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Manuel Mazzara

Publications and source records attributed to Manuel Mazzara.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Hyperspectral Image Classification-Traditional to Deep Models: A Survey for Future Prospects

Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) has been extensively utilized in many real-life applications because it benefits from the detailed spectral information contained in each pixel. Notably, the complex characteristics i.e., the nonlinear relation among the captured spectral information and the corresponding object of HSI data make accurate classification challenging for traditional methods. In the last few years, Deep Learning (DL) has been substantiated as a powerful feature extractor that effectively addresses the nonlinear problems that appeared in a number of computer vision tasks. This prompts the deployment of DL for HSI classification (HSIC) which revealed good performance. This survey enlists a systematic overview of DL for HSIC and compared state-of-the-art strategies on the said topic. Primarily, we will encapsulate the main challenges of traditional machine learning for HSIC and then we will acquaint the superiority of DL to address these problems. This survey breakdown the state-of-the-art DL frameworks into spectral features, spatial features, and together spatial-spectral features to systematically analyze the achievements (future research directions as well) of these frameworks for HSIC. Moreover, we will consider the fact that DL requires a large number of labeled training examples whereas acquiring such a number for HSIC is challenging in terms of time and cost. Therefore, this survey discusses some strategies to improve the generalization performance of DL strategies which can provide some future guidelines.

eess.IV↗

Attention Mechanism Meets with Hybrid Dense Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are more suitable, indeed. However, fixed kernel sizes make traditional CNN too specific, neither flexible nor conducive to feature learning, thus impacting on the classification accuracy. The convolution of different kernel size networks may overcome this problem by capturing more discriminating and relevant information. In light of this, the proposed solution aims at combining the core idea of 3D and 2D Inception net with the Attention mechanism to boost the HSIC CNN performance in a hybrid scenario. The resulting \textit{attention-fused hybrid network} (AfNet) is based on three attention-fused parallel hybrid sub-nets with different kernels in each block repeatedly using high-level features to enhance the final ground-truth maps. In short, AfNet is able to selectively filter out the discriminative features critical for classification. Several tests on HSI datasets provided competitive results for AfNet compared to state-of-the-art models. The proposed pipeline achieved, indeed, an overall accuracy of 97\% for the Indian Pines, 100\% for Botswana, 99\% for Pavia University, Pavia Center, and Salinas datasets.

cs.CV↗

3D/2D regularized CNN feature hierarchy for Hyperspectral image classification

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been rigorously studied for Hyperspectral Image Classification (HSIC) and are known to be effective in exploiting joint spatial-spectral information with the expense of lower generalization performance and learning speed due to the hard labels and non-uniform distribution over labels. Several regularization techniques have been used to overcome the aforesaid issues. However, sometimes models learn to predict the samples extremely confidently which is not good from a generalization point of view. Therefore, this paper proposed an idea to enhance the generalization performance of a hybrid CNN for HSIC using soft labels that are a weighted average of the hard labels and uniform distribution over ground labels. The proposed method helps to prevent CNN from becoming over-confident. We empirically show that in improving generalization performance, label smoothing also improves model calibration which significantly improves beam-search. Several publicly available Hyperspectral datasets are used to validate the experimental evaluation which reveals improved generalization performance, statistical significance, and computational complexity as compared to the state-of-the-art models. The code will be made available at https://github.com/mahmad00.

cs.CV↗

Hyperspectral Image Classification: Artifacts of Dimension Reduction on Hybrid CNN

