribute the reward to the miners whose reported shares are in the last N shares, according to their proportion of the number of shares in the last N shares. In the PPLNS mechanism, different reporting strategies may bring different rewards for miners. Thus, how to report their found shares to the pool has become an important issue faced by the miners. In this paper, we study the share reporting problem faced by the miners in PPLNS pools, and establish a share reporting optimization model for the miners. We also study the effect of the parameter N in the PPLNS mechanism on the optimal reporting strategies of the miners. With the computational experiments approach, we design experiments to evaluate our proposed share reporting strategies. This work is the first attempt to study the share reporting issue faced by miners in PPLNS pools, and it can provide useful managerial insights for miners when making their share reporting decisions in such pools.

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.

In recent years, social media platforms and, especially, instant messaging applications have been witnessed to play an increasingly important role as a communication channel among employees to build effective organizations, which results in a considerably large part of individual activities moving onto the cyber-based workspace. In this paper, we collect the unique real-world data set from a WeChat-based work performance evaluation system built and used by a medium-sized organization in China, in order to study the optimization of the employees’ work strategies, especially the work time determination, with the purpose of maximizing the total utility comprised of the work and nonwork utilities. In the system, the performance evaluation is completely based on the employees’ work reports and includes three major measures including score, level, and rank. First, we formulate a dynamic optimization model, incorporating the work utility into the reputational and the substantive utility, so as to examine the employees’ work strategy. Then, we conduct both empirical studies and computational experiments to make an in-depth analysis to probe the employees’ optimal work strategies. The main results include: 1) the optimal work time is greatly affected by the weight of the reputational utility; 2) the optimal work time is always the threshold time to achieve a certain level or a certain rank; 3) the total utility is with the trend of decreasing after increasing with the growing work time; and 4) the optimal work time does not always make the employee achieve a good work performance.

Understanding travelers' route choice behavior is a key task in transportation studies. In this paper, we analyze the route choices of Beijing taxi drivers regarding four frequently mentioned cost-based route choice rules: pursuing shortest time, or distance, avoiding passing signalized intersections, or making left/right turnings. Test results show that route choices of drivers are not always optimal according to either of these rules. Instead, we argue that taxi drivers are bounded rational and usually choose a satisfactory route that belongs to one of the few routes that consume the shortest times. Test results show that more than 90% observed traces can be explained by this simple explanation.

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.

Since the increasing popularization of the emerging blockchain technology, blockchain mining has attracted more and more attention. Due to the difficulty of solo mining, typically miners choose to join a mining pool. As there are many mining pools and different mining pools may adopt different reward mechanisms, how to choose the appropriate mining pool has become one of the most important issues faced by miners, since miners can get different rewards in different pools. In practice, there are three commonly used reward mechanisms for the mining pools to distribute the reward among their miners, namely, the proportional mechanism, the pay-per-share mechanism, and the pay-per-last-N-share mechanism. In this paper, we study the pool selection problem faced by the miners, and model it as a risk decision problem since different reward mechanisms have different risks. We establish a pool selection model based on the maximum-likelihood criterion and also study the effect of N on the miners' optimal pool selection decisions. By utilizing the computational experiments approach, we validate our proposed pool selection strategies. Our results can provide important managerial insights for miners when making their pool selection decisions.

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 third issue of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS) for 2018.

Time flies fast, it has been already one year since I was appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of this great publication, and thanks to the strong support and dedication of our associate editors, editorial staff, anonymous reviewers, and authors, we have made solid progress and I really enjoy my work and our achievement so far. At this point, significant improvements in the timeliness and quality of the review process, as well as the numbers of manuscripts submitted and articles published have been accomplished.

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.

Welcome to the last issue of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (IEEE TCSS) in 2018. Starting from the first issue next year, our Transactions will be a bimonthly publication, entering a new stage for the IEEE TCSS.

