Asia
An Algorithm knows you better than your own family members do
Doctors have long known the data points can be leading indicators of potentially fatal medical emergencies. If physicians were able to analyze the data to identify when serious deterioration starts, they could save lives. Now computers have started doing just that. Researchers are using artificial intelligence algorithms to comb through the records of patients who suffered, say, sepsis or lung failure. The software examines data points from hours or even days before the onset of a crisis to see which combinations of factors might have predicted a fatal condition." One woman had turned on her air-conditioner, but said it then switched off without her touching it. Another said the code numbers of the digital lock at her front door changed every day and she could not figure out why. Still another told an abuse help line that she kept hearing the doorbell ring, but no one was there. Their stories are part of a new pattern of behavior in domestic abuse cases tied to the rise of smart home technology. Internet-connected locks, speakers, thermostats, lights and cameras …are being used as a means for harassment, monitoring, revenge and control."
Artificial intelligence accurately predicts distribution of radioactive fallout
A means of overcoming this difficulty has been presented in a new study reported in the journal Scientific Reports by a research team at The University of Tokyo Institute of Industrial Science. The team has created a computer program that can accurately predict where radioactive material that has been emitted will eventually land, over 30 hours in advance, using weather forecasts on the expected wind patterns. This tool enables evacuation plans and other health-protective measures to be implemented if another nuclear accident like in 2011 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant were to occur. This latest study was prompted by the limitations of existing atmospheric modeling tools in the aftermath of the accident at Fukushima; tools considered so unreliable that they were not used for planning immediately after the disaster. In this context, the team created a system based on a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning, which can use data on previous weather patterns to predict the route that radioactive emissions are likely to take.
Google Has Been Letting App Developers Read Users' Gmail, Unsurprisingly
The Gmail email application is seen on a portable device in this photo illustration on December 6, 2017. Google has reportedly allowed third-party developers of Android apps to review millions of Gmail messages, which seems about right. On Monday, a report by The Wall Street Journal drew attention to the fact that access settings for Gmail, Google's popular email platform, allow data companies and app developers that work Google to view millions of users' personal content and details. According to the WSJ, third parties have gotten human and AI access to whole Gmail messages, time stamps, and recipients' addresses, among other things. The report also suggested that Gmail's associated consent form isn't explicit enough about that fact that human eyes will be studying users' content, not just AI.
HAMLET: Hierarchical Harmonic Filters for Learning Tracts from Diffusion MRI
Reisert, Marco, Coenen, Volker A., Kaller, Christoph, Egger, Karl, Skibbe, Henrik
In this work we propose HAMLET, a novel tract learning algorithm, which, after training, maps raw diffusion weighted MRI directly onto an image which simultaneously indicates tract direction and tract presence. The automatic learning of fiber tracts based on diffusion MRI data is a rather new idea, which tries to overcome limitations of atlas-based techniques. HAMLET takes a such an approach. Unlike the current trend in machine learning, HAMLET has only a small number of free parameters HAMLET is based on spherical tensor algebra which allows a translation and rotation covariant treatment of the problem. HAMLET is based on a repeated application of convolutions and non-linearities, which all respect the rotation covariance. The intrinsic treatment of such basic image transformations in HAMLET allows the training and generalization of the algorithm without any additional data augmentation. We demonstrate the performance of our approach for twelve prominent bundles, and show that the obtained tract estimates are robust and reliable. It is also shown that the learned models are portable from one sequence to another.
Stochastic Constraint Optimization using Propagation on Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams
Latour, Anna L. D., Babaki, Behrouz, Nijssen, Siegfried
A number of problems in relational Artificial Intelligence can be viewed as Stochastic Constraint Optimization Problems (SCOPs). These are constraint optimization problems that involve objectives or constraints with a stochastic component. Building on the recently proposed language SC-ProbLog for modeling SCOPs, we propose a new method for solving these problems. Earlier methods used Probabilistic Logic Programming (PLP) techniques to create Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (OBDDs), which were decomposed into smaller constraints in order to exploit existing constraint programming (CP) solvers. We argue that this approach has as drawback that a decomposed representation of an OBDD does not guarantee domain consistency during search, and hence limits the efficiency of the solver. For the specific case of monotonic distributions, we suggest an alternative method for using CP in SCOP, based on the development of a new propagator; we show that this propagator is linear in the size of the OBDD, and has the potential to be more efficient than the decomposition method, as it maintains domain consistency.
