Africa
Pre-screening breast cancer with machine learning and deep learning
Martinez, Rolando Gonzales, van Dongen, Daan-Max
We suggest that deep learning can be used for pre-screening cancer by analyzing demographic and anthropometric information of patients, as well as biological markers obtained from routine blood samples and relative risks obtained from meta-analysis and international databases. We applied feature selection algorithms to a database of 116 women, including 52 healthy women and 64 women diagnosed with breast cancer, to identify the best pre-screening predictors of cancer. We utilized the best predictors to perform k-fold Monte Carlo cross-validation experiments that compare deep learning against traditional machine learning algorithms. Our results indicate that a deep learning model with an input-layer architecture that is fine-tuned using feature selection can effectively distinguish between patients with and without cancer. Additionally, compared to machine learning, deep learning has the lowest uncertainty in its predictions. These findings suggest that deep learning algorithms applied to cancer pre-screening offer a radiation-free, non-invasive, and affordable complement to screening methods based on imagery. The implementation of deep learning algorithms in cancer pre-screening offer opportunities to identify individuals who may require imaging-based screening, can encourage self-examination, and decrease the psychological externalities associated with false positives in cancer screening. The integration of deep learning algorithms for both screening and pre-screening will ultimately lead to earlier detection of malignancy, reducing the healthcare and societal burden associated to cancer treatment.
Use of Federated Learning and Blockchain towards Securing Financial Services
Chatterjee, Pushpita, Das, Debashis, Rawat, Danda B
In recent days, the proliferation of several existing and new cyber-attacks pose an axiomatic threat to the stability of financial services. It is hard to predict the nature of attacks that can trigger a serious financial crisis. The unprecedented digital transformation to financial services has been accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic and it is still ongoing. Attackers are taking advantage of this transformation and pose a new global threat to financial stability and integrity. Many large organizations are switching from centralized finance (CeFi) to decentralized finance (DeFi) because decentralized finance has many advantages. Blockchain can bring big and far-reaching effects on the trustworthiness, safety, accessibility, cost-effectiveness, and openness of the financial sector. The present paper gives an in-depth look at how blockchain and federated learning (FL) are used in financial services. It starts with an overview of recent developments in both use cases. This paper explores and discusses existing financial service vulnerabilities, potential threats, and consequent risks. So, we explain the problems that can be fixed in financial services and how blockchain and FL could help solve them. These problems include data protection, storage optimization, and making more money in financial services. We looked at many blockchain-enabled FL methods and came up with some possible solutions that could be used in financial services to solve several challenges like cost-effectiveness, automation, and security control. Finally, we point out some future directions at the end of this study.
A Benchmark and Scoring Algorithm for Enriching Arabic Synonyms
Ghanem, Sana, Jarrar, Mustafa, Jarrar, Radi, Bounhas, Ibrahim
This paper addresses the task of extending a given synset with additional synonyms taking into account synonymy strength as a fuzzy value. Given a mono/multilingual synset and a threshold (a fuzzy value [0-1]), our goal is to extract new synonyms above this threshold from existing lexicons. We present twofold contributions: an algorithm and a benchmark dataset. The dataset consists of 3K candidate synonyms for 500 synsets. Each candidate synonym is annotated with a fuzzy value by four linguists. The dataset is important for (i) understanding how much linguists (dis/)agree on synonymy, in addition to (ii) using the dataset as a baseline to evaluate our algorithm. Our proposed algorithm extracts synonyms from existing lexicons and computes a fuzzy value for each candidate. Our evaluations show that the algorithm behaves like a linguist and its fuzzy values are close to those proposed by linguists (using RMSE and MAE). The dataset and a demo page are publicly available at https://portal.sina.birzeit.edu/synonyms.
PIXEL: Physics-Informed Cell Representations for Fast and Accurate PDE Solvers
Kang, Namgyu, Lee, Byeonghyeon, Hong, Youngjoon, Yun, Seok-Bae, Park, Eunbyung
With the increases in computational power and advances in machine learning, data-driven learning-based methods have gained significant attention in solving PDEs. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have recently emerged and succeeded in various forward and inverse PDE problems thanks to their excellent properties, such as flexibility, mesh-free solutions, and unsupervised training. However, their slower convergence speed and relatively inaccurate solutions often limit their broader applicability in many science and engineering domains. This paper proposes a new kind of data-driven PDEs solver, physics-informed cell representations (PIXEL), elegantly combining classical numerical methods and learning-based approaches. We adopt a grid structure from the numerical methods to improve accuracy and convergence speed and overcome the spectral bias presented in PINNs. Moreover, the proposed method enjoys the same benefits in PINNs, e.g., using the same optimization frameworks to solve both forward and inverse PDE problems and readily enforcing PDE constraints with modern automatic differentiation techniques. We provide experimental results on various challenging PDEs that the original PINNs have struggled with and show that PIXEL achieves fast convergence speed and high accuracy. Project page: https://namgyukang.github.io/PIXEL/
Sentiment Analysis on YouTube Smart Phone Unboxing Video Reviews in Sri Lanka
Product-related reviews are based on users' experiences that are mostly shared on videos in YouTube. It is the second most popular website globally in 2021. People prefer to watch videos on recently released products prior to purchasing, in order to gather overall feedback and make worthy decisions. These videos are created by vloggers who are enthusiastic about technical materials and feedback is usually placed by experienced users of the product or its brand. Analyzing the sentiment of the user reviews gives useful insights into the product in general. This study is focused on three smartphone reviews, namely, Apple iPhone 13, Google Pixel 6, and Samsung Galaxy S21 which were released in 2021. VADER, which is a lexicon and rule-based sentiment analysis tool was used to classify each comment to its appropriate positive or negative orientation. All three smartphones show a positive sentiment from the users' perspective and iPhone 13 has the highest number of positive reviews. The resulting models have been tested using N\"aive Bayes, Decision Tree, and Support Vector Machine. Among these three classifiers, Support Vector Machine shows higher accuracies and F1-scores.