Driver decisions and behaviors regarding the surrounding traffic are critical to traffic safety. It is important for an intelligent vehicle to understand driver behavior and assist in driving tasks according to their status. In this paper, the consumer range camera Kinect is used to monitor drivers and identify driving tasks in a real vehicle. Specifically, seven common tasks performed by multiple drivers during driving are identified in this paper. The tasks include normal driving, left-, right-, and rear-mirror checking, mobile phone answering, texting using a mobile phone with one or both hands, and the setup of in-vehicle video devices. The first four tasks are considered safe driving tasks, while the other three tasks are regarded as dangerous and distracting tasks. The driver behavior signals collected from the Kinect consist of a color and depth image of the driver inside the vehicle cabin. In addition, 3-D head rotation angles and the upper body (hand and arm at both sides) joint positions are recorded. Then, the importance of these features for behavior recognition is evaluated using random forests and maximal information coefficient methods. Next, a feedforward neural network (FFNN) is used to identify the seven tasks. Finally, the model performance for task recognition is evaluated with different features (body only, head only, and combined). The final detection result for the seven driving tasks among five participants achieved an average of greater than 80% accuracy, and the FFNN tasks detector is proved to be an efficient model that can be implemented for real-time driver distraction and dangerous behavior recognition.

Artificial Society is an analytical foundation of various complex eco- and social systems. Such system is usually implemented via multiagent approach. However, there is no consensus on how to model the agent’s decision-making process, since different application scenarios concentrate on different facets. This, to some extent, hinders model reuse and system integration. This paper proposes a general cognitive architecture that attempts to adapt all the aspects of agent’s decision-making in artificial societies, so that different programs and software can be reorganized and integrated conveniently. To illustrate its implementation, two simulations—emergent evacuation and population evolution—are conducted. These tests clearly show that the proposed architecture is able to support different agent-based models. Problems that might be encountered, as well as possible strategies, are also proposed in the end.

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.

This paper focuses on the bibliographic analyses and collaboration patterns in the field of pedestrian and evacuation dynamics (PED) research covering the period of 1991-2017. The statistic analyses of most productive authors, institutions, countries/regions, and cited papers, as well as keywords and their trends, are conducted based on the data set collected from the Web of Science. The most productive and high-impact authors, institutions, and countries are identified. The results of bibliographic analyses show that Europe researchers dominate and guide the research of PED in that it not only has the most papers but also has six out of the ten most-cited papers. Helbing Dirk is an influential author in the research of PED field in that he has five out of the ten most-cited papers. Chinese institutions account for 70% of the top 10 most productive institution and three among the top 5 ranks. Meanwhile, researchers from China and USA have published nearly half of the papers in this field. In addition, we generate four networks, i.e., coauthorship network, coinstitution network, cocountry/region network, and document cocitation network to analyze collaboration patterns and evolution of PED research at different levels. The software of Citespace is adopted to visualize the topological interactions among authors, institutions, and countries/regions as well as document cocitations. The degree, betweenness, burst, and PageRank are selected and measured as indicators to identify the key nodes. Finally, some future directions are put forward. The results of this paper provide a better understanding of patterns, trends, and other important factors as a basis for directing research activities, sharing knowledge, and collaborating in the field of PED research.

The profit of greenhouse production is influenced by management activities (e.g., environmental control and plantation scheduling) as well as social conditions (e.g., price fluctuation). In China, the prevailing horticultural facility is the traditional solar greenhouse. The key existing problem is the lack of knowledge of growers, which in turn leads to inefficient management, low production, or unsalable products. To secure effective greenhouse management, the production planning system must account for the crop growing environment, grower's activities, and the market. This paper presents an agricultural cyber-physical-social system (CPSS) serving agricultural production management, with a case study on the solar greenhouse. The system inputs are derived from social and physical sensors, with the former collecting the price of agricultural products in a wholesale market, and the latter collecting the necessary environmental data in the solar greenhouse. Decision support for the cropping plan is provided by the artificial system, computational experiment, and parallel execution-based method, with description intelligence for estimating the crop development and harvest time, prediction intelligence for optimizing the planting time and area according to the expected targets (stable production or maximum gross profit), and prescription intelligence for online system training. The presented system fits the current technical and economic situation of horticulture in China. The application of agricultural CPSS could decrease waste in labor or fertilizer and support sustainable agricultural production.