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) has been extensively studied for Hyperspectral Image Classification (HSIC) more specifically, 2D and 3D CNN models have proved highly efficient in exploiting the spatial and spectral information of Hyperspectral Images. However, 2D CNN only considers the spatial information and ignores the spectral information whereas 3D CNN jointly exploits spatial-spectral information at a high computational cost. Therefore, this work proposed a lightweight CNN (3D followed by 2D-CNN) model which significantly reduces the computational cost by distributing spatial-spectral feature extraction across a lighter model alongside a preprocessing that has been carried out to improve the classification results. Five benchmark Hyperspectral datasets (i.e., SalinasA, Salinas, Indian Pines, Pavia University, Pavia Center, and Botswana) are used for experimental evaluation. The experimental results show that the proposed pipeline outperformed in terms of generalization performance, statistical significance, and computational complexity, as compared to the state-of-the-art 2D/3D CNN models except commonly used computationally expensive design choices.

cs.CV↗

Multi Sensor-based Implicit User Identification

Smartphones have ubiquitously integrated into our home and work environments, however, users normally rely on explicit but inefficient identification processes in a controlled environment. Therefore, when a device is stolen, a thief can have access to the owner's personal information and services against the stored passwords. As a result of this potential scenario, this work proposes an automatic legitimate user identification system based on gait biometrics extracted from user walking patterns captured by a smartphone. A set of preprocessing schemes is applied to calibrate noisy and invalid samples and augment the gait-induced time and frequency domain features, then further optimized using a non-linear unsupervised feature selection method. The selected features create an underlying gait biometric representation able to discriminate among individuals and identify them uniquely. Different classifiers (i.e. Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Bagging, and Extreme Learning Machine (ELM)) are adopted to achieve accurate legitimate user identification. Extensive experiments on a group of $16$ individuals in an indoor environment show the effectiveness of the proposed solution: with $5$ to $70$ samples per window, KNN and bagging classifiers achieve $87-99\%$ accuracy, $82-98\%$ for ELM, and $81-94\%$ for SVM. The proposed pipeline achieves a $100\%$ true positive and $0\%$ false-negative rate for almost all classifiers.

cs.CR↗

Code Review in the Classroom

This paper presents a case study to examine the affinity of the code review process among young developers in an academic setting. Code review is indispensable considering the positive outcomes it generates. However, it is not an individual activity and requires substantial interaction among stakeholders, deliverance, and acceptance of feedback, timely actions upon feedback as well as the ability to agree on a solution in the wake of diverse viewpoints. Young developers in a classroom setting provide a clear picture of the potential favourable and problematic areas of the code review process. Their feedback suggests that the process has been well received with some points to better the process. This paper can be used as guidelines to perform code reviews in the classroom.

cs.CY↗

The role of formalism in system requirements (full version)

A major determinant of the quality of software systems is the quality of their requirements, which should be both understandable and precise. Most requirements are written in natural language, good for understandability but lacking in precision. To make requirements precise, researchers have for years advocated the use of mathematics-based notations and methods, known as "formal". Many exist, differing in their style, scope and applicability. The present survey discusses some of the main formal approaches and compares them to informal methods. The analysis uses a set of 9 complementary criteria, such as level of abstraction, tool availability, traceability support. It classifies the approaches into five categories: general-purpose, natural-language, graph/automata, other mathematical notations, seamless (programming-language-based). It presents approaches in all of these categories, altogether 22 different ones, including for example SysML, Relax, Eiffel, Event-B, Alloy. The review discusses a number of open questions, including seamlessness, the role of tools and education, and how to make industrial applications benefit more from the contributions of formal approaches. (This is the full version of the survey, including some sections and two appendices which, because of length restrictions, do not appear in the submitted version.)

cs.SE↗

An Open Source Solution for Smart Contract-based Parking

This paper discusses an open source solution to smart-parking in highly urbanized areas. Interviews have been conducted with domain experts, user stories defined and a system architecture has been proposed with a case study. Our solution allows independent owners of parking space to be integrated into one unified system, that facilitates the parking situation in a smart city. The utilization of such a system raises the issues of trust and transparency among several actors of the parking process. In order to tackle those, we propose a smart contract-based solution, that brings in trust by encapsulating sensitive relations and processes into transparent and distributed smart contracts.

