Africa
A Knowledge Graph-Enhanced Tensor Factorisation Model for Discovering Drug Targets
Ye, Cheng, Swiers, Rowan, Bonner, Stephen, Barrett, Ian
The drug discovery and development process is a long and expensive one, costing over 1 billion USD on average per drug and taking 10-15 years. To reduce the high levels of attrition throughout the process, there has been a growing interest in applying machine learning methodologies to various stages of drug discovery and development in the recent decade, especially at the earliest stage identification of druggable disease genes. In this paper, we have developed a new tensor factorisation model to predict potential drug targets (genes or proteins) for treating diseases. We created a three dimensional data tensor consisting of 1,048 gene targets, 860 diseases and 230,011 evidence attributes and clinical outcomes connecting them, using data extracted from the Open Targets and PharmaProjects databases. We enriched the data with gene target representations learned from a drug discovery oriented knowledge graph and applied our proposed method to predict the clinical outcomes for unseen gene target and disease pairs. We designed three evaluation strategies to measure the prediction performance and benchmarked several commonly used machine learning classifiers together with Bayesian matrix and tensor factorisation methods. The result shows that incorporating knowledge graph embeddings significantly improves the prediction accuracy and that training tensor factorisation alongside a dense neural network outperforms all other baselines. In summary, our framework combines two actively studied machine learning approaches to disease target identification, namely tensor factorisation and knowledge graph representation learning, which could be a promising avenue for further exploration in data driven drug discovery.
Journal Impact Factor and Peer Review Thoroughness and Helpfulness: A Supervised Machine Learning Study
Severin, Anna, Strinzel, Michaela, Egger, Matthias, Barros, Tiago, Sokolov, Alexander, Mouatt, Julia Vilstrup, Müller, Stefan
The journal impact factor (JIF) is often equated with journal quality and the quality of the peer review of the papers submitted to the journal. We examined the association between the content of peer review and JIF by analysing 10,000 peer review reports submitted to 1,644 medical and life sciences journals. Two researchers hand-coded a random sample of 2,000 sentences. We then trained machine learning models to classify all 187,240 sentences as contributing or not contributing to content categories. We examined the association between ten groups of journals defined by JIF deciles and the content of peer reviews using linear mixed-effects models, adjusting for the length of the review. The JIF ranged from 0.21 to 74.70. The length of peer reviews increased from the lowest (median number of words 185) to the JIF group (387 words). The proportion of sentences allocated to different content categories varied widely, even within JIF groups. For thoroughness, sentences on 'Materials and Methods' were more common in the highest JIF journals than in the lowest JIF group (difference of 7.8 percentage points; 95% CI 4.9 to 10.7%). The trend for 'Presentation and Reporting' went in the opposite direction, with the highest JIF journals giving less emphasis to such content (difference -8.9%; 95% CI -11.3 to -6.5%). For helpfulness, reviews for higher JIF journals devoted less attention to 'Suggestion and Solution' and provided fewer Examples than lower impact factor journals. No, or only small differences were evident for other content categories. In conclusion, peer review in journals with higher JIF tends to be more thorough in discussing the methods used but less helpful in terms of suggesting solutions and providing examples. Differences were modest and variability high, indicating that the JIF is a bad predictor for the quality of peer review of an individual manuscript.
Exploration, Path Planning with Obstacle and Collision Avoidance in a Dynamic Environment
Alirezazadeh, Saeid, Alexandre, Luís A.
If we give a robot the task of moving an object from its current position to another location in an unknown environment, the robot must explore the map, identify all types of obstacles, and then determine the best route to complete the task. We proposed a mathematical model to find an optimal path planning that avoids collisions with all static and moving obstacles and has the minimum completion time and the minimum distance traveled. In this model, the bounding box around obstacles and robots is not considered, so the robot can move very close to the obstacles without colliding with them. We considered two types of obstacles: deterministic, which include all static obstacles such as walls that do not move and all moving obstacles whose movements have a fixed pattern, and non-deterministic, which include all obstacles whose movements can occur in any direction with some probability distribution at any time. We also consider the acceleration and deceleration of the robot to improve collision avoidance.
Review on Action Recognition for Accident Detection in Smart City Transportation Systems
Adewopo, Victor, Elsayed, Nelly, ElSayed, Zag, Ozer, Murat, Abdelgawad, Ahmed, Bayoumi, Magdy
Action detection and public traffic safety are crucial aspects of a safe community and a better society. Monitoring traffic flows in a smart city using different surveillance cameras can play a significant role in recognizing accidents and alerting first responders. The utilization of action recognition (AR) in computer vision tasks has contributed towards high-precision applications in video surveillance, medical imaging, and digital signal processing. This paper presents an intensive review focusing on action recognition in accident detection and autonomous transportation systems for a smart city. In this paper, we focused on AR systems that used diverse sources of traffic video capturing, such as static surveillance cameras on traffic intersections, highway monitoring cameras, drone cameras, and dash-cams. Through this review, we identified the primary techniques, taxonomies, and algorithms used in AR for autonomous transportation and accident detection. We also examined data sets utilized in the AR tasks, identifying the main sources of datasets and features of the datasets. This paper provides potential research direction to develop and integrate accident detection systems for autonomous cars and public traffic safety systems by alerting emergency personnel and law enforcement in the event of road accidents to minimize human error in accident reporting and provide a spontaneous response to victims
Rethinking Graph Neural Networks for the Graph Coloring Problem
Li, Wei, Li, Ruxuan, Ma, Yuzhe, Chan, Siu On, Pan, David, Yu, Bei
Graph coloring, a classical and critical NP-hard problem, is the problem of assigning connected nodes as different colors as possible. However, we observe that state-of-the-art GNNs are less successful in the graph coloring problem. We analyze the reasons from two perspectives. First, most GNNs fail to generalize the task under homophily to heterophily, i.e., graphs where connected nodes are assigned different colors. Second, GNNs are bounded by the network depth, making them possible to be a local method, which has been demonstrated to be non-optimal in Maximum Independent Set (MIS) problem. In this paper, we focus on the aggregation-combine GNNs (AC-GNNs), a popular class of GNNs. We first define the power of AC-GNNs in the coloring problem as the capability to assign nodes different colors. The definition is different with previous one that is based on the assumption of homophily. We identify node pairs that AC-GNNs fail to discriminate. Furthermore, we show that any AC-GNN is a local coloring method, and any local coloring method is non-optimal by exploring the limits of local methods over sparse random graphs, thereby demonstrating the non-optimality of AC-GNNs due to its local property. We then prove the positive correlation between model depth and its coloring power. Moreover, we discuss the color equivariance of graphs to tackle some practical constraints such as the pre-fixing constraints. Following the discussions above, we summarize a series of rules a series of rules that make a GNN color equivariant and powerful in the coloring problem. Then, we propose a simple AC-GNN variation satisfying these rules. We empirically validate our theoretical findings and demonstrate that our simple model substantially outperforms state-of-the-art heuristic algorithms in both quality and runtime.