As a typical cyber-physical system (CPS), electrified vehicle becomes a hot research topic due to its high efficiency and low emissions. In order to develop advanced electric powertrains, accurate estimations of the unmeasurable hybrid states, including discrete backlash nonlinearity and continuous half-shaft torque, are of great importance. In this paper, a novel estimation algorithm for simultaneously identifying the backlash position and half-shaft torque of an electric powertrain is proposed using a hybrid system approach. System models, including the electric powertrain and vehicle dynamics models, are established considering the drivetrain backlash and flexibility, and also calibrated and validated using vehicle road testing data. Based on the developed system models, the powertrain behavior is represented using hybrid automata according to the piecewise affine property of the backlash dynamics. A hybrid-state observer, which is comprised of a discrete-state observer and a continuous-state observer, is designed for the simultaneous estimation of the backlash position and half-shaft torque. In order to guarantee the stability and reachability, the convergence property of the proposed observer is investigated. The proposed observer are validated under highly dynamical transitions of vehicle states. The validation results demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed hybrid-state observer.

In this paper, we study the control problems of distributed parameter systems, and discuss the limitations of traditional control methods. In recent years, social factors have gradually become an essential parameter of system modeling. For complex distributed parameter systems, the accurate modeling becomes difficult. With the rapid development of the network and the technology of big data and cloud computing, based on the advanced control theory of large-scale computing, we introduce the idea of parallel control to the control of distributed parameter systems. Parallel control is a method to accomplish tasks through the interaction of virtual and actual. Its core is to model the complex distributed parameter system on artificial society or artificial system, then analyze and evaluate it by computational experiment, and finally control and manage the distributed parameter system by parallel execution. Data-driven control and computational control are used in this method, which is a control idea that adapts to the rapid development of society.

Inspired by the idealism embodied in Russell and Whitehead’s “Principia Mathematica,” Wiener marched along a different and unique path toward sciences of intelligence and behavior which culminated at “Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” 70 years ago. Since then, we have witnessed the birth of Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Computational Intelligence, and many other new research fields and disciplines, all of which have been catalyzed by Cybernetics. The IEEE Systems, Man, AND Cybernetics Society and this Transactions on Cybernetics have become the focal point of the broad cybernetics community by promoting the theory, practice, and interdisciplinary aspects of systems science and engineering, human-machine systems, and cybernetics principles. It is a time of celebration and reflection.

Building autonomous systems that achieve human level intelligence is one of the primary objectives in artificial intelligence (AI). It requires the study of a wide range of functions robustly across different phases of human cognition. This paper presents a review of agent cognitive architectures in the past 20 year's AI research. Different from software structures and simulation environments, most of the architectures concerned are established from mathematics and philosophy. They are categorized according to their knowledge processing patterns-symbolic, emergent or hybrid. All the relevant literature can be accessed publicly, particularly through the Internet. Available websites are also summarized for further reference.

As an important safety-critical cyber-physical system (CPS), the braking system is essential to the safe operation of the electric vehicle. Accurate estimation of the brake pressure is of great importance for automotive CPS design and control. In this paper, a novel probabilistic estimation method of brake pressure is developed for electrified vehicles based on multilayer artificial neural networks (ANNs) with Levenberg-Marquardt backpropagation (LMBP) training algorithm. First, the high-level architecture of the proposed multilayer ANN for brake pressure estimation is illustrated. Then, the standard backpropagation (BP) algorithm used for training of the feed-forward neural network (FFNN) is introduced. Based on the basic concept of BP, a more efficient training algorithm of LMBP method is proposed. Next, real vehicle testing is carried out on a chassis dynamometer under standard driving cycles. Experimental data of the vehicle and the powertrain systems are collected, and feature vectors for FFNN training collection are selected. Finally, the developed multilayer ANN is trained using the measured vehicle data, and the performance of the brake pressure estimation is evaluated and compared with other available learning methods. Experimental results validate the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed ANN-based method for braking pressure estimation under real deceleration scenarios.

