Identification of anonymous identical users of cross-platforms refers to the recognition of the accounts belonging to the same individual among multiple Social Network (SN). Evidently, cross-platform exploration may help solve many problems in social computing, in both theory and practice. However, it is still an intractable problem due to the fragmentation, inconsistency and disruption of the accessible information among SNs. Although substantial achievements have been made, most of the current network structure-based solutions, requiring prior knowledge of some given identified users, are supervised or semi-supervised. It is laborious to label the prior knowledge manually in some scenarios where prior knowledge is hard to obtain. We proposed the unsupervised Friend Relationship-based User Identification algorithm without Prior knowledge (FRUI-P). The FRUI-P first extracts the friend feature of each user into friend feature vector, and then calculates the similarities of all the candidate identical users between two SNs. Finally, a one-to-one map scheme is developed to identify the users based on the similarities. Results of extensive experiments demonstrated that FRUI-P performs much better than current state-of-art network structure-based algorithm without prior knowledge. Due to its high precision, FRUI-P can additionally be utilized to generate prior knowledge for supervised and semi-supervised schemes. In applications, the unsupervised anonymous identical user identification method accommodates more scenarios where the seed users are unobtainable.

A Building Digital Twin (BDT) can maintain an up-to-date digital model reflecting physical world conditions and has become necessary for building applications. Recent studies on the BDT employed the Internet of Things to sense physical-world conditions. Although cameras are one of the most widely-used facilities in buildings, their adoption in the BDT remains unexplored. This study proposes a novel computer-vision(CV)-enabled BDT scheme using Building Information Modelling (BIM) taking camera videos as input, which addresses the dimension, coordinate system, and object inconsistencies between BIM and camera videos. Firstly, the proposed BDT scheme detects objects’ locations and rotations jointly using a two-dimensional (2D) object detection network and a three-dimensional (3D) object estimation network. Then, Theorem and Lemmas are presented to compute the 3D locations in BIM coordinate system using detected 2D locations. Thirdly, both cold-start object matching and run-time object matching schemes are proposed to address the object inconsistency between camera videos and BIM. Finally, experiments were conducted in the real-world environment. The experiment results showed that the proposed BDT scheme maintained average location errors of 0.181$m$ with distortions preserved and 0.165$m$ with distortions removed in the manual calibration scenario, 0.166$m$ with distortions preserved, and 0.195$m$ with distortions removed in automatic calibration scenario. This finding proved the effectiveness of the proposed BDT scheme. This study is the first to explore a BDT scheme on top of BIM using CV. It is anticipated that this study will inspire more intelligent studies in smart buildings jointly employing both CV and BIM.

Pathfinding is a fundamental problem for many areas, e.g., robotics, automation, computer-aided design, and computer graphics. Although outdoor pathfinding is fledged, indoor pathfinding remains a challenge due to the lack of indoor maps. Currently, some efforts have utilized Building Information Modelling (BIM) to generate either grid-based map or topological map. However, either grid-based map or topological map is not sufficient to provide accurate and efficient pathfinding service. This study proposes a novel Grid-Topological map and develops an accurate and efficient indoor pathfinding scheme. The Grid-Topological map is modeled jointly adopting the advantages of both grid-based map and topological map. On top of Grid-Topological map, an accurate and efficient pathfinding algorithm is developed. Empirical studies proved the effectiveness of the Grid-Topological map, as well as the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed indoor pathfinding algorithm.

The animal mitochondrial genome is generally considered to be under selection for both compactness and gene order conservation. As more mitochondrial genomes are sequenced, mitochondrial duplications and gene rearrangements have been frequently identified among diverse animal groups. Although several mechanisms of gene rearrangement have been proposed thus far, more observational evidence from major taxa is needed to validate specific mechanisms. In the current study, the complete mitochondrial DNA of sixteen bird species from the family Ardeidae was sequenced and the evolution of mitochondrial gene rearrangements was investigated. The mitochondrial genomes were then used to review the phylogenies of these ardeid birds. The complete mitochondrial genome sequences of the sixteen ardeid birds exhibited four distinct mitochondrial gene orders in which two of them, named as “duplicate tRNAGlu–CR” and “duplicate tRNAThr–tRNAPro and CR”, were newly discovered. These gene rearrangements arose from an evolutionary process consistent with the tandem duplication - random loss model (TDRL). Additionally, duplications in these gene orders were near identical in nucleotide sequences within each individual, suggesting that they evolved in concert. Phylogenetic analyses of the sixteen ardeid species supported the idea that Ardea ibis, Ardea modesta and Ardea intermedia should be classified as genus Ardea, and Ixobrychus flavicollis as genus Ixobrychus, and indicated that within the subfamily Ardeinae, Nycticorax nycticorax is closely related to genus Egretta and that Ardeola bacchus and Butorides striatus are closely related to the genus Ardea. The duplicate tRNAThr–CR gene order is found in most ardeid lineages, suggesting this gene order is the ancestral pattern within these birds and persisted in most lineages via concerted evolution. In two independent lineages, when the concerted evolution stopped in some subsections due to the accumulation of numerous substitutions and deletions, the duplicate tRNAThr–CR gene order was transformed into three other gene orders. The phylogenetic trees produced from concatenated rRNA and protein coding genes have high support values in most nodes, indicating that the mitochondrial genome sequences are promising markers for resolving the phylogenetic issues of ardeid birds when more taxa are added.