Neural networks are becoming increasingly popular in applications, but our mathematical understanding of their potential and limitations is still limited. In this paper, we further this understanding by developing statistical guarantees for sparse deep learning. In contrast to previous work, we consider different types of sparsity, such as few active connections, few active nodes, and other norm-based types of sparsity. Moreover, our theories cover important aspects that previous theories have neglected, such as multiple outputs, regularization, and l2-loss. The guarantees have a mild dependence on network widths and depths, which means that they support the application of sparse but wide and deep networks from a statistical perspective. Some of the concepts and tools that we use in our derivations are uncommon in deep learning and, hence, might be of additional interest.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Church closed its physical doors for the first time in about 800 years, which is, arguably, a cataclysmic event. Other religions have found themselves in a similar situation, and they were practically forced to move online, which is an unprecedented occasion. In this paper, we analyse this sudden change in religious activities twofold: we create and deliver a questionnaire, as well as analyse Twitter data, to understand people's perceptions and activities related to religious activities online. Importantly, we also analyse the temporal variations in this process by analysing a period of 3 months: July-September 2020. Additionally to the separate analysis of the two data sources, we also discuss the implications from triangulating the results.

Deep learning models for medical image segmentation can fail unexpectedly and spectacularly for pathological cases and images acquired at different centers than training images, with labeling errors that violate expert knowledge. Such errors undermine the trustworthiness of deep learning models for medical image segmentation. Mechanisms for detecting and correcting such failures are essential for safely translating this technology into clinics and are likely to be a requirement of future regulations on artificial intelligence (AI). In this work, we propose a trustworthy AI theoretical framework and a practical system that can augment any backbone AI system using a fallback method and a fail-safe mechanism based on Dempster-Shafer theory. Our approach relies on an actionable definition of trustworthy AI. Our method automatically discards the voxel-level labeling predicted by the backbone AI that violate expert knowledge and relies on a fallback for those voxels. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed trustworthy AI approach on the largest reported annotated dataset of fetal MRI consisting of 540 manually annotated fetal brain 3D T2w MRIs from 13 centers. Our trustworthy AI method improves the robustness of a state-of-the-art backbone AI for fetal brain MRIs acquired across various centers and for fetuses with various brain abnormalities.

This work addresses the problems of (a) designing utilization measurements of trained artificial intelligence (AI) models and (b) explaining how training data are encoded in AI models based on those measurements. The problems are motivated by the lack of explainability of AI models in security and safety critical applications, such as the use of AI models for classification of traffic signs in self-driving cars. We approach the problems by introducing theoretical underpinnings of AI model utilization measurement and understanding patterns in utilization-based class encodings of traffic signs at the level of computation graphs (AI models), subgraphs, and graph nodes. Conceptually, utilization is defined at each graph node (computation unit) of an AI model based on the number and distribution of unique outputs in the space of all possible outputs (tensor-states). In this work, utilization measurements are extracted from AI models, which include poisoned and clean AI models. In contrast to clean AI models, the poisoned AI models were trained with traffic sign images containing systematic, physically realizable, traffic sign modifications (i.e., triggers) to change a correct class label to another label in a presence of such a trigger. We analyze class encodings of such clean and poisoned AI models, and conclude with implications for trojan injection and detection.

Reasoning is central to human intelligence. However, fallacious arguments are common, and some exacerbate problems such as spreading misinformation about climate change. In this paper, we propose the task of logical fallacy detection, and provide a new dataset (Logic) of logical fallacies generally found in text, together with an additional challenge set for detecting logical fallacies in climate change claims (LogicClimate). Detecting logical fallacies is a hard problem as the model must understand the underlying logical structure of the argument. We find that existing pretrained large language models perform poorly on this task. In contrast, we show that a simple structure-aware classifier outperforms the best language model by 5.46% on Logic and 4.51% on LogicClimate. We encourage future work to explore this task as (a) it can serve as a new reasoning challenge for language models, and (b) it can have potential applications in tackling the spread of misinformation. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/causalNLP/logical-fallacy

Speech translation (ST) is the task of directly translating acoustic speech signals in a source language into text in a foreign language. ST task has been addressed, for a long time, using a pipeline approach with two modules : first an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in the source language followed by a text-to-text Machine translation (MT). In the past few years, we have seen a paradigm shift towards the end-to-end approaches using sequence-to-sequence deep neural network models. This paper presents our efforts towards the development of the first Broadcast News end-to-end Arabic to English speech translation system. Starting from independent ASR and MT LDC releases, we were able to identify about 92 hours of Arabic audio recordings for which the manual transcription was also translated into English at the segment level. These data was used to train and compare pipeline and end-to-end speech translation systems under multiple scenarios including transfer learning and data augmentation techniques.