An augmented reality (AR) technique has recently gained its popularity in minimally invasive surgery. Tracking is a crucial step to achieve precise AR. Besides optical tracking in traditional medical AR, visual tracking attracts a lot of attention due to its generality. Moreover, when the target organ's 3-D model can be obtained from preoperative images and under the model rigidity assumption, tracking is then converted into a problem of computing the six-degree-of-freedom pose of the 3-D model. In this paper, we introduce a robust tracking algorithm in our endoscopic AR system, where we combine the benefits of both region and dense cues in a unified framework. Each kind of cues alone may not be adequate for tracking in endoscopic surgery. However, they have complementary characteristics, with region cues being more robust to motion blur and fast motion, and dense cues being more accurate when motion is not large. We also propose an appearance model adaption method and an occlusion processing method to effectively handle occlusions. Experiments on both synthetic dataset and simulated surgical environment show the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed method. This work presents a novel tracking strategy in medical AR applications.

Driver driving style plays an important role in vehicle energy management as well as driving safety. Furthermore, it is key for advance driver assistance systems development, toward increasing levels of vehicle automation. This fact has motivated numerous research and development efforts on driving style identification and classification. This paper provides a survey on driving style characterization and recognition revising a variety of algorithms, with particular emphasis on machine learning approaches based on current and future trends. Applications of driving style recognition to intelligent vehicle controls are also briefly discussed, including experts' predictions of the future development.

In this paper, we propose a deep neural network-based car-following model that has two distinctive properties. First, unlike most existing car-following models that take only the instantaneous velocity, velocity difference, and position difference as inputs, this new model takes the velocities, velocity differences, and position differences that were observed in the last few time intervals as inputs. That is, we assume that drivers’ actions are temporally dependent in this model and try to embed prediction capability or memory effect of human drivers in a natural and efficient way. Second, this car-following model is built in a data-driven way, in which we reduce human interference to the minimum degree. Specially, we use recently developing deep neural networks rather than conventional neural networks to establish the model, since deep learning technique provides us more flexibility and accuracy to describe complicated human actions. Tests on empirical trajectory records show that this deep neural network-based car-following model yield significantly higher simulation accuracy than existing car-following models. All these findings provide a novel way to study traffic flow theory and traffic simulations.

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.

As an emerging decentralized architecture and distributed computing paradigm underlying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, blockchain has attracted intensive attention in both research and applications in recent years. The key advantage of this technology lies in the fact that it enables the establishment of secured, trusted, and decentralized autonomous ecosystems for various scenarios, especially for better usage of the legacy devices, infrastructure, and resources. In this paper, we presented a systematic investigation of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Related fundamental rationales, technical advantages, existing and potential ecosystems of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are discussed, and a six-layer reference model of the blockchain framework is proposed with detailed description for each of its six layers. Potential applications of blockchain and cryptocurrencies are also addressed. Our aim here is to provide guidance and reference for future research along this promising and important direction.

Current approaches for facial landmark detection and head pose estimation first perform landmark detection, followed by fitting 3D face model or regression model to estimate head pose. Different from the existing methods, in this paper, we propose a unified method, called Coupled Cascade Regression (CCR), for simultaneous facial landmark detection and head pose estimation. At each cascade level, two separate regressors are learned to update the landmark locations and 3D face model parameters based on the local appearance features, respectively. Since 2D facial landmark locations and head pose parameters are related, we further apply the projection model to refine the prediction results in each cascade iteration and make them consistent. As a result, CCR can leverage both the learning methods and the projection model to simultaneously perform facial landmark detection and pose estimation to enhance the performances of both tasks. Experimental results on 300-W and BU datasets indicate that our proposed CCR method outperforms many conventional methods both for landmark detection and head pose estimation.

With the development of intelligent technologies, self-driving vehicles are considered as a promising solution against accident, traffic congestion and pollution problems. Intelligent vehicle techniques have been the research focus all over the world. However, full self-driving vehicles are still far away from its realization and extensive application due to safety requirements and cost considerations. As a novel breakthrough, PArallel VEhicles (PAVE) incorporate the ACP theory, which facilitates real-time interaction and optimization of the actual self-driving vehicles and the artificial ones. As a result, PAVE can maintain intelligent control of the actual self-driving vehicles and achieve the global optimization via software-defined self-driving vehicles, intelligent infrastructure construction, and parallel control center. Besides, PAVE can effectively reduce the cost of high-precision equipments on the actual self-driving vehicles via remote processing and intelligent road(side) infrastructure, and also achieve improved safety and reliability via remote control, guidance and planning.