--Depression is a serious mental health illness that significantly affects an individual's well-being and quality of life, making early detection crucial for adequate care and treatment. Detecting depression is often difficult, as it is based primarily on subjective evaluations during clinical interviews. Hence, the early diagnosis of depression, thanks to the content of social networks, has become a prominent research area. The extensive and diverse nature of user-generated information poses a significant challenge, limiting the accurate extraction of relevant temporal information and the effective fusion of data across multiple modalities. This paper introduces MMFformer, a multimodal depression detection network designed to retrieve depressive spatio-temporal high-level patterns from multimodal social media information. The transformer network with residual connections captures spatial features from videos, and a transformer encoder is exploited to design important temporal dynamics in audio. Moreover, the fusion architecture fused the extracted features through late and intermediate fusion strategies to find out the most relevant intermodal correlations among them. Finally, the proposed network is assessed on two large-scale depression detection datasets, and the results clearly reveal that it surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches, improving the F1-Score by 13.92% for D-Vlog dataset and 7.74% for LMVD dataset. The code is made available publicly at https://github.com/rezwanh001/

--Depression is a major mental health condition that severely impacts the emotional and physical well-being of individuals. The simple nature of data collection from social media platforms has attracted significant interest in properly utilizing this information for mental health research. A Multimodal Depression Detection Network (MDD-Net), utilizing acoustic and visual data obtained from social media networks, is proposed in this work where mutual transformers are exploited to efficiently extract and fuse multimodal features for efficient depression detection. The MDD-Net consists of four core modules: an acoustic feature extraction module for retrieving relevant acoustic attributes, a visual feature extraction module for extracting significant high-level patterns, a mutual transformer for computing the correlations among the generated features and fusing these features from multiple modalities, and a detection layer for detecting depression using the fused feature representations. The extensive experiments are performed using the multimodal D-Vlog dataset, and the findings reveal that the developed multimodal depression detection network surpasses the state-of-the-art by up to 17.37% for F1-Score, demonstrating the greater performance of the proposed system. The source code is accessible at https://github. Depression is a serious psychological condition that distorts a person's mood, thoughts, and behavior.

President Donald Trump's recent visit to the UAE marked a pivotal moment for UAE-U.S. bilateral relations, shining a spotlight on a shared vision for the future. As the UAE and the "New Gulf" pivot from oil to cutting-edge technologies, our partnership with the U.S., rooted in decades of trust, has become a beacon of what's possible when nations collaborate. This trust has paved the way for a bold new chapter: a strategic economic alliance poised to create tens of thousands of high-tech, energy and manufacturing jobs, driving prosperity in both of our countries. At the heart of this collaboration lies the new U.S.-UAE AI Acceleration Partnership. This initiative will advance cooperation in artificial intelligence and other transformative technologies while spurring investment flows between our nations.

Electricity load consumption may be extremely complex in terms of profile patterns, as it depends on a wide range of human factors, and it is often correlated with several exogenous factors, such as the availability of renewable energy and the weather conditions. The first goal of this paper is to investigate the performance of a large selection of different types of forecasting models in predicting the electricity load consumption within the short time horizon of a day or few hours ahead. Such forecasts may be rather useful for the energy management of individual residential buildings or small energy communities. In particular, we introduce persistence models, standard auto-regressive-based machine learning models, and more advanced deep learning models. The second goal of this paper is to introduce two alternative modeling approaches that are simpler in structure while they take into account domain specific knowledge, as compared to the previously mentioned black-box modeling techniques. In particular, we consider the persistence-based auto-regressive model (PAR) and the seasonal persistence-based regressive model (SPR), priorly introduced by the authors. In this paper, we specifically tailor these models to accommodate the generation of hourly forecasts. The introduced models and the induced comparative analysis extend prior work of the authors which was restricted to day-ahead forecasts. We observed a 15-30% increase in the prediction accuracy of the newly introduced hourly-based forecasting models over existing approaches.

Recently, ACM FAccT published an article by Kwegyir-Aggrey and colleagues (2023), critiquing the use of AUC ROC in predictive analytics in several domains. In this article, we offer a critique of that article. Specifically, we highlight technical inaccuracies in that paper's comparison of metrics, mis-specification of the interpretation and goals of AUC ROC, the article's use of the accuracy metric as a gold standard for comparison to AUC ROC, and the article's application of critiques solely to AUC ROC for concerns that would apply to the use of any metric. We conclude with a re-framing of the very valid concerns raised in that article, and discuss how the use of AUC ROC can remain a valid and appropriate practice in a well-informed predictive analytics approach taking those concerns into account. We conclude by discussing the combined use of multiple metrics, including machine learning bias metrics, and AUC ROC's place in such an approach. Like broccoli, AUC ROC is healthy, but also like broccoli, researchers and practitioners in our field shouldn't eat a diet of only AUC ROC.

