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Precision livestock farming (PLF) aims to improve the health and welfare of livestock animals and farming outcomes through the use of advanced technologies. Computer vision, combined with recent advances in machine learning and deep learning artificial intelligence approaches, offers a possible solution to the PLF ideal of 24/7 livestock monitoring that helps facilitate early detection of animal health and welfare issues. However, a significant number of livestock species are raised in large outdoor habitats that pose technological challenges for computer vision approaches. This review provides a comprehensive overview of computer vision methods and open challenges in outdoor animal monitoring. We include research from both the livestock and wildlife fields in the review because of the similarities in appearance, behaviour, and habitat for many livestock and wildlife. We focus on large terrestrial mammals, such as cattle, horses, deer, goats, sheep, koalas, giraffes, and elephants. We use an image processing pipeline to frame our discussion and highlight the current capabilities and open technical challenges at each stage of the pipeline. The review found a clear trend towards the use of deep learning approaches for animal detection, counting, and multi-species classification. We discuss in detail the applicability of current vision-based methods to PLF contexts and promising directions for future research., Comment: 28 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables

Hand gesture-based sign language recognition (SLR) is one of the most advanced applications of machine learning, and computer vision uses hand gestures. Although, in the past few years, many researchers have widely explored and studied how to address BSL problems, specific unaddressed issues remain, such as skeleton and transformer-based BSL recognition. In addition, the lack of evaluation of the BSL model in various concealed environmental conditions can prove the generalized property of the existing model by facing daily life signs. As a consequence, existing BSL recognition systems provide a limited perspective of their generalisation ability as they are tested on datasets containing few BSL alphabets that have a wide disparity in gestures and are easy to differentiate. To overcome these limitations, we propose a spatial-temporal attention-based BSL recognition model considering hand joint skeletons extracted from the sequence of images. The main aim of utilising hand skeleton-based BSL data is to ensure the privacy and low-resolution sequence of images, which need minimum computational cost and low hardware configurations. Our model captures discriminative structural displacements and short-range dependency based on unified joint features projected onto high-dimensional feature space. Specifically, the use of Separable TCN combined with a powerful multi-head spatial-temporal attention architecture generated high-performance accuracy. The extensive experiments with a proposed dataset and two benchmark BSL datasets with a wide range of evaluations, such as intra- and inter-dataset evaluation settings, demonstrated that our proposed models achieve competitive performance with extremely low computational complexity and run faster than existing models.

This study investigates the impact of Hofstede's cultural dimensions on abnormal core earnings management in multiple national cultural contexts. We employ an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression model with abnormal core earnings as the dependent variable. The independent variables analyzed include Hofstede's dimensions: Power Distance Index (PDI), Individualism (IDV), Masculinity (MAS), and Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI). Our findings reveal that individualism is positively associated with abnormal core earnings, suggesting that cultures characterized by high individualism may encourage practices that inflate earnings due to the prominence of personal achievement and rewards. In contrast, masculinity negatively correlates with abnormal core earnings, indicating that the risk-taking attributes associated with masculine cultures may deter earnings management. Interestingly, uncertainty avoidance is positively linked to abnormal core earnings, supporting the notion that managers tend to engage more in earnings management to minimize fluctuations in financial reports in cultures with high uncertainty avoidance. The relationship between power distance and abnormal core earnings is found to be non-significant, indicating no substantial effect in this context. These findings contribute to the literature on cultural influences in financial reporting, providing valuable insights for policymakers and multinational firms concerning the cultural contexts within which financial decisions and reporting occur., Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, "Published with European Journal of Business and Management"

Many studies have examined the connection between the intention to start a business and environmental values. However, there still needs to be more knowledge in the extant literature about how climate change campaigns influence sustainable entrepreneurial intention. This study uses the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to develop a theoretical framework to explain how climate change campaigns affect the intention to start a sustainable business. This interdisciplinary conceptual research model bridges the gap between climate awareness, sustainable values, and entrepreneurial intentions, offering a robust framework for understanding and fostering sustainable entrepreneurial behaviors. Our study lays the groundwork for future empirical studies and real-world interventions to advance sustainability through entrepreneurship., Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, Published with International Research Journal of Economics and Management Studies (IRJEMS)

