Africa
Causal Discovery for Gene Regulatory Network Prediction
Biological systems and processes are networks of complex nonlinear regulatory interactions between nucleic acids, proteins, and metabolites. A natural way in which to represent these interaction networks is through the use of a graph. In this formulation, each node represents a nucleic acid, protein, or metabolite and edges represent intermolecular interactions (inhibition, regulation, promotion, coexpression, etc.). In this work, a novel algorithm for the discovery of latent graph structures given experimental data is presented.
Independence Testing for Bounded Degree Bayesian Network
Bhattacharyya, Arnab, Canonne, Clément L., Yang, Joy Qiping
We study the following independence testing problem: given access to samples from a distribution $P$ over $\{0,1\}^n$, decide whether $P$ is a product distribution or whether it is $\varepsilon$-far in total variation distance from any product distribution. For arbitrary distributions, this problem requires $\exp(n)$ samples. We show in this work that if $P$ has a sparse structure, then in fact only linearly many samples are required. Specifically, if $P$ is Markov with respect to a Bayesian network whose underlying DAG has in-degree bounded by $d$, then $\tilde{\Theta}(2^{d/2}\cdot n/\varepsilon^2)$ samples are necessary and sufficient for independence testing.
Statistical Machine Translation for Indic Languages
Das, Sudhansu Bala, Panda, Divyajoti, Mishra, Tapas Kumar, Patra, Bidyut Kr.
Machine Translation (MT) system generally aims at automatic representation of source language into target language retaining the originality of context using various Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Among various NLP methods, Statistical Machine Translation(SMT). SMT uses probabilistic and statistical techniques to analyze information and conversion. This paper canvasses about the development of bilingual SMT models for translating English to fifteen low-resource Indian Languages (ILs) and vice versa. At the outset, all 15 languages are briefed with a short description related to our experimental need. Further, a detailed analysis of Samanantar and OPUS dataset for model building, along with standard benchmark dataset (Flores-200) for fine-tuning and testing, is done as a part of our experiment. Different preprocessing approaches are proposed in this paper to handle the noise of the dataset. To create the system, MOSES open-source SMT toolkit is explored. Distance reordering is utilized with the aim to understand the rules of grammar and context-dependent adjustments through a phrase reordering categorization framework. In our experiment, the quality of the translation is evaluated using standard metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, and RIBES
Lost in Algorithms
Algorithms are becoming more capable, and with that comes hic sunt dracones (here be dragons). The term symbolizes areas beyond our known maps. We use this term since we are stepping into an exciting, potentially dangerous, and unknown area with algorithms. Our curiosity to understand the natural world drives our search for new methods. For this reason, it is crucial to explore this subject. The project's objective is to overlay the information obtained, in conjunction with the state of hardware today, to see if we can determine the likely directions for future algorithms'. Even though we slightly cover non-classical computing in this paper, our primary focus is on classical computing (i.e., digital computers). It is worth noting that non-classical quantum computing requires classical computers to operate; they are not mutually exclusive.
Russia-Ukraine war: Modeling and Clustering the Sentiments Trends of Various Countries
Vahdat-Nejad, Hamed, Akbari, Mohammad Ghasem, Salmani, Fatemeh, Azizi, Faezeh, Nili-Sani, Hamid-Reza
With Twitter's growth and popularity, a huge number of views are shared by users on various topics, making this platform a valuable information source on various political, social, and economic issues. This paper investigates English tweets on the Russia-Ukraine war to analyze trends reflecting users' opinions and sentiments regarding the conflict. The tweets' positive and negative sentiments are analyzed using a BERT-based model, and the time series associated with the frequency of positive and negative tweets for various countries is calculated. Then, we propose a method based on the neighborhood average for modeling and clustering the time series of countries. The clustering results provide valuable insight into public opinion regarding this conflict. Among other things, we can mention the similar thoughts of users from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and most Western European countries versus the shared views of Eastern European, Scandinavian, Asian, and South American nations toward the conflict.
