Africa
Summit explores role of ethics in development of artificial intelligence
Universities around the world are taking steps alongside major technology companies to explore ways to bolster ethics education in the artificial intelligence field in line with an initiative supported by the Vatican. The effort seeks to help those already working or aspiring to work in the tech fields understand that the development of artificial intelligence, or AI, should benefit humanity rather than pose uncontrollable challenges to human life. Participants at a global summit at the University of Notre Dame Oct. 25-26 explored ways to encompass ethics education in coursework with speakers calling for widespread integration in both technical and nontechnical curricula. Casey Fiesler, associate professor of information science at the University of Colorado, told in person and online attendees in a session that the long-held view that ethical topics are a "specialization" within technology education must be put aside. "We should not be teaching ethics in the context of computing so that it is completely separate from everything else that we are doing," Fiesler said in calling for a culture shift in higher education that can reach across society.
Fast-Convergent Federated Learning via Cyclic Aggregation
Lee, Youngjoon, Park, Sangwoo, Kang, Joonhyuk
Federated learning (FL) aims at optimizing a shared global model over multiple edge devices without transmitting (private) data to the central server. While it is theoretically well-known that FL yields an optimal model -- centrally trained model assuming availability of all the edge device data at the central server -- under mild condition, in practice, it often requires massive amount of iterations until convergence, especially under presence of statistical/computational heterogeneity. This paper utilizes cyclic learning rate at the server side to reduce the number of training iterations with increased performance without any additional computational costs for both the server and the edge devices. Numerical results validate that, simply plugging-in the proposed cyclic aggregation to the existing FL algorithms effectively reduces the number of training iterations with improved performance.
SlovakBERT: Slovak Masked Language Model
Pikuliak, Matúš, Grivalský, Štefan, Konôpka, Martin, Blšták, Miroslav, Tamajka, Martin, Bachratý, Viktor, Šimko, Marián, Balážik, Pavol, Trnka, Michal, Uhlárik, Filip
We introduce a new Slovak masked language model called SlovakBERT. This is to our best knowledge the first paper discussing Slovak transformers-based language models. We evaluate our model on several NLP tasks and achieve state-of-the-art results. This evaluation is likewise the first attempt to establish a benchmark for Slovak language models. We publish the masked language model, as well as the fine-tuned models for part-of-speech tagging, sentiment analysis and semantic textual similarity.
LEADER: Learning Attention over Driving Behaviors for Planning under Uncertainty
Danesh, Mohamad H., Cai, Panpan, Hsu, David
Uncertainty on human behaviors poses a significant challenge to autonomous driving in crowded urban environments. The partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) offer a principled framework for planning under uncertainty, often leveraging Monte Carlo sampling to achieve online performance for complex tasks. However, sampling also raises safety concerns by potentially missing critical events. To address this, we propose a new algorithm, LEarning Attention over Driving bEhavioRs (LEADER), that learns to attend to critical human behaviors during planning. LEADER learns a neural network generator to provide attention over human behaviors in real-time situations. It integrates the attention into a belief-space planner, using importance sampling to bias reasoning towards critical events. To train the algorithm, we let the attention generator and the planner form a min-max game. By solving the min-max game, LEADER learns to perform risk-aware planning without human labeling.
A Critical Reflection and Forward Perspective on Empathy and Natural Language Processing
Lahnala, Allison, Welch, Charles, Jurgens, David, Flek, Lucie
We review the state of research on empathy in natural language processing and identify the following issues: (1) empathy definitions are absent or abstract, which (2) leads to low construct validity and reproducibility. Moreover, (3) emotional empathy is overemphasized, skewing our focus to a narrow subset of simplified tasks. We believe these issues hinder research progress and argue that current directions will benefit from a clear conceptualization that includes operationalizing cognitive empathy components. Our main objectives are to provide insight and guidance on empathy conceptualization for NLP research objectives and to encourage researchers to pursue the overlooked opportunities in this area, highly relevant, e.g., for clinical and educational sectors.
Phonemic Representation and Transcription for Speech to Text Applications for Under-resourced Indigenous African Languages: The Case of Kiswahili
Awino, Ebbie, Wanzare, Lilian, Muchemi, Lawrence, Wanjawa, Barack, Ombui, Edward, Indede, Florence, McOnyango, Owen, Okal, Benard
Building automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems is a challenging task, especially for under-resourced languages that need to construct corpora nearly from scratch and lack sufficient training data. It has emerged that several African indigenous languages, including Kiswahili, are technologically under-resourced. ASR systems are crucial, particularly for the hearing-impaired persons who can benefit from having transcripts in their native languages. However, the absence of transcribed speech datasets has complicated efforts to develop ASR models for these indigenous languages. This paper explores the transcription process and the development of a Kiswahili speech corpus, which includes both read-out texts and spontaneous speech data from native Kiswahili speakers. The study also discusses the vowels and consonants in Kiswahili and provides an updated Kiswahili phoneme dictionary for the ASR model that was created using the CMU Sphinx speech recognition toolbox, an open-source speech recognition toolkit. The ASR model was trained using an extended phonetic set that yielded a WER and SER of 18.87% and 49.5%, respectively, an improved performance than previous similar research for under-resourced languages.