Graph Neural Network (GNN) achieves great success for node-level and graph-level tasks via encoding meaningful topological structures of networks in various domains, ranging from social to biological networks. However, repeated aggregation operations lead to excessive mixing of node representations, particularly in dense regions with multiple GNN layers, resulting in nearly indistinguishable embeddings. This phenomenon leads to the oversmoothing problem that hampers downstream graph analytics tasks. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel and flexible truss-based graph sparsification model that prunes edges from dense regions of the graph. Pruning redundant edges in dense regions helps to prevent the aggregation of excessive neighborhood information during hierarchical message passing and pooling in GNN models. We then utilize our sparsification model in the state-of-the-art baseline GNNs and pooling models, such as GIN, SAGPool, GMT, DiffPool, MinCutPool, HGP-SL, DMonPool, and AdamGNN. Extensive experiments on different real-world datasets show that our model significantly improves the performance of the baseline GNN models in the graph classification task.

SMS, or short messaging service, is a widely used and cost-effective communication medium that has sadly turned into a haven for unwanted messages, commonly known as SMS spam. With the rapid adoption of smartphones and Internet connectivity, SMS spam has emerged as a prevalent threat. Spammers have taken notice of the significance of SMS for mobile phone users. Consequently, with the emergence of new cybersecurity threats, the number of SMS spam has expanded significantly in recent years. The unstructured format of SMS data creates significant challenges for SMS spam detection, making it more difficult to successfully fight spam attacks in the cybersecurity domain. In this work, we employ optimized and fine-tuned transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve the problem of spam message detection. We use a benchmark SMS spam dataset for this spam detection and utilize several preprocessing techniques to get clean and noise-free data and solve the class imbalance problem using the text augmentation technique. The overall experiment showed that our optimized fine-tuned BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) variant model RoBERTa obtained high accuracy with 99.84\%. We also work with Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques to calculate the positive and negative coefficient scores which explore and explain the fine-tuned model transparency in this text-based spam SMS detection task. In addition, traditional Machine Learning (ML) models were also examined to compare their performance with the transformer-based models. This analysis describes how LLMs can make a good impact on complex textual-based spam data in the cybersecurity field.

The rise of generative artificial intelligence, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), has intensified the imperative to scrutinize fairness alongside accuracy. Recent studies have begun to investigate fairness evaluations for LLMs within domains such as recommendations. Given that personalization is an intrinsic aspect of recommendation systems, its incorporation into fairness assessments is paramount. Yet, the degree to which current fairness evaluation frameworks account for personalization remains unclear. Our comprehensive literature review aims to fill this gap by examining how existing frameworks handle fairness evaluations of LLMs, with a focus on the integration of personalization factors. Despite an exhaustive collection and analysis of relevant works, we discovered that most evaluations overlook personalization, a critical facet of recommendation systems, thereby inadvertently perpetuating unfair practices. Our findings shed light on this oversight and underscore the urgent need for more nuanced fairness evaluations that acknowledge personalization. Such improvements are vital for fostering equitable development within the AI community., Comment: 10 pages

The segmentation of satellite images is crucial in remote sensing applications. Existing methods face challenges in recognizing small-scale objects in satellite images for semantic segmentation primarily due to ignoring the low-level characteristics of the underlying network and due to containing distinct amounts of information by different feature maps. Thus, in this research, a tri-level attention-based DeepLabv3+ architecture (DeepTriNet) is proposed for the semantic segmentation of satellite images. The proposed hybrid method combines squeeze-and-excitation networks (SENets) and tri-level attention units (TAUs) with the vanilla DeepLabv3+ architecture, where the TAUs are used to bridge the semantic feature gap among encoders output and the SENets used to put more weight on relevant features. The proposed DeepTriNet finds which features are the more relevant and more generalized way by its self-supervision rather we annotate them. The study showed that the proposed DeepTriNet performs better than many conventional techniques with an accuracy of 98% and 77%, IoU 80% and 58%, precision 88% and 68%, and recall of 79% and 55% on the 4-class Land-Cover.ai dataset and the 15-class GID-2 dataset respectively. The proposed method will greatly contribute to natural resource management and change detection in rural and urban regions through efficient and semantic satellite image segmentation, Comment: Keywords: Attention mechanism, Deep learning, Satellite image, DeepLabv3+, Segmentation

Persistent homology is a mathematical tool used for studying the shape of data by extracting its topological features. It has gained popularity in network science due to its applicability in various network mining problems, including clustering, graph classification, and graph neural networks. The definition of persistent homology for graphs is relatively straightforward, as graphs possess distinct intrinsic distances and a simplicial complex structure. However, hypergraphs present a challenge in preserving topological information since they may not have a simplicial complex structure. In this paper, we define several topological characterizations of hypergraphs in defining hypergraph persistent homology to prioritize different higher-order structures within hypergraphs. We further use these persistent homology filtrations in classifying four different real-world hypergraphs and compare their performance to the state-of-the-art graph neural network models. Experimental results demonstrate that persistent homology filtrations are effective in classifying hypergraphs and outperform the baseline models. To the best of our knowledge, this study represents the first systematic attempt to tackle the hypergraph classification problem using persistent homology.

