The automation of surveillance systems, driven by the rapid development of computer vision technology, has significantly enhanced the analysis of surveillance videos, particularly in recognition of human activity, including behavior analysis and violence detection, thereby bolstering public and industrial security. Despite these advancements, detecting and analyzing violent actions remains challenging, especially for real-time surveillance systems with limited computing power. We propose an artificial intelligence-based framework called VD-Net (Violence Detection Network), enabled by Intelligent Internet-of-Things (IIoT) to detect violent behavior in public and private spaces. The model utilizes lightweight special task temporal convolutional network (ST-TCN) blocks and several bottleneck layers to focus on salient features in the input sequence. The learned features passed from the classifier to discriminate between violent and nonviolent actions. Additionally, our system is supposed to trigger an alert if violence is detected, which is then communicated to relevant departments. We tested the effectiveness of the proposed system by conducting experiments on surveillance and non-surveillance datasets and ensured a 1-4 % improvement in State-of-The-Art (SoTA) accuracy.

Collective decision making is the ability of individuals to jointly make a decision without any centralized leadership, but only relying on local interactions. A special case is represented by the best-of-n problem, whereby the swarm has to select the best option among a set of n discrete alternatives. In this paper, we perform a thorough study of the best-of-n problem in dynamic environments, in the presence of two options (\(n=2\)). Site qualities can be directly measured by agents, and we introduce abrupt changes to these qualities. We introduce two adaptation mechanisms to deal with dynamic site qualities: stubborn agents and spontaneous opinion switching. Using both computer simulations and ordinary differential equation models, we show that: (i) The mere presence of the stubborn agents is enough to achieve adaptability, but increasing its number has detrimental effects on the performance; (ii) the system adaptation increases with increasing swarm size, while it does not depend on agents’ density, unless this is below a critical threshold; (iii) the spontaneous switching mechanism can also be used to achieve adaptability to dynamic environments, and its key parameter, the probability of switching, can be used to regulate the trade-off between accuracy and speed of adaptation.

Using a data set which includes all transactions among banks in the Italian money market, we study their trading strategies and the dependence among them. We use the Fourier method to compute the variance–covariance matrix of trading strategies. Our results indicate that well defined patterns arise. Two main communities of banks, which can be coarsely identified as small and large banks, emerge

Strongly opinionated minorities can have a dramatic impact on the opinion dynamics of a large population. Two factions of inflexible minorities, polarised into two competing opinions, could lead the entire population to persistent indecision. Equivalently, populations can remain undecided when individuals sporadically change their opinion based on individual information rather than social information. Our analysis compares the cross-inhibition model with the voter model for decisions between equally good alternatives, and with the weighted voter model for decisions among alternatives characterised by different qualities. Here we show that cross-inhibition, contrary to the other two models, is a simple mechanism that allows the population to reach a stable majority for one alternative even in the presence of a relatively high amount of asocial behaviour. The results predicted by the mean-field models are confirmed by experiments with swarms of 100 locally interacting robots. This work suggests an answer to the longstanding question of why inhibitory signals are widespread in natural systems of collective decision making, and, at the same time, it proposes an efficient mechanism for designing resilient swarms of minimalistic robots.