The data model is a critical component of an Adaptive Web System (AWS). The major goals of such a data model are describing the application domain of the AWS and capturing data about the user in order to support the “adaptation effect”. There have been many proposals for data models, principally based on knowledge representation, machine learning, logic and reasoning, and, recently, ontologies. These models are focused on the implementation of the core layer of AWS, that is realizing the adaptation of contents and presentations of the system, but sometimes they are poor with respect to the application domain design. In this paper, we present an extension of the state-of-the-art XML Adaptive Hypermedia Model (XAHM), Object-Oriented XAHM (OO-XAHM) that supports the application domain modeling using an object-oriented approach. We also provide the formal definition of the model, its description via Unified Modeling Language (UML), and its implementation using XML Schema. Finally, we provide a complete case study that focuses the attention on the well-known Italian archaeological site Pompeii.
Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising approach to address privacy concerns inherent in Machine Learning (ML) practices. However, conventional FL methods, particularly those following the Centralized FL (CFL) paradigm, utilize a central server for global aggregation, which exhibits limitations such as bottleneck and single point of failure. To address these issues, the Decentralized FL (DFL) paradigm has been proposed, which removes the client–server boundary and enables all participants to engage in model training and aggregation tasks. Nevertheless, as CFL, DFL remains vulnerable to adversarial attacks, notably poisoning attacks that undermine model performance. While existing research on model robustness has predominantly focused on CFL, there is a noteworthy gap in understanding the model robustness of the DFL paradigm. In this paper, a thorough review of poisoning attacks targeting the model robustness in DFL systems, as well as their corresponding countermeasures, are presented. Additionally, a solution called DART is proposed to evaluate the robustness of DFL models, which is implemented and integrated into a DFL platform. Through extensive experiments, this paper compares the behavior of CFL and DFL under diverse poisoning attacks, pinpointing key factors affecting attack spread and effectiveness within the DFL. It also evaluates the performance of different defense mechanisms and investigates whether defense mechanisms designed for CFL are compatible with DFL. The empirical results provide insights into research challenges and suggest ways to improve the robustness of DFL models for future research.
The increasing use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in both military and civilian applications, such as infrastructure inspection, package delivery, and recreational activities, underscores the importance of enhancing their autonomous functionalities. Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly deep learning-based computer vision (DL-based CV), plays a crucial role in this enhancement. This paper aims to provide a systematic literature review (SLR) of Scopus-indexed research studies published from 2019 to 2024, focusing on DL-based CV approaches for autonomous UAV applications. By analyzing 173 studies, we categorize the research into four domains: sensing and inspection, landing, surveillance and tracking, and search and rescue. Our review reveals a significant increase in research utilizing computer vision for UAV applications, with over 39.5 % of studies employing the You Only Look Once (YOLO) framework. We discuss the key findings, including the dominant trends, challenges, and opportunities in the field, and highlight emerging technologies such as in-sensor computing. This review provides valuable insights into the current state and future directions of DL-based CV for autonomous UAVs, emphasizing its growing significance as legislative frameworks evolve to support these technologies.
In today’s digital and internet era, threat intelligence analysis is of paramount importance to ensure network and information security. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing, aimed at identifying and extracting specific types of named entities from text, such as person names, locations, organization names, dates, times, currencies, and more. The quality of entities determines the effectiveness of upper-layer applications such as knowledge graphs. Recently, there has been a scarcity of training data in the threat intelligence field, and single models suffer from poor generalization ability. To address this, we propose a multi-view learning model, named the Few-shot Threat Intelligence Named Entity Recognition Model (FTM). We enhance the fusion method based on FTM, and further propose the FTM-GRU (Gate Recurrent Unit) model. The FTM model is based on the Tri-training algorithm to collaboratively train three few-shot NER models, leveraging the complementary nature of different model views to enable them to capture more threat intelligence domain knowledge at the coding level.FTM-GRU improves the fusion of multiple views. FTM-GRU uses the improved GRU model structure to control the memory and forgetting of view information, and introduces a relevance calculation unit to avoid redundancy of view information while highlighting important semantic features. We label and construct a few-shot Threat Intelligence Dataset (TID), and experiments on TID as well as the publicly available National Vulnerability Database (NVD) validate the effectiveness of our model for NER in the threat intelligence domain. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves better recognition results in the task.
Otitis media (OM) is a common infection or inflammation of the middle ear causing conductive hearing loss that primarily affects children and may delay speech, language, and cognitive development. OM can manifest itself in different forms, and can be diagnosed using (video) otoscopy (visualizing the tympanic membrane) or (video) pneumatic otoscopy and tympanometry. Accurate diagnosis of OM is challenging due to subtle differences in otoscopic features. This research aims to develop an automated computer-aided design (CAD) system to assist clinicians in diagnosing OM using otoscopy images. The ground truths, generated manually and validated by otolaryngologists, are utilized to train the proposed nested U-Net++ model. Ten clinically relevant gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) and morphological features were extracted from the segmented Region of Interest (ROI) and validated for OM classification based on a statistical significance test. These features serve as input for a Graph Neural Network (GNN) model, the base model in our research. An optimized GNN model is proposed after ablation study of the base model. Three datasets, one private dataset, and two public ones have been used, where the private dataset is utilized for both training and testing, and the public datasets are used to test the robustness of the proposed GNN model only. The proposed GNN model obtained the highest accuracy in diagnosing OM: 99.38 %, 93.51 %, and 91.38 % for the private dataset, public dataset1, and public dataset2, respectively. The proposed methodology and results of this research might enhance clinicians' effectiveness in diagnosing OM.