One of the major concerns of targeting interventions on individuals in social welfare programs is discrimination: individualized treatments may induce disparities on sensitive attributes such as age, gender, or race. This paper addresses the question of the design of fair and efficient treatment allocation rules. We adopt the non-maleficence perspective of "first do no harm": we propose to select the fairest allocation within the Pareto frontier. We provide envy-freeness justifications to novel counterfactual notions of fairness. We discuss easy-to-implement estimators of the policy function, by casting the optimization into a mixed-integer linear program formulation. We derive regret bounds on the unfairness of the estimated policy function, and small sample guarantees on the Pareto frontier. Finally, we illustrate our method using an application from education economics.

We study the problem of finding a mapping $f$ from a set of points into the real line, under ordinal triple constraints. An ordinal constraint for a triple of points $(u,v,w)$ asserts that $|f(u)-f(v)|<|f(u)-f(w)|$. We present an approximation algorithm for the dense case of this problem. Given an instance that admits a solution that satisfies $(1-\varepsilon)$-fraction of all constraints, our algorithm computes a solution that satisfies $(1-O(\varepsilon^{1/8}))$-fraction of all constraints, in time $O(n^7) + (1/\varepsilon)^{O(1/\varepsilon^{1/8})} n$.

There are a wide range of applications that involve multi-modal data, such as cross-modal retrieval, visual question-answering, and image captioning. Such applications are primarily dependent on aligned distributions of the different constituent modalities. Existing approaches generate latent embeddings for each modality in a joint fashion by representing them in a common manifold. However these joint embedding spaces fail to sufficiently reduce the modality gap, which affects the performance in downstream tasks. We hypothesize that these embeddings retain the intra-class relationships but are unable to preserve the inter-class dynamics. In this paper, we present a novel framework COBRA that aims to train two modalities (image and text) in a joint fashion inspired by the Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC) and Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) paradigms which preserve both inter and intra-class relationships. We empirically show that this framework reduces the modality gap significantly and generates a robust and task agnostic joint-embedding space. We outperform existing work on four diverse downstream tasks spanning across seven benchmark cross-modal datasets.

From public CCTV cameras to biometric identification systems in airports, facial recognition technology is now common in a growing number of places around the world. In its most benign form, facial recognition technology is a convenient way to unlock your smartphone. At the state level though, facial recognition is a key component of mass surveillance, and it already touches half the global population on a regular basis. Today's visualizations from SurfShark classify 194 countries and regions based on the extent of surveillance. Click here to explore the full research methodology.

Delaying the reopening of primary schools in England on 1 June by two weeks could halve the risk to each child of being exposed to an infectious classmate, according to a report by the Independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, a recently-formed group of scientists that is seeking to provide alternative advice to the UK government. The group say that modelling suggests that waiting until September would reduce this risk further, to less than the risk to children of road traffic accidents. The group is chaired by former government chief scientific advisor David King and is separate from the official SAGE committee that advises the UK government. "The crucial factor allowing school reopening around the world has been the presence of well-functioning local test, trace and isolate protocols – something that is now accepted will not be in place in England by early June," the report says. It adds that before schools can reopen, it is important to confirm that daily new ...

Cloud computing has become a powerful and indispensable technology for complex, high performance and scalable computation. The exponential expansion in the deployment of cloud technology has produced a massive amount of data from a variety of applications, resources and platforms. In turn, the rapid rate and volume of data creation has begun to pose significant challenges for data management and security. The design and deployment of intrusion detection systems (IDS) in the big data setting has, therefore, become a topic of importance. In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) of data mining techniques (DMT) used in IDS-based solutions through the period 2013-2018. We employed criterion-based, purposive sampling identifying 32 articles, which constitute the primary source of the present survey. After a careful investigation of these articles, we identified 17 separate DMTs deployed in an IDS context. This paper also presents the merits and disadvantages of the various works of current research that implemented DMTs and distributed streaming frameworks (DSF) to detect and/or prevent malicious attacks in a big data environment.

The NHS Confederation, a membership body that represents people who commission or provide NHS services, has warned of the urgent need for a UK contact tracing strategy. "Our members are concerned that unless there is a clear strategy, then there must be a greater risk of a second wave of infections and serious health consequences," chief executive Niall Dickson wrote in a letter sent to the UK's health and social care minister Matt Hancock yesterday. "We would therefore urge you to produce such a strategy with a clear implementation plan ahead of any further easing of the lockdown." Dickson welcomed Prime Minister Boris Johnson's new commitment to trace 10,000 new coronavirus cases per day by 1 June, adding that "delivery and implementation will be critical, and we await further details." However, he said that a strategy for tracing contacts "should have been in place much sooner". An international randomised controlled trial investigating whether hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine ...

The past several years have witnessed a huge surge in the use of social media platforms during mass convergence events such as health emergencies, natural or human-induced disasters. These non-traditional data sources are becoming vital for disease forecasts and surveillance when preparing for epidemic and pandemic outbreaks. In this paper, we present GeoCoV19, a large-scale Twitter dataset containing more than 524 million multilingual tweets posted over a period of 90 days since February 1, 2020. Moreover, we employ a gazetteer-based approach to infer the geolocation of tweets. We postulate that this large-scale, multilingual, geolocated social media data can empower the research communities to evaluate how societies are collectively coping with this unprecedented global crisis as well as to develop computational methods to address challenges such as identifying fake news, understanding communities' knowledge gaps, building disease forecast and surveillance models, among others.

Intra-driver and inter-driver heterogeneity has been confirmed to exist in human driving behaviors by many studies. In this study, a joint model of the two types of heterogeneity in car-following behavior is proposed as an approach of driver profiling and identification. It is assumed that all drivers share a pool of driver states; under each state a car-following data sequence obeys a specific probability distribution in feature space; each driver has his/her own probability distribution over the states, called driver profile, which characterize the intradriver heterogeneity, while the difference between the driver profile of different drivers depict the inter-driver heterogeneity. Thus, the driver profile can be used to distinguish a driver from others. Based on the assumption, a stochastic car-following model is proposed to take both intra-driver and inter-driver heterogeneity into consideration, and a method is proposed to jointly learn parameters in behavioral feature extractor, driver states and driver profiles. Experiments demonstrate the performance of the proposed method in driver identification on naturalistic car-following data: accuracy of 82.3% is achieved in an 8-driver experiment using 10 car-following sequences of duration 15 seconds for online inference. The potential of fast registration of new drivers are demonstrated and discussed.

The combination of Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and deep reinforcement learning is state-of-the-art in two-player perfect-information games. In this paper, we describe a search algorithm that uses a variant of MCTS which we enhanced by 1) a novel action value normalization mechanism for games with potentially unbounded rewards (which is the case in many optimization problems), 2) defining a virtual loss function that enables effective search parallelization, and 3) a policy network, trained by generations of self-play, to guide the search. We gauge the effectiveness of our method in "SameGame"---a popular single-player test domain. Our experimental results indicate that our method outperforms baseline algorithms on several board sizes. Additionally, it is competitive with state-of-the-art search algorithms on a public set of positions.