18,017 research outputs found

    The Metaverse: Survey, Trends, Novel Pipeline Ecosystem & Future Directions

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    The Metaverse offers a second world beyond reality, where boundaries are non-existent, and possibilities are endless through engagement and immersive experiences using the virtual reality (VR) technology. Many disciplines can benefit from the advancement of the Metaverse when accurately developed, including the fields of technology, gaming, education, art, and culture. Nevertheless, developing the Metaverse environment to its full potential is an ambiguous task that needs proper guidance and directions. Existing surveys on the Metaverse focus only on a specific aspect and discipline of the Metaverse and lack a holistic view of the entire process. To this end, a more holistic, multi-disciplinary, in-depth, and academic and industry-oriented review is required to provide a thorough study of the Metaverse development pipeline. To address these issues, we present in this survey a novel multi-layered pipeline ecosystem composed of (1) the Metaverse computing, networking, communications and hardware infrastructure, (2) environment digitization, and (3) user interactions. For every layer, we discuss the components that detail the steps of its development. Also, for each of these components, we examine the impact of a set of enabling technologies and empowering domains (e.g., Artificial Intelligence, Security & Privacy, Blockchain, Business, Ethics, and Social) on its advancement. In addition, we explain the importance of these technologies to support decentralization, interoperability, user experiences, interactions, and monetization. Our presented study highlights the existing challenges for each component, followed by research directions and potential solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and allows users, scholars, and entrepreneurs to get an in-depth understanding of the Metaverse ecosystem to find their opportunities and potentials for contribution

    One Small Step for Generative AI, One Giant Leap for AGI: A Complete Survey on ChatGPT in AIGC Era

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    OpenAI has recently released GPT-4 (a.k.a. ChatGPT plus), which is demonstrated to be one small step for generative AI (GAI), but one giant leap for artificial general intelligence (AGI). Since its official release in November 2022, ChatGPT has quickly attracted numerous users with extensive media coverage. Such unprecedented attention has also motivated numerous researchers to investigate ChatGPT from various aspects. According to Google scholar, there are more than 500 articles with ChatGPT in their titles or mentioning it in their abstracts. Considering this, a review is urgently needed, and our work fills this gap. Overall, this work is the first to survey ChatGPT with a comprehensive review of its underlying technology, applications, and challenges. Moreover, we present an outlook on how ChatGPT might evolve to realize general-purpose AIGC (a.k.a. AI-generated content), which will be a significant milestone for the development of AGI.Comment: A Survey on ChatGPT and GPT-4, 29 pages. Feedback is appreciated ([email protected]

    MUFFLE: Multi-Modal Fake News Influence Estimator on Twitter

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    To alleviate the impact of fake news on our society, predicting the popularity of fake news posts on social media is a crucial problem worthy of study. However, most related studies on fake news emphasize detection only. In this paper, we focus on the issue of fake news influence prediction, i.e., inferring how popular a fake news post might become on social platforms. To achieve our goal, we propose a comprehensive framework, MUFFLE, which captures multi-modal dynamics by encoding the representation of news-related social networks, user characteristics, and content in text. The attention mechanism developed in the model can provide explainability for social or psychological analysis. To examine the effectiveness of MUFFLE, we conducted extensive experiments on real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms both state-of-the-art methods of popularity prediction and machine-based baselines in top-k NDCG and hit rate. Through the experiments, we also analyze the feature importance for predicting fake news influence via the explainability provided by MUFFLE

    Underwater optical wireless communications in turbulent conditions: from simulation to experimentation

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    Underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) is a technology that aims to apply high speed optical wireless communication (OWC) techniques to the underwater channel. UOWC has the potential to provide high speed links over relatively short distances as part of a hybrid underwater network, along with radio frequency (RF) and underwater acoustic communications (UAC) technologies. However, there are some difficulties involved in developing a reliable UOWC link, namely, the complexity of the channel. The main focus throughout this thesis is to develop a greater understanding of the effects of the UOWC channel, especially underwater turbulence. This understanding is developed from basic theory through to simulation and experimental studies in order to gain a holistic understanding of turbulence in the UOWC channel. This thesis first presents a method of modelling optical underwater turbulence through simulation that allows it to be examined in conjunction with absorption and scattering. In a stationary channel, this turbulence induced scattering is shown to cause and increase both spatial and temporal spreading at the receiver plane. It is also demonstrated using the technique presented that the relative impact of turbulence on a received signal is lower in a highly scattering channel, showing an in-built resilience of these channels. Received intensity distributions are presented confirming that fluctuations in received power from this method follow the commonly used Log-Normal fading model. The impact of turbulence - as measured using this new modelling framework - on link performance, in terms of maximum achievable data rate and bit error rate is equally investigated. Following that, experimental studies comparing both the relative impact of turbulence induced scattering on coherent and non-coherent light propagating through water and the relative impact of turbulence in different water conditions are presented. It is shown that the scintillation index increases with increasing temperature inhomogeneity in the underwater channel. These results indicate that a light beam from a non-coherent source has a greater resilience to temperature inhomogeneity induced turbulence effect in an underwater channel. These results will help researchers in simulating realistic channel conditions when modelling a light emitting diode (LED) based intensity modulation with direct detection (IM/DD) UOWC link. Finally, a comparison of different modulation schemes in still and turbulent water conditions is presented. Using an underwater channel emulator, it is shown that pulse position modulation (PPM) and subcarrier intensity modulation (SIM) have an inherent resilience to turbulence induced fading with SIM achieving higher data rates under all conditions. The signal processing technique termed pair-wise coding (PWC) is applied to SIM in underwater optical wireless communications for the first time. The performance of PWC is compared with the, state-of-the-art, bit and power loading optimisation algorithm. Using PWC, a maximum data rate of 5.2 Gbps is achieved in still water conditions

    Healthcare Innovation Absenteeism: The Rise of Physician Entrepreneurs & Medical Startups

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    For years, warning signs have illuminated imminent days of reckoning for stalled healthcare innovation across the dynamic American healthcare landscape. An evolving epic battle for healthcare innovation delivery has silently raged and set arena stages throughout the healthcare industry. Urgent innovative healthcare delivery is needed to ameliorate longstanding points of failures in providing healthcare delivery to society. Historically, the science of medicine has fostered cultural practices of innovation absenteeism and resistance to change. Mired by archaic processes, legacy systems, and fractionally useful equipment, our current healthcare ecosystems are unsustainable. Recently, some unhindered frontline physicians opted to take on a portion of critical healthcare challenges and followed their ideas to leverage clinical expertise and drive the agenda for changing healthcare innovation delivery. Our qualitative multi-case study design centered around empirical evidence that answered the research question: How do physician entrepreneurs navigate decision-making strategies for medical startups from ideation, innovation, to commercialization of new medical products and services? We examined 21 cases of physician founded medical startups to understand particularizations around physician entrepreneurship. Findings suggest three contributions towards knowledge accumulation about physician entrepreneurs and medical startups: exclusive decision-making processes, industry-specific insights, and illuminations of physician voices that might not otherwise be heard

    Is Facebook Use Helping or Hurting Your Healthcare Employees During COVID?

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    The COVID pandemic has drastically impacted peoples’ lives and workplaces, especially those who work in healthcare and have been on the forefront battling this global health crisis. There has been great uncertainty regarding how to effectively mitigate health risks due to the pandemic, and many healthcare employees have turned to social media outlets, such as Facebook, to express their thoughts and concerns. However, social media can either play a positive or negative role depending on what type of information is transmitted and how it is perceived. Some employees are more affected by social media than others regarding the pandemic, and people cope differently with this information based on their personality. Two prominent personality traits—extraversion and neuroticism—have been tied to positive and negative affect, respectively. Based on Affective Events Theory (AET), this paper will unpack these crucial relationships to analyze two key personality dimensions of healthcare employees, extraversion and neuroticism, the moderating role of Facebook use, and outcomes at work. This paper’s purpose is to empirically investigate how, in the highly COVID affected healthcare industry, these variables impact employee mental health, counterproductive work behavior, and workplace social courage
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