Self-supervised Multi-view Disentanglement for Expansion of Visual Collections
Jain, Nihal, Vaddamanu, Praneetha, Maheshwari, Paridhi, Vinay, Vishwa, Kulkarni, Kuldeep
Image search engines enable the retrieval of images relevant to a query image. In this work, we consider the setting where a query for similar images is derived from a collection of images. For visual search, the similarity measurements may be made along multiple axes, or views, such as style and color. We assume access to a set of feature extractors, each of which computes representations for a specific view. Our objective is to design a retrieval algorithm that effectively combines similarities computed over representations from multiple views. To this end, we propose a self-supervised learning method for extracting disentangled view-specific representations for images such that the inter-view overlap is minimized. We show how this allows us to compute the intent of a collection as a distribution over views. We show how effective retrieval can be performed by prioritizing candidate expansion images that match the intent of a query collection. Finally, we present a new querying mechanism for image search enabled by composing multiple collections and perform retrieval under this setting using the techniques presented in this paper.
Accelerated Nonnegative Tensor Completion via Integer Programming
Pan, Wenhao, Aswani, Anil, Chen, Chen
The problem of tensor completion has applications in healthcare, computer vision, and other domains. However, past approaches to tensor completion have faced a tension in that they either have polynomial-time computation but require exponentially more samples than the information-theoretic rate, or they use fewer samples but require solving NP-hard problems for which there are no known practical algorithms. A recent approach, based on integer programming, resolves this tension for nonnegative tensor completion. It achieves the information-theoretic sample complexity rate and deploys the Blended Conditional Gradients algorithm, which requires a linear (in numerical tolerance) number of oracle steps to converge to the global optimum. The tradeoff in this approach is that, in the worst case, the oracle step requires solving an integer linear program. Despite this theoretical limitation, numerical experiments show that this algorithm can, on certain instances, scale up to 100 million entries while running on a personal computer. The goal of this paper is to further enhance this algorithm, with the intention to expand both the breadth and scale of instances that can be solved. We explore several variants that can maintain the same theoretical guarantees as the algorithm, but offer potentially faster computation. We consider different data structures, acceleration of gradient descent steps, and the use of the Blended Pairwise Conditional Gradients algorithm. We describe the original approach and these variants, and conduct numerical experiments in order to explore various tradeoffs in these algorithmic design choices.
Who is Abbe Lowell? Hunter Biden's high-profile attorney in the legal battle over his infamous laptop
Former federal prosecutor Trey Gowdy gives his take on the Alex Murdaugh trial and Hunter Biden's attorney calling for criminal probe of the laptop on'The Story.' High-profile lawyer Abbe Lowell again entered the national spotlight this week representing Hunter Biden in the legal battle involving his infamous laptop, and Lowell's hiring signals how seriously Biden is taking his situation, an attorney tells Fox News Digital. "Abbe is not cheap, and you don't bring in Abbe unless you want to go to war or prevent one," said the source who's worked with Lowell. He hasn't been charged with anything, but they're trying to prevent that because that would be bad for [President] Biden and Hunter." Lowell made a splash this week with letters urging prosecutors to launch state and federal investigations into John Paul Mac Isaac, who he accused of "unlawfully" accessing the younger Biden's personal data on his laptop after it was left at his repair shop in 2019. Former President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon and other notable Biden critics were also listed in the lawsuit for their role in disseminating the information to the public. Mac Isaac chose to work with President Donald Trump's personal lawyer to weaponize Mr. Biden's personal computer data against his father, Joseph R. Biden, by unlawfully causing the provision of Mr. Biden's personal data to the New York Post," Lowell wrote Wednesday.
You're Not Going to Like How Colleges Respond to That Chatbot That Writes Papers
In the classroom of the future--if there still are any--it's easy to imagine the endpoint of an arms race: an artificial intelligence that generates the day's lessons and prompts, a student-deployed A.I. that will surreptitiously do the assignment, and finally, a third-party A.I. that will determine if any of the pupils actually did the work with their own fingers and brain. Loop complete; no humans needed. If you were to take all the hype about ChatGPT at face value, this might feel inevitable. But a response to the hit software demo, released by OpenAI in November to instant fanfare, is coming. You only have to look at how schools dealt with the potential externalities of newly essential tech during the pandemic to see how a similarly paranoid reaction to chatbots like ChatGPT could go--and how it shouldn't. When schools had to shift on the fly to remote learning three years ago, there was a massive turn to what at that point was mainly enterprise software: Zoom.