Africa
Deep Learning-Based Acoustic Mosquito Detection in Noisy Conditions Using Trainable Kernels and Augmentations
Khandelwal, Devesh, Campos, Sean, Nagaraj, Shwetha, Nugen, Fred, Todeschini, Alberto
In this paper, we demonstrate a unique recipe to enhance the effectiveness of audio machine learning approaches by fusing pre-processing techniques into a deep learning model. Our solution accelerates training and inference performance by optimizing hyper-parameters through training instead of costly random searches to build a reliable mosquito detector from audio signals. The experiments and the results presented here are part of the MOS C submission of the ACM 2022 challenge. Our results outperform the published baseline by 212% on the unpublished test set. We believe that this is one of the best real-world examples of building a robust bio-acoustic system that provides reliable mosquito detection in noisy conditions.
AI, analytics key to developing African hydrocarbons - IT-Online
Africa has had massive oil and gas discoveries in recent years – including the Greater Tortue Ahmeyim offshore Senegal and Mauritania, the Luiperd and Brulpadda in South Africa and the Rovuma Basin discoveries offshore Mozambique, among others – but development has been slow owing largely to restricted investment, Covid-19 impacts and a lack of modern digital solutions. With more than 600-million people living without access to electricity in Africa, the accelerated development of Africa's oil and gas is key for making energy poverty history. Now, with the emergence of AI and analytics across the oil and gas sector, an opportunity has risen for Africa to drive modern and sustainable energy growth for years to come. With oil and gas production decreasing in Africa due to natural declines in legacy projects, increasing the use of AI and analytics across the upstream segment could help simplify drilling activities, revitalise the sector and expand the continent's hydrocarbons reserves for energy reliability, saving project developers, operators and owners time and resources. Furthermore, with African hydrocarbon-producing countries such as Nigeria losing billions in revenue due to theft and vandalism of infrastructure – a condition that is restraining Africa's oil and gas sector from expanding – AI and analytics tools can help optimisa industry growth by enhancing infrastructure maintenance and security across the entire oil and gas value chain, thereby helping reduce energy and revenue loss, and in the process stimulating investments across the oil and gas sector. What's more, despite Africa accounting for less than 3% of all carbon emissions, global energy transition related policies are hindering the deployment of investments necessary for boosting the continent's hydrocarbons sector.
DF-Captcha: A Deepfake Captcha for Preventing Fake Calls
Social engineering (SE) is a form of deception that aims to trick people into giving access to data, information, networks and even money. For decades SE has been a key method for attackers to gain access to an organization, virtually skipping all lines of defense. Attackers also regularly use SE to scam innocent people by making threatening phone calls which impersonate an authority or by sending infected emails which look like they have been sent from a loved one. SE attacks will likely remain a top attack vector for criminals because humans are the weakest link in cyber security. Unfortunately, the threat will only get worse now that a new technology called deepfakes as arrived. A deepfake is believable media (e.g., videos) created by an AI. Although the technology has mostly been used to swap the faces of celebrities, it can also be used to `puppet' different personas. Recently, researchers have shown how this technology can be deployed in real-time to clone someone's voice in a phone call or reenact a face in a video call. Given that any novice user can download this technology to use it, it is no surprise that criminals have already begun to monetize it to perpetrate their SE attacks. In this paper, we propose a lightweight application which can protect organizations and individuals from deepfake SE attacks. Through a challenge and response approach, we leverage the technical and theoretical limitations of deepfake technologies to expose the attacker. Existing defence solutions are too heavy as an end-point solution and can be evaded by a dynamic attacker. In contrast, our approach is lightweight and breaks the reactive arms race, putting the attacker at a disadvantage.
Visual Comparison of Language Model Adaptation
Sevastjanova, Rita, Cakmak, Eren, Ravfogel, Shauli, Cotterell, Ryan, El-Assady, Mennatallah
To appear in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Figure 1: We present a workspace that enables the evaluation and comparison of adapters - lightweight alternatives for language model fine-tuning. After data pre-processing (e.g., embedding extraction), users can select pre-trained adapters, create explanations, and explore model differences through three types of visualizations: Concept Embedding Similarity, Concept Embedding Projection, and Concept Prediction Similarity. The explanations are provided for single models as well as model comparisons. For each explanation, we provide further explanation details, such as the word contexts as well as embedding vectors themselves. Abstract--Neural language models are widely used; however, their model parameters often need to be adapted to the specific domains and tasks of an application, which is time-and resource-consuming. Thus, adapters have recently been introduced as a lightweight alternative for model adaptation. They consist of a small set of task-specific parameters with a reduced training time and simple parameter composition. The simplicity of adapter training and composition comes along with new challenges, such as maintaining an overview of adapter properties and effectively comparing their produced embedding spaces. To help developers overcome these challenges, we provide a twofold contribution. First, in close collaboration with NLP researchers, we conducted a requirement analysis for an approach supporting adapter evaluation and detected, among others, the need for both intrinsic (i.e., embedding similaritybased) and extrinsic (i.e., prediction-based) explanation methods. Second, motivated by the gathered requirements, we designed a flexible visual analytics workspace that enables the comparison of adapter properties. In this paper, we discuss several design iterations and alternatives for interactive, comparative visual explanation methods. Our comparative visualizations show the differences in the adapted embedding vectors and prediction outcomes for diverse human-interpretable concepts (e.g., person names, human qualities).
The Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus
Trager, Jackson, Ziabari, Alireza S., Davani, Aida Mostafazadeh, Golazizian, Preni, Karimi-Malekabadi, Farzan, Omrani, Ali, Li, Zhihe, Kennedy, Brendan, Reimer, Nils Karl, Reyes, Melissa, Cheng, Kelsey, Wei, Mellow, Merrifield, Christina, Khosravi, Arta, Alvarez, Evans, Dehghani, Morteza
Moral framing and sentiment can affect a variety of online and offline behaviors, including donation, pro-environmental action, political engagement, and even participation in violent protests. Various computational methods in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been used to detect moral sentiment from textual data, but in order to achieve better performances in such subjective tasks, large sets of hand-annotated training data are needed. Previous corpora annotated for moral sentiment have proven valuable, and have generated new insights both within NLP and across the social sciences, but have been limited to Twitter. To facilitate improving our understanding of the role of moral rhetoric, we present the Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus, a collection of 16,123 Reddit comments that have been curated from 12 distinct subreddits, hand-annotated by at least three trained annotators for 8 categories of moral sentiment (i.e., Care, Proportionality, Equality, Purity, Authority, Loyalty, Thin Morality, Implicit/Explicit Morality) based on the updated Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) framework. We use a range of methodologies to provide baseline moral-sentiment classification results for this new corpus, e.g., cross-domain classification and knowledge transfer.
Deep Generative Views to Mitigate Gender Classification Bias Across Gender-Race Groups
Ramachandran, Sreeraj, Rattani, Ajita
Published studies have suggested the bias of automated face-based gender classification algorithms across gender-race groups. Specifically, unequal accuracy rates were obtained for women and dark-skinned people. To mitigate the bias of gender classifiers, the vision community has developed several strategies. However, the efficacy of these mitigation strategies is demonstrated for a limited number of races mostly, Caucasian and African-American. Further, these strategies often offer a trade-off between bias and classification accuracy. To further advance the state-of-the-art, we leverage the power of generative views, structured learning, and evidential learning towards mitigating gender classification bias. We demonstrate the superiority of our bias mitigation strategy in improving classification accuracy and reducing bias across gender-racial groups through extensive experimental validation, resulting in state-of-the-art performance in intra- and cross dataset evaluations.
Sparse Nonnegative Tucker Decomposition and Completion under Noisy Observations
Zhang, Xiongjun, Ng, Michael K.
Tensor decomposition is a powerful tool for extracting physically meaningful latent factors from multi-dimensional nonnegative data, and has been an increasing interest in a variety of fields such as image processing, machine learning, and computer vision. In this paper, we propose a sparse nonnegative Tucker decomposition and completion method for the recovery of underlying nonnegative data under noisy observations. Here the underlying nonnegative data tensor is decomposed into a core tensor and several factor matrices with all entries being nonnegative and the factor matrices being sparse. The loss function is derived by the maximum likelihood estimation of the noisy observations, and the $\ell_0$ norm is employed to enhance the sparsity of the factor matrices. We establish the error bound of the estimator of the proposed model under generic noise scenarios, which is then specified to the observations with additive Gaussian noise, additive Laplace noise, and Poisson observations, respectively. Our theoretical results are better than those by existing tensor-based or matrix-based methods. Moreover, the minimax lower bounds are shown to be matched with the derived upper bounds up to logarithmic factors. Numerical examples on both synthetic and real-world data sets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method for nonnegative tensor data completion.
AI robots that coexist with humans, incredible scientific development!!
The era of artificial intelligence chatbots has opened wide in Korea. On the 10th, the domestic media introduced an artificial intelligence robot that helps the elderly. The human care robot developed by the Intelligent Robotics Research Division of the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) is the main character. The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) said, "We have developed a robot artificial intelligence technology that understands the elderly, responds emotionally, and provides personalized services tailored to the situation." According to ETRI, the development of human care service robots requires data to recognize people from the robot's point of view and artificial intelligence technology necessary for deep learning.
Cloud-based medical imaging reconstruction using deep neural networks
Medical imaging techniques like computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), medical x-ray imaging, ultrasound imaging, and others are commonly used by doctors for various reasons. Some examples include detecting changes in the appearance of organs, tissues, and vessels, and detecting abnormalities such as tumors and various other type of pathologies. Before doctors can use the data from those techniques, the data needs to be transformed from its native raw form to a form that can be displayed as an image on a computer screen. This process is known as image reconstruction, and it plays a crucial role in a medical imaging workflow--it's the step that creates diagnostic images that can be then reviewed by doctors. In this post, we discuss a use case of MRI reconstruction, but the architectural concepts can be applied to other types of image reconstruction.
Semi-automatic tuning of coupled climate models with multiple intrinsic timescales: lessons learned from the Lorenz96 model
Lguensat, Redouane, Deshayes, Julie, Durand, Homer, Balaji, V.
The objective of this study is to evaluate the potential for History Matching (HM) to tune a climate system with multi-scale dynamics. By considering a toy climate model, namely, the two-scale Lorenz96 model and producing experiments in perfect-model setting, we explore in detail how several built-in choices need to be carefully tested. We also demonstrate the importance of introducing physical expertise in the range of parameters, a priori to running HM. Finally we revisit a classical procedure in climate model tuning, that consists of tuning the slow and fast components separately. By doing so in the Lorenz96 model, we illustrate the non-uniqueness of plausible parameters and highlight the specificity of metrics emerging from the coupling. This paper contributes also to bridging the communities of uncertainty quantification, machine learning and climate modeling, by making connections between the terms used by each community for the same concept and presenting promising collaboration avenues that would benefit climate modeling research.