Single-port ferroelectric FET (FeFET) that performs write and read operations on the same electrical gate prevents its wide application in tunable analog electronics and suffers from read disturb, especially to the high-threshold voltage (VTH) state as the retention energy barrier is reduced by the applied read bias. To address both issues, we propose to adopt a read disturb-free dual-port FeFET where write is performed on the gate featuring a ferroelectric layer and the read is done on a separate gate featuring a non-ferroelectric dielectric. Combining the unique structure and the separate read gate, read disturb is eliminated as the applied field is aligned with polarization in the high-VTH state and thus improving its stability, while it is screened by the channel inversion charge and exerts no negative impact on the low-VTH state stability. Comprehensive theoretical and experimental validation have been performed on fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FDSOI) FeFETs integrated on 22 nm platform, which intrinsically has dual ports with its buried oxide layer acting as the non-ferroelectric dielectric. Novel applications that can exploit the proposed dual-port FeFET are proposed and experimentally demonstrated for the first time, including FPGA that harnesses its read disturb-free feature and tunable analog electronics (e.g., frequency tunable ring oscillator in this work) leveraging the separated write and read paths., Comment: 32 pages

Graph Neural networks (GNNs) have recently become a powerful technique for many graph-related tasks including graph classification. Current GNN models apply different graph pooling methods that reduce the number of nodes and edges to learn the higher-order structure of the graph in a hierarchical way. All these methods primarily rely on the one-hop neighborhood. However, they do not consider the higher- order structure of the graph. In this work, we propose a multi-channel Motif-based Graph Pooling method named (MPool) captures the higher-order graph structure with motif and local and global graph structure with a combination of selection and clustering-based pooling operations. As the first channel, we develop node selection-based graph pooling by designing a node ranking model considering the motif adjacency of nodes. As the second channel, we develop cluster-based graph pooling by designing a spectral clustering model using motif adjacency. As the final layer, the result of each channel is aggregated into the final graph representation. We perform extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets and show that our proposed method shows better accuracy than the baseline methods for graph classification tasks.

Sequence classification has a wide range of real-world applications in different domains, such as genome classification in health and anomaly detection in business. However, the lack of explicit features in sequence data makes it difficult for machine learning models. While Neural Network (NN) models address this with learning features automatically, they are limited to capturing adjacent structural connections and ignore global, higher-order information between the sequences. To address these challenges in the sequence classification problems, we propose a novel Hypergraph Attention Network model, namely Seq-HyGAN. To capture the complex structural similarity between sequence data, we first create a hypergraph where the sequences are depicted as hyperedges and subsequences extracted from sequences are depicted as nodes. Additionally, we introduce an attention-based Hypergraph Neural Network model that utilizes a two-level attention mechanism. This model generates a sequence representation as a hyperedge while simultaneously learning the crucial subsequences for each sequence. We conduct extensive experiments on four data sets to assess and compare our model with several state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed Seq-HyGAN model can effectively classify sequence data and significantly outperform the baselines. We also conduct case studies to investigate the contribution of each module in Seq-HyGAN.

Accurate recognition of food items along with quality assessment is of paramount importance in the agricultural industry. Such automated systems can speed up the wheel of the food processing sector and save tons of manual labor. In this connection, the recent advancement of Deep learning-based architectures has introduced a wide variety of solutions offering remarkable performance in several classification tasks. In this work, we have exploited the concept of Densely Connected Convolutional Neural Networks (DenseNets) for fruit quality assessment. The feature propagation towards the deeper layers has enabled the network to tackle the vanishing gradient problems and ensured the reuse of features to learn meaningful insights. Evaluating on a dataset of 19,526 images containing six fruits having three quality grades for each, the proposed pipeline achieved a remarkable accuracy of 99.67%. The robustness of the model was further tested for fruit classification and quality assessment tasks where the model produced a similar performance, which makes it suitable for real-life applications., Comment: Accepted in 12th ICECE (4 pages, 3 Figures, 3 Tables)

