MLOps -- Definitions, Tools and Challenges

This paper is an overview of the Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) area. Our aim is to define the operation and the components of such systems by highlighting the current problems and trends. In this context, we present the different tools and their usefulness in order to provide the corresponding guidelines. Moreover, the connection between MLOps and AutoML (Automated Machine Learning) is identified and how this combination could work is proposed.

Moment Transform-Based Compressive Sensing in Image Processing

Over the last decades, images have become an important source of information in many domains, thus their high quality has become necessary to acquire better information. One of the important issues that arise is image denoising, which means recovering a signal from inaccurately and/or partially measured samples. This interpretation is highly correlated to the compressive sensing theory, which is a revolutionary technology and implies that if a signal is sparse then the original signal can be obtained from a few measured values, which are much less, than the ones suggested by other used theories like Shannon's sampling theories. A strong factor in Compressive Sensing (CS) theory to achieve the sparsest solution and the noise removal from the corrupted image is the selection of the basis dictionary. In this paper, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and moment transform (Tchebichef, Krawtchouk) are compared in order to achieve image denoising of Gaussian additive white noise based on compressive sensing and sparse approximation theory. The experimental results revealed that the basis dictionaries constructed by the moment transform perform competitively to the traditional DCT. The latter transform shows a higher PSNR of 30.82 dB and the same 0.91 SSIM value as the Tchebichef transform. Moreover, from the sparsity point of view, Krawtchouk moments provide approximately 20-30% more sparse results than DCT.

Machine Learning Meets Natural Language Processing -- The story so far

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has evolved significantly over the last decade. This paper highlights the most important milestones of this period while trying to pinpoint the contribution of each individual model and algorithm to the overall progress. Furthermore, it focuses on issues still remaining to be solved, emphasizing the groundbreaking proposals of Transformers, BERT, and all the similar attention-based models.

Predictive Maintenance -- Bridging Artificial Intelligence and IoT

This paper highlights the trends in the field of predictive maintenance with the use of machine learning. With the continuous development of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, through IoT, the technologies that use artificial intelligence are evolving. As a result, industries have been using these technologies to optimize their production. Through scientific research conducted for this paper, conclusions were drawn about the trends in Predictive Maintenance applications with the use of machine learning bridging Artificial Intelligence and IoT. These trends are related to the types of industries in which Predictive Maintenance was applied, the models of artificial intelligence were implemented, mainly of machine learning and the types of sensors that are applied through the IoT to the applications. Six sectors were presented and the production sector was dominant as it accounted for 54.54% of total publications. In terms of artificial intelligence models, the most prevalent among ten were the Artificial Neural Networks, Support Vector Machine and Random Forest with 27.84%, 17.72% and 13.92% respectively. Finally, twelve categories of sensors emerged, of which the most widely used were the sensors of temperature and vibration with percentages of 60.71% and 46.42% correspondingly.

Machine Biometrics -- Towards Identifying Machines in a Smart City Environment

This paper deals with the identification of machines in a smart city environment. The concept of machine biometrics is proposed in this work for the first time, as a way to authenticate machine identities interacting with humans in everyday life. This definition is imposed in modern years where autonomous vehicles, social robots, etc. are considered active members of contemporary societies. In this context, the case of car identification from the engine behavioral biometrics is examined. For this purpose, 22 sound features were extracted and their discrimination capabilities were tested in combination with 9 different machine learning classifiers, towards identifying 5 car manufacturers. The experimental results revealed the ability of the proposed biometrics to identify cars with high accuracy up to 98% for the case of the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neural network model.

Machine learning for cloud resources management -- An overview

Nowadays, an important topic that is considered a lot is how to integrate Machine Learning(ML) to cloud resources management. In this study, our goal is to explore the most important cloud resources management issues that have been combined with ML and which present many promising results. To accomplish this, we used chronological charts based on some keywords that we considered important and tried to answer the question: is ML suitable for resources management problems in the cloud? Furthermore, a short discussion takes place on the data that are available and the open challenges on it. A big collection of researches is used to make sensible comparisons between the ML techniques that are used in the different kinds of cloud resources management fields and we propose the most suitable ML model for each field. 1

Performance Evaluation of Convolutional Neural Networks for Gait Recognition

In this paper, a performance evaluation of well-known deep learning models in gait recognition is presented. For this purpose, the transfer learning scheme is adopted to pre-trained models in order to fit the models to the CASIA-B dataset for solving a gait recognition task. In this context, 18 popular Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), were re-trained using Gait Energy Images (GEIs) of CASIA-B containing almost 14000 images of 124 classes under various conditions, and their performance was studied in terms of accuracy. Moreover, the performance of the studied models is managed to be explained by examining the parts of the images being considered by the models towards providing their decisions. The experimental results are very promising since almost all the models achieved a high accuracy of over 90%, which is robust to the increasing number of classes. Furthermore, an important outcome of this study is the fact that a recognition problem can be effectively solved by using CNNs pre-trained to different problems, thus eliminating the need for customized model design.