We introduce Jais and Jais-chat, new state-of-the-art Arabic-centric foundation and instruction-tuned open generative large language models (LLMs). The models are based on the GPT-3 decoder-only architecture and are pretrained on a mixture of Arabic and English texts, including source code in various programming languages. With 13 billion parameters, they demonstrate better knowledge and reasoning capabilities in Arabic than any existing open Arabic and multilingual models by a sizable margin, based on extensive evaluation. Moreover, the models are competitive in English compared to English-centric open models of similar size, despite being trained on much less English data. We provide a detailed description of the training, the tuning, the safety alignment, and the evaluation of the models. We release two open versions of the model -- the foundation Jais model, and an instruction-tuned Jais-chat variant -- with the aim of promoting research on Arabic LLMs. Available at https://huggingface.co/inception-mbzuai/jais-13b-chat

The coronavirus pandemic has tested public health systems globally. Few novel and infectious diseases around the world have ever posed such dramatic challenges as the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19. With highly efficient human-to-human transmission and high mortality rates, COVID19 led the World Health Organization to declare a public health emergency of international concern and caused countries around the world to reassess their public health capabilities. The United Arab Emirates, like other members of the international community, faced the unprecedented challenge of ensuring public health and safety while minimizing economic fallout. These efforts by the U.A.E.'s leadership allowed the U.A.E. to be globally ranked as one of the top countries, and the highest in the Arab world, in terms of its COVID-19 response. VPS Healthcare is an integrated healthcare service provider with 22 operational hospitals, over 125 healthcare centres, 13000 employees, one of the largest pharmaceutical manufacturing plants in Dubai and medical support services spread across the Middle East, Europe and India. By providing comprehensive patient management at international quality standards across the MENA Region and beyond and to the entire strata of community, VPS Healthcare reflects a brand image of excellence in healthcare delivery system.

A two-layer neural network model that systematically includes correlations among input variables to arbitrary order and is designed to implement Bayes inference has been adapted to classify breast cancer tumors as malignant or benign, assigning a probability for either outcome. The inputs to the network represent measured characteristics of cell nuclei imaged in Fine Needle Aspiration biopsies. The present machine-learning approach to diagnosis (known as HOPP, for higher-order probabilistic perceptron) is tested on the much-studied, open-access Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Diagnosis) Data Set of Wolberg et al. This set lists, for each tumor, measured physical parameters of the cell nuclei of each sample. The HOPP model can identify the key factors -- input features and their combinations -- most relevant for reliable diagnosis. HOPP networks were trained on 90\% of the examples in the Wisconsin database, and tested on the remaining 10\%. Referred to ensembles of 300 networks, selected randomly for cross-validation, accuracy of classification for the test sets of up to 97\% was readily achieved, with standard deviation around 2\%, together with average Matthews correlation coefficients reaching 0.94 indicating excellent predictive performance. Demonstrably, the HOPP is capable of matching the predictive power attained by other advanced machine-learning algorithms applied to this much-studied database, over several decades. Analysis shows that in this special problem, which is almost linearly separable, the effects of irreducible correlations among the measured features of the Wisconsin database are of relatively minor importance, as the Naive Bayes approximation can itself yield predictive accuracy approaching 95\%. The advantages of the HOPP algorithm will be more clearly revealed in application to more challenging machine-learning problems.

The Cabinet has adopted the formation of the'UAE Council for Artificial Intelligence' to ensure the implementation of these technologies in various sectors. The move aims to serve the UAE Government's objectives, and improve the quality of life of citizens and residents in order to achieve the vision of the UAE 2021 and make the UAE one of the best countries in the world by 2071. The council's formation is a reaffirmation of the UAE Government's keenness to move forward in the use of artificial intelligence and its applications in various fields to improve government performance and create innovative work environments to accelerate the development projects. The formation of the council follows the appointment of a Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence in the recent formation of the UAE Cabinet, the launch of the UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence and the UAE Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The council will study and identify the government sectors where artificial intelligence technology can be incorporated and make recommendations for the development of related infrastructure, in addition to the integration of artificial intelligence in different stages of education.

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook revealed that two of its artificial intelligence (AI) machines had developed their own language to communicate in a more efficient fashion. The response was wide-scale scaremongering from pundits who lamented the evolution of computers. It might be a while before robots take over, but a recent study from Oxford University suggests that robots and AI will replace most human tasks by as early as 2051 and all human jobs by 2136. Technology has already progressed enough to give us driverless cars, robot police and autonomous delivery drones, but the true impact will go beyond making large swaths of the population redundant and drastically alter our society as we know it – from education and health care, to the criminal justice system. "Traditionally, to get a computer to do something, you had to write code and algorithms, but AI is different...the algorithm works independently," said Duncan Angove, president of software company Infor at a recent conference in New York.