Dynamically Modular and Sparse General Continual Learning
Varma, Arnav, Arani, Elahe, Zonooz, Bahram
Real-world applications often require learning continuously from a stream of data under ever-changing conditions. When trying to learn from such non-stationary data, deep neural networks (DNNs) undergo catastrophic forgetting of previously learned information. Among the common approaches to avoid catastrophic forgetting, rehearsal-based methods have proven effective. However, they are still prone to forgetting due to task-interference as all parameters respond to all tasks. To counter this, we take inspiration from sparse coding in the brain and introduce dynamic modularity and sparsity (Dynamos) for rehearsal-based general continual learning. In this setup, the DNN learns to respond to stimuli by activating relevant subsets of neurons. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Dynamos on multiple datasets under challenging continual learning evaluation protocols. Finally, we show that our method learns representations that are modular and specialized, while maintaining reusability by activating subsets of neurons with overlaps corresponding to the similarity of stimuli.
Bimanual Telemanipulation with Force and Haptic Feedback through an Anthropomorphic Avatar System
Robotic teleoperation is a key technology for a wide variety of applications. It allows sending robots instead of humans in remote, possibly dangerous locations while still using the human brain with its enormous knowledge and creativity, especially for solving unexpected problems. A main challenge in teleoperation consists of providing enough feedback to the human operator for situation awareness and thus create full immersion, as well as offering the operator suitable control interfaces to achieve efficient and robust task fulfillment. We present a bimanual telemanipulation system consisting of an anthropomorphic avatar robot and an operator station providing force and haptic feedback to the human operator. The avatar arms are controlled in Cartesian space with a direct mapping of the operator movements. The measured forces and torques on the avatar side are haptically displayed to the operator. We developed a predictive avatar model for limit avoidance which runs on the operator side, ensuring low latency. The system was successfully evaluated during the ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition semifinals. In addition, we performed in lab experiments and carried out a small user study with mostly untrained operators.
A review of Implementation and Challenges of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Spraying Applications and Crop Monitoring in Indonesia
Fikri, Muhamad Rausyan, Candra, Taufiq, Saptaji, Kushendarsyah, Noviarini, Ajeng Nindi, Wardani, Dilla Ayu
Abstract: The rapid development of technology has brought unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to become widely known in the current era. The market of UAVs is also predicted to continue growing with related technologies in the future. UAVs have been used in various sectors, including livestock, forestry, and agriculture. In agricultural applications, UAVs are highly capable of increasing the productivity of the farm and reducing farmers' workload. This study examines the urgency of UAV implementation in the agriculture sector. A short history of UAVs is provided in this paper to portray the development of UAVs from time to time. The classification of UAVs is also discussed to differentiate various types of UAVs. The application of UAVs in spraying and crop monitoring is based on the previous studies that have been done by many scientific groups and researchers who are working closely to propose solutions for agriculture-related issues. Furthermore, the limitations of UAV applications are also identified. The challenges in implementing agricultural UAVs in Indonesia are also presented. Keywords: Unmanned aerial vehicle, agricultural UAV, spraying, crop monitoring. 1. Introduction According to the United Nations (UN), the world population is projected to reach 9.7 billion people in 2050 (UN, 2015). This vast population would potentially double the food demand in the future (Hunter et al., 2017). Consequently, the ever-growing population that would emerge could cause food shortages in the future. This issue has become a severe problem since the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced similar speculation in which the current agricultural production must be increased by 70 percent by 2050 to meet the increasing demand for highquality food (Mundial, 2021). Many people suffering from hunger become a signal of how severe the food shortage is, and it was reported that more than 820 million people in 2018 were considered undernutrition (WHO, 2019). Surprisingly, the earlier data mentioned shows the increasing tendency towards people suffering from hunger since only around 690 million people were considered suffering from hunger in 2015.
Text Style Transfer: A Review and Experimental Evaluation
Hu, Zhiqiang, Lee, Roy Ka-Wei, Aggarwal, Charu C., Zhang, Aston
The stylistic properties of text have intrigued computational linguistics researchers in recent years. Specifically, researchers have investigated the Text Style Transfer (TST) task, which aims to change the stylistic properties of the text while retaining its style independent content. Over the last few years, many novel TST algorithms have been developed, while the industry has leveraged these algorithms to enable exciting TST applications. The field of TST research has burgeoned because of this symbiosis. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of recent research efforts on text style transfer. More concretely, we create a taxonomy to organize the TST models and provide a comprehensive summary of the state of the art. We review the existing evaluation methodologies for TST tasks and conduct a large-scale reproducibility study where we experimentally benchmark 19 state-of-the-art TST algorithms on two publicly available datasets. Finally, we expand on current trends and provide new perspectives on the new and exciting developments in the TST field.