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On Distributed Adaptive Optimization with Gradient Compression

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study COMP-AMS, a distributed optimization framework based on gradient averaging and adaptive AMSGrad algorithm. Gradient compression with error feedback is applied to reduce the communication cost in the gradient transmission process. Our convergence analysis of COMP-AMS shows that such compressed gradient averaging strategy yields same convergence rate as standard AMSGrad, and also exhibits the linear speedup effect w.r.t. the number of local workers. Compared with recently proposed protocols on distributed adaptive methods, COMP-AMS is simple and convenient. Numerical experiments are conducted to justify the theoretical findings, and demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve same test accuracy as the full-gradient AMSGrad with substantial communication savings. With its simplicity and efficiency, COMP-AMS can serve as a useful distributed training framework for adaptive gradient methods.


Machine Learning to Support Triage of Children at Risk for Epileptic Seizures in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Objective: Epileptic seizures are relatively common in critically-ill children admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) and thus serve as an important target for identification and treatment. Most of these seizures have no discernible clinical manifestation but still have a significant impact on morbidity and mortality. Children that are deemed at risk for seizures within the PICU are monitored using continuous-electroencephalogram (cEEG). cEEG monitoring cost is considerable and as the number of available machines is always limited, clinicians need to resort to triaging patients according to perceived risk in order to allocate resources. This research aims to develop a computer aided tool to improve seizures risk assessment in critically-ill children, using an ubiquitously recorded signal in the PICU, namely the electrocardiogram (ECG). Approach: A novel data-driven model was developed at a patient-level approach, based on features extracted from the first hour of ECG recording and the clinical data of the patient. Main results: The most predictive features were the age of the patient, the brain injury as coma etiology and the QRS area. For patients without any prior clinical data, using one hour of ECG recording, the classification performance of the random forest classifier reached an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) score of 0.84. When combining ECG features with the patients clinical history, the AUROC reached 0.87. Significance: Taking a real clinical scenario, we estimated that our clinical decision support triage tool can improve the positive predictive value by more than 59% over the clinical standard.


Pushing Buttons: No matter how hard developers try to avoid it, games are – and should be – political

The Guardian

Welcome to Pushing Buttons, the Guardian's gaming newsletter. If you'd like to receive it in your inbox every week, just pop your email in below – and check your inbox (and spam) for the confirmation email.Sign up for Pushing Buttons, our weekly guide to what's going on in video games. The New York Times's acquisition of viral word game Wordle has not been without its controversies: some players are convinced that the words have become more obscure (remember CAULK? I've felt a vague sense of dissatisfaction with it myself since late February, though I'm not sure how much of that is a natural drop-off from the times of Wordle mania, and how much has anything to do with the game itself. This week, though, there was a genuine controversy when the NYT decided to remove the word "fetus" as a solution to one of last week's puzzles.


KNUST advances research in Artificial Intelligence

#artificialintelligence

The Vice-Chancellor of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Professor Mrs. Rita Akosua Dickson, has said the University remains committed to advancing research in Artificial Intelligence (AI). This she said is part of efforts to ensure that the country does not get left behind in the application of AI for national socio-economic development. "We at the KNUST are providing the enabling research environment to our cherished scientists to lead in scientific discoveries, harness innovation and foster scientific collaborations," the Vice-Chancellor said. "This is because Ghana and the sub-Saharan Region cannot be left out of the positive outlook that the application of AI is projected to make on global development and national socio-economic transformation. Mrs. Dickson, who was addressing a workshop in Kumasi on Friday, May 6, 2022, on the theme: "The Role of Responsible AI in Promoting the Sustainable Development Agenda in the sub-Region", said the global market contribution of AI as of 2019, according to the Grand View Research, was about US $39.9 billion.



Startups Apply Artificial Intelligence To Supply Chain Disruptions

#artificialintelligence

Over the last two years a series of unexpected events has scrambled global supply chains. Coronavirus, war in Ukraine, Brexit and a container ship wedged in the Suez Canal have combined to delay deliveries of everything from bicycles to pet food. In response, a growing group of startups and established logistics firms has created a multi-billion dollar industry applying the latest technology to help businesses minimize the disruption. Interos Inc, Fero Labs, KlearNow Corp and others are using artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge tools so manufacturers and their customers can react more swiftly to supplier snarl-ups, monitor raw material availability and get through the bureaucratic thicket of cross-border trade. The market for new technology services focused on supply chains could be worth more than $20 billion a year in the next five years, analysts told Reuters.


The Turkish Drone That Changed the Nature of Warfare

The New Yorker

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. A video posted toward the end of February on the Facebook page of Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine's armed forces, showed grainy aerial footage of a Russian military convoy approaching the city of Kherson. Russia had invaded Ukraine several days earlier, and Kherson, a shipbuilding hub at the mouth of the Dnieper River, was an important strategic site. At the center of the screen, a targeting system locked onto a vehicle in the middle of the convoy; seconds later, the vehicle exploded, and a tower of burning fuel rose into the sky. The Bayraktar TB2 is a flat, gray unmanned aerial vehicle (U.A.V.), with angled wings and a rear propeller.


Approaches to the classification of complex systems: Words, texts, and more

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The Chapter starts with introductory information about quantitative linguistics notions, like rank--frequency dependence, Zipf's law, frequency spectra, etc. Similarities in distributions of words in texts with level occupation in quantum ensembles hint at a superficial analogy with statistical physics. This enables one to define various parameters for texts based on this physical analogy, including "temperature", "chemical potential", entropy, and some others. Such parameters provide a set of variables to classify texts serving as an example of complex systems. Moreover, texts are perhaps the easiest complex systems to collect and analyze. Similar approaches can be developed to study, for instance, genomes due to well-known linguistic analogies. We consider a couple of approaches to define nucleotide sequences in mitochondrial DNAs and viral RNAs and demonstrate their possible application as an auxiliary tool for comparative analysis of genomes. Finally, we discuss entropy as one of the parameters, which can be easily computed from rank--frequency dependences. Being a discriminating parameter in some problems of classification of complex systems, entropy can be given a proper interpretation only in a limited class of problems. Its overall role and significance remain an open issue so far.


Accelerated functional brain aging in major depressive disorder: evidence from a large scale fMRI analysis of Chinese participants

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the most common mental health conditions that has been intensively investigated for its association with brain atrophy and mortality. Recent studies reveal that the deviation between the predicted and the chronological age can be a marker of accelerated brain aging to characterize MDD. However, current conclusions are usually drawn based on structural MRI information collected from Caucasian participants. The universality of this biomarker needs to be further validated by subjects with different ethnic/racial backgrounds and by different types of data. Here we make use of the REST-meta-MDD, a large scale resting-state fMRI dataset collected from multiple cohort participants in China. We develop a stacking machine learning model based on 1101 healthy controls, which estimates a subject's chronological age from fMRI with promising accuracy. The trained model is then applied to 1276 MDD patients from 24 sites. We observe that MDD patients exhibit a $+4.43$ years ($\text{$p$} < 0.0001$, $\text{Cohen's $d$} = 0.35$, $\text{95\% CI}:1.86 - 3.91$) higher brain-predicted age difference (brain-PAD) compared to controls. In the MDD subgroup, we observe a statistically significant $+2.09$ years ($\text{$p$} < 0.05$, $\text{Cohen's $d$} = 0.134483$) brain-PAD in antidepressant users compared to medication-free patients. The statistical relationship observed is further checked by three different machine learning algorithms. The positive brain-PAD observed in participants in China confirms the presence of accelerated brain aging in MDD patients. The utilization of functional brain connectivity for age estimation verifies existing findings from a new dimension.