cs.CY↗

Machine Learning and value generation in Software Development: a survey

Machine Learning (ML) has become a ubiquitous tool for predicting and classifying data and has found application in several problem domains, including Software Development (SD). This paper reviews the literature between 2000 and 2019 on the use the learning models that have been employed for programming effort estimation, predicting risks and identifying and detecting defects. This work is meant to serve as a starting point for practitioners willing to add ML to their software development toolbox. It categorises recent literature and identifies trends and limitations. The survey shows as some authors have agreed that industrial applications of ML for SD have not been as popular as the reported results would suggest. The conducted investigation shows that, despite having promising findings for a variety of SD tasks, most of the studies yield vague results, in part due to the lack of comprehensive datasets in this problem domain. The paper ends with concluding remarks and suggestions for future research.

cs.SE↗

A survey of of blockchain-based solutions for Energy Industry

The energy industry needs to shift to a new paradigm from its classical model of energy generation, distribution, and management. This shift is necessary to handle digitization, increased renewable energy generation, and to achieve goals of environmental sustainability. This shift has several challenges on its way and has been seen through research and development that blockchain which is one of the budding technology in this era could be suitable for addressing those challenges. This paper is aimed at the survey of all the research and development related to blockchain in the energy industry and uses a software engineering approach to categories all the existing work in several clusters such as challenges addressed, quality attribute promoted, the maturity level of the solutions, etc. This survey provides researchers in this field a well-defined categorization and insight into the existing work in this field from 3 different perspectives (challenges, quality attributes, maturity).

cs.CY↗

A Machine to Machine framework for the charging of Electric Autonomous Vehicles

Electric Autonomous Vehicles (EAVs) have gained increasing attention of industry, governments and scientific communities concerned about issues related to classic transportation including accidents and casualties, gas emissions and air pollution, intensive traffic and city viability. One of the aspects, however, that prevent a broader adoption of this technology is the need for human interference to charge EAVs, which is still mostly manual and time-consuming. This study approaches such a problem by introducing the Inno-EAV, an open-source charging framework for EAVs that employs machine-to-machine (M2M) distributed communication. The idea behind M2M is to have networked devices that can interact, exchange information and perform actions without any manual assistance of humans. The advantages of the Inno-EAV include the automation of charging processes and the collection of relevant data that can support better decision making in the spheres of energy distribution. In this paper, we present the software design of the framework, the development process, the emphasis on the distributed architecture and the networked communication, and we discuss the back-end database that is used to store information about car owners, cars, and charging stations.

cs.CY↗

From DevOps to DevDataOps: Data Management in DevOps processes

DevOps is a quite effective approach for managing software development and operation, as confirmed by plenty of success stories in real applications and case studies. DevOps is now becoming the main-stream solution adopted by the software industry in development, able to reduce the time to market and costs while improving quality and ensuring evolvability and adaptability of the resulting software architecture. Among the aspects to take into account in a DevOps process, data is assuming strategic importance, since it allows to gain insights from the operation directly into the development, the main objective of a DevOps approach. Data can be therefore considered as the fuel of the DevOps process, requiring proper solutions for its management. Based on the amount of data generated, its variety, velocity, variability, value and other relevant features, DevOps data management can be mainly framed into the BigData category. This allows exploiting BigData solutions for the management of DevOps data generated throughout the process, including artefacts, code, documentation, logs and so on. This paper aims at investigating data management in DevOps processes, identifying related issues, challenges and potential solutions taken from the BigData world as well as from new trends adopting and adapting DevOps approaches in data management, i.e. DataOps.