Differential private (DP) query and response mechanisms have been widely adopted in various applications based on Internet of Things (IoT) to leverage variety of benefits through data analysis. The protection of sensitive information is achieved through the addition of noise into the query response which hides the individual records in a dataset. However, the noise addition negatively impacts the accuracy which gives rise to privacy-utility trade-off. Moreover, the DP budget or cost $\epsilon$ is often fixed and it accumulates due to the sequential composition which limits the number of queries. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a framework known as optimized privacy-utility trade-off framework for data sharing in IoT (OPU-TF-IoT). Firstly, OPU-TF-IoT uses an adaptive approach to utilize the DP budget $\epsilon$ by considering a new metric of population or dataset size along with the query. Secondly, our proposed heuristic search algorithm reduces the DP budget accordingly whereas satisfying both data owner and data user. Thirdly, to make the utilization of DP budget transparent to the data owners, a blockchain-based verification mechanism is also proposed. Finally, the proposed framework is evaluated using real-world datasets and compared with the traditional DP model and other related state-of-the-art works. The results confirm that our proposed framework not only utilize the DP budget $\epsilon$ efficiently, but it also optimizes the number of queries. Furthermore, the data owners can effectively make sure that their data is shared accordingly through our blockchain-based verification mechanism which encourages them to share their data into the IoT system.

The integration of permissioned blockchain such as Hyperledger fabric (HF) and Industrial internet of Things (IIoT) has opened new opportunities for interdependent supply chain partners to improve their performance through data sharing and coordination. The multichannel mechanism, private data collection and querying mechanism of HF enable private data sharing, transparency, traceability, and verification across the supply chain. However, the existing querying mechanism of HF needs further improvement for statistical data sharing because the query is evaluated on the original data recorded on the ledger. As a result, it gives rise to privacy issues such as leak of business secrets, tracking of resources and assets, and disclose of personal information. Therefore, we solve this problem by proposing a differentially private enhanced permissioned blockchain for private data sharing in the context of supply chain in IIoT which is known as (EDH-IIoT). We propose algorithms to efficiently utilize the $\epsilon$ through the reuse of the privacy budget for the repeated queries. Furthermore, the reuse and tracking of $\epsilon$ enable the data owner to get ensure that $\epsilon$ does not exceed the threshold which is the maximum privacy budget ($\epsilon_{t}$). Finally, we model two privacy attacks namely linking attack and composition attack to evaluate and compare privacy preservation, and the efficiency of reuse of {\epsilon} with the default chaincode of HF and traditional differential privacy model, respectively. The results confirm that EDH-IIoT obtains an accuracy of 97% in the shared data for $\epsilon_{t}$ = 1, and a reduction of 35.96% in spending of $\epsilon$.

Lane marking detection is fundamental for both advanced driving assistance systems. However, detecting lane is highly challenging when the visibility of a road lane marking is low due to real-life challenging environment and adverse weather. Most of the lane detection methods suffer from four types of challenges: (i) light effects i.e., shadow, glare of light, reflection etc.; (ii) Obscured visibility of eroded, blurred, colored and cracked lane caused by natural disasters and adverse weather; (iii) lane marking occlusion by different objects from surroundings (wiper, vehicles etc.); and (iv) presence of confusing lane like lines inside the lane view e.g., guardrails, pavement marking, road divider etc. Here, we propose a robust lane detection and tracking method with three key technologies. First, we introduce a comprehensive intensity threshold range (CITR) to improve the performance of the canny operator in detecting low intensity lane edges. Second, we propose a two-step lane verification technique, the angle based geometric constraint (AGC) and length-based geometric constraint (LGC) followed by Hough Transform, to verify the characteristics of lane marking and to prevent incorrect lane detection. Finally, we propose a novel lane tracking technique, by defining a range of horizontal lane position (RHLP) along the x axis which will be updating with respect to the lane position of previous frame. It can keep track of the lane position when either left or right or both lane markings are partially and fully invisible. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method we used the DSDLDE [1] and SLD [2] dataset with 1080x1920 and 480x720 resolutions at 24 and 25 frames/sec respectively. Experimental results show that the average detection rate is 97.55%, and the average processing time is 22.33 msec/frame, which outperform the state of-the-art method., Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures, submitted to IEEE Access