Deep Learning for Combating Misinformation in Multicategorical Text Contents.

Currently, one can observe the evolution of social media networks. In particular, humans are faced with the fact that, often, the opinion of an expert is as important and significant as the opinion of a non-expert. It is possible to observe changes and processes in traditional media that reduce the role of a conventional 'editorial office', placing gradual emphasis on the remote work of journalists and forcing increasingly frequent use of online sources rather than actual reporting work. As a result, social media has become an element of state security, as disinformation and fake news produced by malicious actors can manipulate readers, creating unnecessary debate on topics organically irrelevant to society. This causes a cascading effect, fear of citizens, and eventually threats to the state's security. Advanced data sensors and deep machine learning methods have great potential to enable the creation of effective tools for combating the fake news problem. However, these solutions often need better model generalization in the real world due to data deficits. In this paper, we propose an innovative solution involving a committee of classifiers in order to tackle the fake news detection challenge. In that regard, we introduce a diverse set of base models, each independently trained on sub-corpora with unique characteristics. In particular, we use multi-label text category classification, which helps formulate an ensemble. The experiments were conducted on six different benchmark datasets. The results are promising and open the field for further research.

Sensors and Pattern Recognition Methods for Security and Industrial Applications.

Contemporary cyberthreats continue to evolve, powering the neverending development arms race [...].

Has the pandemic made us more digitally literate?: Innovative association rule mining study of the relationships between shifts in digital skills and cybersecurity awareness occurring whilst working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Digital literacy has been included in the set of the eight key competences, which are necessary to enjoy life to the full in the twenty-first century. According to the previous studies, women tend to possess lower digital competence than men; the older the person, the lower the level of digital literacy. To date, Polish citizens in general have worse skills than the European average. This may lead to people being socially excluded and vulnerable to cybersecurity threats, especially in the times of the COVID-19 pandemic, which requires them to work, study and shop using the Internet. The study concerned Polish women who work at universities, as scientists and teachers. Their perceived level of their digital literacy has been studied in the broad campaign, along with their awareness of the cybersecurity matters. Then, the collected results were processed with an association rules mining algorithm, uncovering the factors related to the shifts in them.

Advances in Computer Recognition, Image Processing and Communications.

This Special Issue aimed to gather high-quality advancements in theoretical and practical aspects of computer recognition, pattern recognition, image processing and machine learning (shallow and deep), including, in particular, novel implementations of these techniques in the areas of modern telecommunications and cybersecurity [...].

Implementation of the BERT-derived architectures to tackle disinformation challenges.

Recent progress in the area of modern technologies confirms that information is not only a commodity but can also become a tool for competition and rivalry among governments and corporations, or can be applied by ill-willed people to use it in their hate speech practices. The impact of information is overpowering and can lead to many socially undesirable phenomena, such as panic or political instability. To eliminate the threats of fake news publishing, modern computer security systems need flexible and intelligent tools. The design of models meeting the above-mentioned criteria is enabled by artificial intelligence and, above all, by the state-of-the-art neural network architectures, applied in NLP tasks. The BERT neural network belongs to this type of architectures. This paper presents Transformer-based hybrid architectures applied to create models for detecting fake news.

Opening up a discussion on the native speaker myth in science.

The commentary touches upon the topic which is relevant to hundreds of thousands of researchers in the world. When trying to publish in English, they are often advised to ask the native speakers of the language for their opinion. However, as English has become the international, cross-border language of science, it may have ceased to be the property of the native speaker researchers, who constitute a small minority in the community. In addition, when English is used as a lingua franca, it is the message which counts, not the particular style or spelling. The commentary finishes with an appeal not to hinder the development of science by slowing down the editing process, and thus not to close the door for diversity and new perspectives.

New explainability method for BERT-based model in fake news detection.

The ubiquity of social media and their deep integration in the contemporary society has granted new ways to interact, exchange information, form groups, or earn money-all on a scale never seen before. Those possibilities paired with the widespread popularity contribute to the level of impact that social media display. Unfortunately, the benefits brought by them come at a cost. Social Media can be employed by various entities to spread disinformation-so called 'Fake News', either to make a profit or influence the behaviour of the society. To reduce the impact and spread of Fake News, a diverse array of countermeasures were devised. These include linguistic-based approaches, which often utilise Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning (DL). However, as the latest advancements in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) domain show, the model's high performance is no longer enough. The explainability of the system's decision is equally crucial in real-life scenarios. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to present a novel explainability approach in BERT-based fake news detectors. This approach does not require extensive changes to the system and can be attached as an extension for operating detectors. For this purposes, two Explainable Artificial Intelligence (xAI) techniques, Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) and Anchors, will be used and evaluated on fake news data, i.e., short pieces of text forming tweets or headlines. This focus of this paper is on the explainability approach for fake news detectors, as the detectors themselves were part of previous works of the authors.

How to Effectively Collect and Process Network Data for Intrusion Detection?

The number of security breaches in the cyberspace is on the rise. This threat is met with intensive work in the intrusion detection research community. To keep the defensive mechanisms up to date and relevant, realistic network traffic datasets are needed. The use of flow-based data for machine-learning-based network intrusion detection is a promising direction for intrusion detection systems. However, many contemporary benchmark datasets do not contain features that are usable in the wild. The main contribution of this work is to cover the research gap related to identifying and investigating valuable features in the NetFlow schema that allow for effective, machine-learning-based network intrusion detection in the real world. To achieve this goal, several feature selection techniques have been applied on five flow-based network intrusion detection datasets, establishing an informative flow-based feature set. The authors' experience with the deployment of this kind of system shows that to close the research-to-market gap, and to perform actual real-world application of machine-learning-based intrusion detection, a set of labeled data from the end-user has to be collected. This research aims at establishing the appropriate, minimal amount of data that is sufficient to effectively train machine learning algorithms in intrusion detection. The results show that a set of 10 features and a small amount of data is enough for the final model to perform very well.