cs.SE↗

Anomaly Detection in DevOps Toolchain

The tools employed in the DevOps Toolchain generates a large quantity of data that is typically ignored or inspected only in particular occasions, at most. However, the analysis of such data could enable the extraction of useful information about the status and evolution of the project. For example, metrics like the "lines of code added since the last release" or "failures detected in the staging environment" are good indicators for predicting potential risks in the incoming release. In order to prevent problems appearing in later stages of production, an anomaly detection system can operate in the staging environment to compare the current incoming release with previous ones according to predefined metrics. The analysis is conducted before going into production to identify anomalies which should be addressed by human operators that address false-positive and negatives that can appear. In this paper, we describe a prototypical implementation of the aforementioned idea in the form of a "proof of concept". The current study effectively demonstrates the feasibility of the approach for a set of implemented functionalities.

cs.SE↗

Towards Blockchain-based Multi-Agent Robotic Systems: Analysis, Classification and Applications

Decentralization, immutability and transparency make of Blockchain one of the most innovative technology of recent years. This paper presents an overview of solutions based on Blockchain technology for multi-agent robotic systems, and provide an analysis and classification of this emerging field. The reasons for implementing Blockchain in a multi-robot network may be to increase the interaction efficiency between agents by providing more trusted information exchange, reaching a consensus in trustless conditions, assessing robot productivity or detecting performance problems, identifying intruders, allocating plans and tasks, deploying distributed solutions and joint missions. Blockchain-based applications are discussed to demonstrate how distributed ledger can be used to extend the number of research platforms and libraries for multi-agent robotic systems.

cs.RO↗

Towards A Broader Acceptance Of Formal Verification Tools: The Role Of Education

Formal methods yet advantageous, face challenges towards wide acceptance and adoption in software development practices. The major reason being presumed complexity. The issue can be addressed by academia with a thoughtful plan of teaching and practise. The user study detailed in this paper is examining AutoProof tool with the motivation to identify complexities attributed to formal methods. Participants' (students of Masters program in Computer Science) performance and feedback on the experience with formal methods assisted us in extracting specific problem areas that effect tool usability. The study results infer, along with improvements in verification tool functionalities, teaching program must be modified to include pre-requisite courses to make formal methods easily adapted by students and promoting their usage in software development process.

cs.SE↗

Seeking Optimum System Settings for Physical Activity Recognition on Smartwatches

Physical activity recognition (PAR) using wearable devices can provide valued information regarding an individual's degree of functional ability and lifestyle. In this regards, smartphone-based physical activity recognition is a well-studied area. Research on smartwatch-based PAR, on the other hand, is still in its infancy. Through a large-scale exploratory study, this work aims to investigate the smartwatch-based PAR domain. A detailed analysis of various feature banks and classification methods are carried out to find the optimum system settings for the best performance of any smartwatch-based PAR system for both personal and impersonal models. To further validate our hypothesis for both personal (The classifier is built using the data only from one specific user) and impersonal (The classifier is built using the data from every user except the one under study) models, we tested single subject validation process for smartwatch-based activity recognition.

cs.CY↗

DevOps and its Philosophy : Education Matters!

DevOps processes comply with principles and offer practices with main objective to support efficiently the evolution of IT systems. To be efficient a DevOps process relies on a set of integrated tools. DevOps is the first required competency together with Agile Method required by the industry. DevOps processes are sharing many aspects with microservices approaches especially the modularity and flexibility which enables continuous change and delivery. As a new approach it is necessary to developp and offer to the academy and to the industry training programs to prepare our engineers in the best possible way. In this chapter we present the main aspects of the educational effort made in the recent years to educate to the concepts and values of the DevOps philosophy. This includes principles, practices, tools and architectures, primarily the Microservice architectural style. Two experiences have been made, one at academic level as a master program course and the other, as an industrial training. Based on those two experiences, we provide a comparative analysis and some proposals in order to develop and improve DevOps education for the future.

cs.SE↗

Size Matters: Microservices Research and Applications

In this chapter we offer an overview of microservices providing the introductory information that a reader should know before continuing reading this book. We introduce the idea of microservices and we discuss some of the current research challenges and real-life software applications where the microservice paradigm play a key role. We have identified a set of areas where both researcher and developer can propose new ideas and technical solutions.

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