Abstract

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
SARS-CoV-2 has presented direct and indirect challenges to the scientific community. One of the most prominent indirect challenges advents from the mandatory use of face masks in a large number of countries. Face recognition methods struggle to perform identity verification with similar accuracy on masked and unmasked individuals. It has been shown that the performance of these methods drops considerably in the presence of face masks, especially if the reference image is unmasked. We propose FocusFace, a multi-task architecture that uses contrastive learning to be able to accurately perform masked face recognition. The proposed architecture is designed to be trained from scratch or to work on top of state-of-the-art face recognition methods without sacrificing the capabilities of a existing models in conventional face recognition tasks. We also explore different approaches to design the contrastive learning module. Results are presented in terms of masked-masked (MM) and unmasked-masked (U-M) face verification performance. For both settings, the results are on par with published methods, but for M-M specifically, the proposed method was able to outperform all the solutions that it was compared to. We further show that when using our method on top of already existing methods the training computational costs decrease significantly while retaining similar performances. The implementation and the trained models are available at GitHub.

Abstract
The direct power purchase by large consumers (DPLC) is an important part of the reform of the electricity market, and the development of renewable energy has led to a trend of decentralization on the supply side. Blockchain, as an emerging distributed database technology, has a good application prospect in the context of the current energy Internet construction. The article first introduces the principle of blockchain technology in detail and analyzes its application value in electricity trading. Starting from the traditional direct purchase transaction model, a framework for direct purchase of electricity for large consumers is proposed. Combining the characteristics of direct power purchase transactions, the distributed consensus mechanism is researched and improved, the smart contract is designed in combination with the transaction process, and the communication protocol and interaction relationship at each level are analyzed from the overall system architecture. Finally, the challenges faced by the system in practical application are analyzed, which provides ideas for follow-up research.

Abstract
This survey paper discusses opportunities and threats of using artificial intelligence (AI) technology in the manufacturing sector with consideration for offensive and defensive uses of such technology. It starts with an introduction of Industry 4.0 concept and an understanding of AI use in this context. Then provides elements of security principles and detection techniques applied to operational technology (OT) which forms the main attack surface of manufacturing systems. As some intrusion detection systems (IDS) already involve some AI-based techniques, we focus on existing machine-learning and data-mining based techniques in use for intrusion detection. This article presents the major strengths and weaknesses of the main techniques in use. We also discuss an assessment of their relevance for application to OT, from the manufacturer point of view. Another part of the paper introduces the essential drivers and principles of Industry 4.0, providing insights on the advent of AI in manufacturing systems as well as an understanding of the new set of challenges it implies. AI-based techniques for production monitoring, optimisation and control are proposed with insights on several application cases. The related technical, operational and security challenges are discussed and an understanding of the impact of such transition on current security practices is then provided in more details. The final part of the report further develops a vision of security challenges for Industry 4.0. It addresses aspects of orchestration of distributed detection techniques, introduces an approach to adversarial/robust AI development and concludes with human-machine behaviour monitoring requirements.