Machine Learning Glossary: ML Fundamentals
This page contains ML Fundamentals glossary terms. The number of correct classification predictions divided by the total number of predictions. Binary classification provides specific names for the different categories of correct predictions and incorrect predictions. Compare and contrast accuracy with precision and recall. Although a valuable metric for some situations, accuracy is highly misleading for others. Notably, accuracy is usually a poor metric for evaluating classification models that process class-imbalanced datasets. For example, suppose snow falls only 25 days per century in a certain subtropical city. Since days without snow (the negative class) vastly outnumber days with snow (the positive class), the snow dataset for this city is class-imbalanced. Imagine a binary classification model that is supposed to predict either snow or no snow each day but simply predicts "no snow" every day. This model is highly accurate but has no predictive power. Although 99.93% accuracy seems like very a impressive percentage, the model actually has no predictive power. Precision and recall are usually more useful metrics than accuracy for evaluating models trained on class-imbalanced datasets. A function that enables neural networks to learn nonlinear (complex) relationships between features and the label. The plots of activation functions are never single straight lines. In a neural network, activation functions manipulate the weighted sum of all the inputs to a neuron. To calculate a weighted sum, the neuron adds up the products of the relevant values and weights. A non-human program or model that can solve sophisticated tasks. For example, a program or model that translates text or a program or model that identifies diseases from radiologic images both exhibit artificial intelligence. Formally, machine learning is a sub-field of artificial intelligence. However, in recent years, some organizations have begun using the terms artificial intelligence and machine learning interchangeably. A number between 0.0 and 1.0 representing a binary classification model's ability to separate positive classes from negative classes. The closer the AUC is to 1.0, the better the model's ability to separate classes from each other. For example, the following illustration shows a classifier model that separates positive classes (green ovals) from negative classes (purple rectangles) perfectly. This unrealistically perfect model has an AUC of 1.0: Conversely, the following illustration shows the results for a classifier model that generated random results.
Could an algorithm predict the next pandemic?
In February 2021, seven Russian poultry-farm workers were reported to have been infected with H5N8 avian influenza. This subtype of bird flu had never been known to infect people before, and the virus's genetic sequence was quickly uploaded to the genetic data repository GISAID. For Colin Carlson, a biologist at Georgetown University in Washington DC, it presented an opportunity. "I immediately thought, 'I want to run this through FluLeap'," he says. FluLeap is a machine-learning algorithm that uses sequence data to classify influenza viruses as either avian or human.
Characteristics of Harmful Text: Towards Rigorous Benchmarking of Language Models
Rauh, Maribeth, Mellor, John, Uesato, Jonathan, Huang, Po-Sen, Welbl, Johannes, Weidinger, Laura, Dathathri, Sumanth, Glaese, Amelia, Irving, Geoffrey, Gabriel, Iason, Isaac, William, Hendricks, Lisa Anne
Large language models produce human-like text that drives a growing number of applications. However, recent literature and, increasingly, real world observations, have demonstrated that these models can generate language that is toxic, biased, untruthful or otherwise harmful. Though work to evaluate language model harms is under way, translating foresight about which harms may arise into rigorous benchmarks is not straightforward. To facilitate this translation, we outline six ways of characterizing harmful text which merit explicit consideration when designing new benchmarks. We then use these characteristics as a lens to identify trends and gaps in existing benchmarks. Finally, we apply them in a case study of the Perspective API, a toxicity classifier that is widely used in harm benchmarks. Our characteristics provide one piece of the bridge that translates between foresight and effective evaluation.
Reinforcement Learning-based Defect Mitigation for Quality Assurance of Additive Manufacturing
Chung, Jihoon, Shen, Bo, Law, Andrew Chung Chee, Zhenyu, null, Kong, null
Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a powerful technology that produces complex 3D geometries using various materials in a layer-by-layer fashion. However, quality assurance is the main challenge in AM industry due to the possible time-varying processing conditions during AM process. Notably, new defects may occur during printing, which cannot be mitigated by offline analysis tools that focus on existing defects. This challenge motivates this work to develop online learning-based methods to deal with the new defects during printing. Since AM typically fabricates a small number of customized products, this paper aims to create an online learning-based strategy to mitigate the new defects in AM process while minimizing the number of samples needed. The proposed method is based on model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL). It is called Continual G-learning since it transfers several sources of prior knowledge to reduce the needed training samples in the AM process. Offline knowledge is obtained from literature, while online knowledge is learned during printing. The proposed method develops a new algorithm for learning the optimal defect mitigation strategies proven the best performance when utilizing both knowledge sources. Numerical and real-world case studies in a fused filament fabrication (FFF) platform are performed and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.