Cooperative Tracking of Cyclists Based on Smart Devices and Infrastructure
Reitberger, Günther, Zernetsch, Stefan, Bieshaar, Maarten, Sick, Bernhard, Doll, Konrad, Fuchs, Erich
In our work, we envision a future mixed traffic scenario [1] where traffic participants, such as automated driving cars, trucks, and intelligent infrastructure equipped with sensors, electronic maps, and Internet connection, share the road with vulnerable road users (VRUs), such as pedestrians and cyclists, equipped with smart devices. Each of them itself determines and continuously maintains a local model of the surrounding traffic situation. This model does not only contain information by each traffic participant's own sensory perception, but is the result of cooperation with other traffic participants and infrastructure in the local environment, e.g., based on vehicular ad hoc networks. This joint knowledge is exploited in various ways, e.g., to increase the perceptual horizon of individual road users beyond their own sensory capabilities. Although modern vehicles possess many forward looking safety systems based on various sensors, still dangerous situations for VRUs can occur as a result of occlusions or sensor malfunctions. Cooperation between the different road users can resolve occlusion situations and improve the overall performance regarding measurement accuracy, e.g., precise positioning.
Providing Explanations for Recommendations in Reciprocal Environments
Kleinerman, Akiva, Rosenfeld, Ariel, Kraus, Sarit
Automated platforms which support users in finding a mutually beneficial match, such as online dating and job recruitment sites, are becoming increasingly popular. These platforms often include recommender systems that assist users in finding a suitable match. While recommender systems which provide explanations for their recommendations have shown many benefits, explanation methods have yet to be adapted and tested in recommending suitable matches. In this paper, we introduce and extensively evaluate the use of "reciprocal explanations" -- explanations which provide reasoning as to why both parties are expected to benefit from the match. Through an extensive empirical evaluation, in both simulated and real-world dating platforms with 287 human participants, we find that when the acceptance of a recommendation involves a significant cost (e.g., monetary or emotional), reciprocal explanations outperform standard explanation methods which consider the recommendation receiver alone. However, contrary to what one may expect, when the cost of accepting a recommendation is negligible, reciprocal explanations are shown to be less effective than the traditional explanation methods.
A Spatial and Temporal Features Mixture Model with Body Parts for Video-based Person Re-Identification
Liu, Jie, Sun, Cheng, Xu, Xiang, Xu, Baomin, Yu, Shuangyuan
The video-based person re-identification is to recognize a person under different cameras, which is a crucial task applied in visual surveillance system. Most previous methods mainly focused on the feature of full body in the frame. In this paper we propose a novel Spatial and Temporal Features Mixture Model (STFMM) based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN), in which the human body is split into $N$ parts in horizontal direction so that we can obtain more specific features. The proposed method skillfully integrates features of each part to achieve more expressive representation of each person. We first split the video sequence into $N$ part sequences which include the information of head, waist, legs and so on. Then the features are extracted by STFMM whose $2N$ inputs are obtained from the developed Siamese network, and these features are combined into a discriminative representation for one person. Experiments are conducted on the iLIDS-VID and PRID-2011 datasets. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods for video-based person re-identification. It achieves a rank-1 CMC accuracy of 74\% on the iLIDS-VID dataset, exceeding the the most recently developed method ASTPN by 12\%. For the cross-data testing, our method achieves a rank-1 CMC accuracy of 48\% exceeding the ASTPN method by 18\%, which shows that our model has significant stability.
Coopetitive Soft Gating Ensemble
Deist, Stephan, Bieshaar, Maarten, