Sustainable Wireless Networks via Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs): Overview of the ETSI ISG RIS

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) are a novel form of ultra-low power devices that are capable to increase the communication data rates as well as the cell coverage in a cost- and energy-efficient way. This is attributed to their programmable operation that enables them to dynamically manipulate the wireless propagation environment, a feature that has lately inspired numerous research investigations and applications. To pave the way to the formal standardization of RISs, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) launched the Industry Specification Group (ISG) on the RIS technology in September 2021. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the status of the work conducted by the ETSI ISG RIS, covering typical deployment scenarios of reconfigurable metasurfaces, use cases and operating applications, requirements, emerging hardware architectures and operating modes, as well as the latest insights regarding future directions of RISs and the resulting smart wireless environments.

Joint Beam Scheduling and Power Optimization for Beam Hopping LEO Satellite Systems

Low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications can provide ubiquitous and reliable services, making it an essential part of the Internet of Everything network. Beam hopping (BH) is an emerging technology for effectively addressing the issue of low resource utilization caused by the non-uniform spatio-temporal distribution of traffic demands. However, how to allocate multi-dimensional resources in a timely and efficient way for the highly dynamic LEO satellite systems remains a challenge. This paper proposes a joint beam scheduling and power optimization beam hopping (JBSPO-BH) algorithm considering the differences in the geographic distribution of sink nodes. The JBSPO-BH algorithm decouples the original problem into two sub-problems. The beam scheduling problem is modelled as a potential game, and the Nash equilibrium (NE) point is obtained as the beam scheduling strategy. Moreover, the penalty function interior point method is applied to optimize the power allocation. Simulation results show that the JBSPO-BH algorithm has low time complexity and fast convergence and achieves better performance both in throughput and fairness. Compared with greedy-based BH, greedy-based BH with the power optimization, round-robin BH, Max-SINR BH and satellite resource allocation algorithm, the throughput of the proposed algorithm is improved by 44.99%, 20.79%, 156.06%, 15.39% and 8.17%, respectively.

Test-time Adaptation with Calibration of Medical Image Classification Nets for Label Distribution Shift

Class distribution plays an important role in learning deep classifiers. When the proportion of each class in the test set differs from the training set, the performance of classification nets usually degrades. Such a label distribution shift problem is common in medical diagnosis since the prevalence of disease vary over location and time. In this paper, we propose the first method to tackle label shift for medical image classification, which effectively adapt the model learned from a single training label distribution to arbitrary unknown test label distribution. Our approach innovates distribution calibration to learn multiple representative classifiers, which are capable of handling different one-dominating-class distributions. When given a test image, the diverse classifiers are dynamically aggregated via the consistency-driven test-time adaptation, to deal with the unknown test label distribution. We validate our method on two important medical image classification tasks including liver fibrosis staging and COVID-19 severity prediction. Our experiments clearly show the decreased model performance under label shift. With our method, model performance significantly improves on all the test datasets with different label shifts for both medical image diagnosis tasks.

Rapid model transfer for medical image segmentation via iterative human-in-the-loop update: from labelled public to unlabelled clinical datasets for multi-organ segmentation in CT

Despite the remarkable success on medical image analysis with deep learning, it is still under exploration regarding how to rapidly transfer AI models from one dataset to another for clinical applications. This paper presents a novel and generic human-in-the-loop scheme for efficiently transferring a segmentation model from a small-scale labelled dataset to a larger-scale unlabelled dataset for multi-organ segmentation in CT. To achieve this, we propose to use an igniter network which can learn from a small-scale labelled dataset and generate coarse annotations to start the process of human-machine interaction. Then, we use a sustainer network for our larger-scale dataset, and iteratively updated it on the new annotated data. Moreover, we propose a flexible labelling strategy for the annotator to reduce the initial annotation workload. The model performance and the time cost of annotation in each subject evaluated on our private dataset are reported and analysed. The results show that our scheme can not only improve the performance by 19.7% on Dice, but also expedite the cost time of manual labelling from 13.87 min to 1.51 min per CT volume during the model transfer, demonstrating the clinical usefulness with promising potentials.

ASAP: A Chinese Review Dataset Towards Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis and Rating Prediction

Sentiment analysis has attracted increasing attention in e-commerce. The sentiment polarities underlying user reviews are of great value for business intelligence. Aspect category sentiment analysis (ACSA) and review rating prediction (RP) are two essential tasks to detect the fine-to-coarse sentiment polarities. %Considering the sentiment of the aspects(ACSA) and the overall review rating(RP) simultaneously has the potential to improve the overall performance. ACSA and RP are highly correlated and usually employed jointly in real-world e-commerce scenarios. While most public datasets are constructed for ACSA and RP separately, which may limit the further exploitation of both tasks. To address the problem and advance related researches, we present a large-scale Chinese restaurant review dataset \textbf{ASAP} including $46,730$ genuine reviews from a leading online-to-offline (O2O) e-commerce platform in China. Besides a $5$-star scale rating, each review is manually annotated according to its sentiment polarities towards $18$ pre-defined aspect categories. We hope the release of the dataset could shed some light on the fields of sentiment analysis. Moreover, we propose an intuitive yet effective joint model for ACSA and RP. Experimental results demonstrate that the joint model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both tasks.