Accurate spatial-temporal traffic flow forecasting is essential for helping traffic managers to take control measures and drivers to choose the optimal travel routes. Recently, graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been widely used in traffic flow prediction owing to their powerful ability to capture spatial-temporal dependencies. The design of the spatial-temporal graph adjacency matrix is a key to the success of GCNs, and it is still an open question. This paper proposes reconstructing the binary adjacency matrix via tensor decomposition, and a traffic flow forecasting method is proposed. First, we reformulate the spatial-temporal fusion graph adjacency matrix into a three-way adjacency tensor. Then, we reconstructed the adjacency tensor via Tucker decomposition, wherein more informative and global spatial-temporal dependencies are encoded. Finally, a Spatial-temporal Synchronous Graph Convolutional module for localized spatial-temporal correlations learning and a Dilated Convolution module for global correlations learning are assembled to aggregate and learn the comprehensive spatial-temporal dependencies of the road network. Experimental results on four open-access datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of the prediction performance and computational cost.

This literature review identifies indicators that associate with higher impact or higher quality research from article text (e.g., titles, abstracts, lengths, cited references and readability) or metadata (e.g., the number of authors, international or domestic collaborations, journal impact factors and authors' h-index). This includes studies that used machine learning techniques to predict citation counts or quality scores for journal articles or conference papers. The literature review also includes evidence about the strength of association between bibliometric indicators and quality score rankings from previous UK Research Assessment Exercises (RAEs) and REFs in different subjects and years and similar evidence from other countries (e.g., Australia and Italy). In support of this, the document also surveys studies that used public datasets of citations, social media indictors or open review texts (e.g., Dimensions, OpenCitations, Altmetric.com and Publons) to help predict the scholarly impact of articles. The results of this part of the literature review were used to inform the experiments using machine learning to predict REF journal article quality scores, as reported in the AI experiments report for this project. The literature review also covers technology to automate editorial processes, to provide quality control for papers and reviewers' suggestions, to match reviewers with articles, and to automatically categorise journal articles into fields. Bias and transparency in technology assisted assessment are also discussed.

Schuyler Moore, Chief Technology Officer at US Central Command (CENTCOM), said Wednesday that such ideas are expected to play a much bigger role in bolstering American troops. CENTCOM is the US combatant command that covers the Middle East and parts of northern Africa and southern Asia. "This tool is intended to do is to provide the opportunity for the boots on the ground that are closest to the threat and closest to their operational environment to mimic that environment as accurately as possible and to, as well, deploy threats against their base and to train against threats on their base that they see and that they interact with sometimes daily," said army Sergent Mickey Reeve, who developed the counter-unmanned aerial system training software. He added that the US will use the Red Sands Integrated Experimentation Center in Saudi Arabia to "pressure test" the new technology, but it will be moving around the region. Sergeant Reeve noted the technology is not tailored solely towards Iranian-made drones, "but it was built to emulate any sort of Unmanned Aerial Systems."

Malaria is a potentially fatal plasmodium parasite injected by female anopheles mosquitoes that infect red blood cells and millions worldwide yearly. However, specialists' manual screening in clinical practice is laborious and prone to error. Therefore, a novel Deep Boosted and Ensemble Learning (DBEL) framework, comprising the stacking of new Boosted-BR-STM convolutional neural networks (CNN) and the ensemble ML classifiers, is developed to screen malaria parasite images. The proposed Boosted-BR-STM is based on a new dilated-convolutional block-based split transform merge (STM) and feature-map Squeezing-Boosting (SB) ideas. Moreover, the new STM block uses regional and boundary operations to learn the malaria parasite's homogeneity, heterogeneity, and boundary with patterns. Furthermore, the diverse boosted channels are attained by employing Transfer Learning-based new feature-map SB in STM blocks at the abstract, medium, and conclusion levels to learn minute intensity and texture variation of the parasitic pattern. The proposed DBEL framework implicates the stacking of prominent and diverse boosted channels and provides the generated discriminative features of the developed Boosted-BR-STM to the ensemble of ML classifiers. The proposed framework improves the discrimination ability and generalization of ensemble learning. Moreover, the deep feature spaces of the developed Boosted-BR-STM and customized CNNs are fed into ML classifiers for comparative analysis. The proposed DBEL framework outperforms the existing techniques on the NIH malaria dataset that are enhanced using discrete wavelet transform to enrich feature space. The proposed DBEL framework achieved Accuracy (98.50%), Sensitivity (0.9920), F-score (0.9850), and AUC (0.997), which suggest it to be utilized for malaria parasite screening.