AI and the super app: An interview with Careem's Selim Turki
QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey recently sat down with Selim Turki, head of data and AI at Careem, to discuss the latest trends in advanced analytics and artificial intelligence. Far from a dry discussion of theory, the conversation coalesced around several fascinating use cases in which Careem is using AI to make a difference in people's lives. We discussed how AI is being leveraged to improve customer and driver security through targeted facial-recognition checks to ensure drivers (captains) are who they say they are. We also discussed how AI is being used to provide customers with the most accurate and up-to-date estimated times of arrival (ETAs) by factoring in a host of conditions, including local weather conditions, prayer times, and even iftar times during Ramadan. Along the way, we discussed what it means to be an "AI first" company and the outlook for AI tech--and talent--in the region.
Rare giant squid with massive eye that roams 3,000 feet below ocean's surface washes up in Cape Town
A rare giant squid was discovered dead on a beach in Cape Town, South Africa, months after another washed up six miles away. Twitter user Tim Dee, who found the strange-looking sea creature on Scarborough Beach on Tuesday, shared photos and videos online that show the colorful squid's gigantic eye. 'Giant squid species wrecked on Scarborough beach this morning,' he wrote. Twitter user Tim Dee, who found the strange-looking sea creature (above) on Scarborough Beach on Tuesday, shared photos and videos online that show the colorful squid's gigantic eye Dee's video shows a marine biologist pulling back flesh to reveal the squid's huge beak that it uses for hunting and fishing. The sea creature, which looks like something Salvador Dali would have painted, is also known for having a very large eye - usually up to 11 inches in diameter with a 3.5 inch pupil.
Nigeria, India strengthen ties on artificial intelligence, solar energy – Businessamlive
Nigeria and India are moving to strengthen ties in areas of fintech, artificial intelligence, scientific development and solar energy, according to Gangadharan Balasubramanian, Indian high commissioner to Nigeria. The newly appointed envoy, who disclosed this during the commemoration of India's 76th Independence in Abuja on Monday, said the partnership between would further strengthen bilateral ties between the two countries. Balasubramanian noted that the trade and economic relations between India and Nigeria have been very strong, with over 135 Indian companies operating in Nigeria. He also said the volume of trade between both countries has increased as well as improved on both sides after the COVID-19 pandemic. "The trade volume between India and Nigeria was $14.95 billion in 2021. The trade volume has increased substantially after COVID-19, both ways," Balasubramanian said.
Artificial Intelligence in BFSI Market Will Hit Big Revenues in Future : Qstream, Gnowbe Group, EdApp
Artificial Intelligence (AI) helps in predicting future trends based on analysis of past behavior of customers, and also helps banks to detect patterns in laundering, identify fraud, and make customer recommendations. These advantages are resulting in increasing deployment of AI in banking operations, which is driving revenue growth of the global Artificial Intelligence in BFSI market. AI understands customer behavior and allows banks to customize financial products and services by adding personalized features to build strong relationships with customers. Digital payment advisors, Artificial Intelligence bots, and biometric fraud detection mechanisms result in high quality of services to a wider customer base. AI helps in increasing revenue, reducing costs, and boosting potential of profit.
A bifurcation threshold for contact-induced language change
One proposed mechanism of language change concerns the role played by second-language (L2) learners in situations of language contact. If sufficiently many L2 speakers are present in a speech community in relation to the number of first-language (L1) speakers, then those features which present a difficulty in L2 acquisition may be prone to disappearing from the language. This paper presents a mathematical account of such contact situations based on a stochastic model of learning and nonlinear population dynamics. The equilibria of a deterministic reduction of the model, describing a mixed population of L1 and L2 speakers, are fully characterized. Whether or not the language changes in response to the introduction of L2 learners turns out to depend on three factors: the overall proportion of L2 learners in the population, the strength of the difficulty speakers face in acquiring the language as an L2, and the language-internal utilities of the competing linguistic variants. These factors are related by a mathematical formula describing a phase transition from retention of the L2-difficult feature to its loss from both speaker populations. This supplies predictions that can be tested against empirical data. Here, the model is evaluated with the help of two case studies, morphological levelling in Afrikaans and the erosion of null subjects in Afro-Peruvian Spanish; the model is found to be broadly in agreement with the historical development in both cases.