A $10 million question and other cybersecurity-related ethical dilemmas amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cybercrime and cybersecurity are like two sides of the same coin: They are opposites but cannot exist without each other. Their mutual relation generates a myriad of ethical issues, ranging from minor to vital. The rapid development of technology will surely involve even more ethical concerns, like the infamous example of a fitness tracking company allegedly paying $10 million worth of ransom. Every cybersecurity solution, tool, or practice has to be ethical by design if it is to protect people and their rights. To identify the ethical issues that cybersecurity/cybercrime might bring about in the future, we conducted the first broad and comprehensive horizon-scanning study since the COVID-19 pandemic arose. As we began this project, nobody had the slightest idea that the coming months would bring the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the reality we had known was about to change dramatically. As it soon became apparent, the deadly coronavirus brought completely new cybersecurity/cybercrime ethical dilemmas to light, and some of the ones known before were transformed or shifted. This article presents the results of our horizon-scanning study concerning the ethical dilemmas that emerged amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Who Will Score? A Machine Learning Approach to Supporting Football Team Building and Transfers.

BACKGROUND: the machine learning (ML) techniques have been implemented in numerous applications, including health-care, security, entertainment, and sports. In this article, we present how the ML can be used for building a professional football team and planning player transfers. METHODS: in this research, we defined numerous parameters for player assessment, and three definitions of a successful transfer. We used the Random Forest, Naive Bayes, and AdaBoost algorithms in order to predict the player transfer success. We used realistic, publicly available data in order to train and test the classifiers. RESULTS: in the article, we present numerous experiments; they differ in the weights of parameters, the successful transfer definitions, and other factors. We report promising results (accuracy = 0.82, precision = 0.84, recall = 0.82, and F1-score = 0.83). CONCLUSION: the presented research proves that machine learning can be helpful in professional football team building. The proposed algorithm will be developed in the future and it may be implemented as a professional tool for football talent scouts.

A Deep Learning Ensemble for Network Anomaly and Cyber-Attack Detection.

Currently, expert systems and applied machine learning algorithms are widely used to automate network intrusion detection. In critical infrastructure applications of communication technologies, the interaction among various industrial control systems and the Internet environment intrinsic to the IoT technology makes them susceptible to cyber-attacks. Given the existence of the enormous network traffic in critical Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), traditional methods of machine learning implemented in network anomaly detection are inefficient. Therefore, recently developed machine learning techniques, with the emphasis on deep learning, are finding their successful implementations in the detection and classification of anomalies at both the network and host levels. This paper presents an ensemble method that leverages deep models such as the Deep Neural Network (DNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and a meta-classifier (i.e., logistic regression) following the principle of stacked generalization. To enhance the capabilities of the proposed approach, the method utilizes a two-step process for the apprehension of network anomalies. In the first stage, data pre-processing, a Deep Sparse AutoEncoder (DSAE) is employed for the feature engineering problem. In the second phase, a stacking ensemble learning approach is utilized for classification. The efficiency of the method disclosed in this work is tested on heterogeneous datasets, including data gathered in the IoT environment, namely IoT-23, LITNET-2020, and NetML-2020. The results of the evaluation of the proposed approach are discussed. Statistical significance is tested and compared to the state-of-the-art approaches in network anomaly detection.

Innovative machine learning approach and evaluation campaign for predicting the subjective feeling of work-life balance among employees.

At present, many researchers see hope that artificial intelligence, machine learning in particular, will improve several aspects of the everyday life for individuals, cities and whole nations alike. For example, it has been speculated that the so-called machine learning could soon relieve employees of part of the duties, which may improve processes or help to find the most effective ways of performing tasks. Consequently, in the long run, it would help to enhance employees' work-life balance. Thus, workers' overall quality of life would improve, too. However, what would happen if machine learning as such were employed to try and find the ways of achieving work-life balance? This is why the authors of the paper decided to utilize a machine learning tool to search for the factors that influence the subjective feeling of one's work-life balance. The possible results could help to predict and prevent the occurrence of work-life imbalance in the future. In order to do so, the data provided by an exceptionally sizeable group of 800 employees was utilised; it was one of the largest sample groups in similar studies in Poland so far. Additionally, this was one of the first studies where so many employees had been analysed using an artificial neural network. In order to enable replicability of the study, the specific setup of the study and the description of the dataset are provided. Having analysed the data and having conducted several experiments, the correlations between some factors and work-life balance have indeed been identified: it has been found that the most significant was the relation between the feeling of balance and the actual working hours; shifting it resulted in the tool predicting the switch from balance to imbalance, and vice versa. Other factors that proved significant for the predicted WLB are the amount of free time a week the employee has for themselves, working at weekends only, being self-employed and the subjective assessment of one's financial status. In the study the dataset gets balanced, the most important features are selected with the selectKbest algorithm, an artificial neural network of 2 hidden layers with 50 and 25 neurons, ReLU and ADAM is constructed and trained on 90% of the dataset. In tests, it predicts WLB based on the prepared dataset and selected features with 81% accuracy.