Publications

In this study, we present a new approach to the face retrieval and face classification problem, which exploits available expert's knowledge and introduces a novel way of describing facial features. These features are described by manually assigned weights corresponding to membership grades with respect to the linguistic descriptors such as short, medium, or long. In the series of experiments, we also use weights produced by the Analytic Hierarchy Process aimed at producing saliences of facial cues. We identify a group of the most essential facial features.

Current fully-supervised facial landmark detection methods have progressed rapidly and achieved remarkable performance. However, they still suffer when coping with faces under large poses and heavy occlusions for inaccurate facial shape constraints and insufficient labeled training samples. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised framework, i.e., a Self-Calibrated Pose Attention Network (SCPAN) to achieve more robust and precise facial landmark detection in challenging scenarios. To be specific, a Boundary-Aware Landmark Intensity (BALI) field is proposed to model more effective facial shape constraints by fusing boundary and landmark intensity field information. Moreover, a Self-Calibrated Pose Attention (SCPA) model is designed to provide a self-learned objective function that enforces intermediate supervision without label information by introducing a self-calibrated mechanism and a pose attention mask. We show that by integrating the BALI fields and SCPA model into a novel self-calibrated pose attention network, more facial prior knowledge can be learned and the detection accuracy and robustness of our method for faces with large poses and heavy occlusions have been improved. The experimental results obtained for challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the literature.

This paper presents action research to analyze an approach for assessment of the alleged agile transformation. This approach was implemented at AK Bars Digital Technologies, an IT spin-off of one of the largest banks in Russia using the Scaled Agile Framework. The approach is based on the Goal-Question-Metric approach, non-invasive measurement collection, and systemic analysis. It uses data from several different sources, including interviews, code repositories, user ratings in the play stores, and templates for agile assessment. The effectiveness of the approach is subjectively validated by the adoption of the proposed recommendations by the banks’ senior management. Details are provided on the approach, the required effort from the side of both those assessing and of the people being assessed and the results. The final part of the paper is devoted to the discussion of its generalizability and the plan for future experimentation and refinement.

Task scheduling of multiple UAVs has become a highly active area of research in recent years. Previous research has generally solved the problem in a whole manner, which makes it hard to efficiently generate high-quality task scheduling schemes due to prohibitive computational complexity. By contrast, the paper constructs a novel divide and conquer framework for multi-UAV task scheduling (DCF), which partitions the original multi-UAV scheduling problem into multiple scheduling sub-problems for all the UAVs. To be specific, DCF includes two phases: one is the task allocation phase which produces multiple scheduling sub-problems and the other is the single UAV scheduling phase which generates the scheduling scheme with sequential tasks for each single UAV considering constraints involving UAV capabilities and task demands. Two phases are iteratively performed until the predefined stopping criteria are met. In the task allocation phase, we propose a tabu-list-based simulated annealing (SATL) algorithm to realize task allocation among multiple UAVs. After obtaining the task allocation scheme, a satisfactory scheduling scheme of each single UAV is generated by variable neighborhood descent (VND) algorithm. Extensive experiments and comparative studies are conducted, demonstrating the efficiency of DCF and the proposed SATL-VND algorithm.

In this study, a novel method for generating multiple-choice tests is presented, which extracts the required number of tests of the same levels of difficulty in a single attempt and approximates the difficulty level requirement given by users. We propose an approach using parallelism and Pareto optimization for multi-swarm migration in a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Multi-PSO is proposed for shortening the computing time. The proposed migration of PSOs increases the diversity of tests and controls the overlap of extracted tests. The experimental results show that the proposed method can generate many tests from question banks satisfying predefined levels of difficulty. Additionally, the developed method is shown to be effective in terms of many criteria when compared with other methods such as manually extracted tests, a simulated annealing algorithm (SA), random methods and PSO-based approaches in terms of the number of successful solutions, accuracy, standard deviation, search speed, and the number of questions overlapping between the exam questions, as well as for changing the search space, changing the number of individuals, changing the number of swarms, and changing the difficulty requirements.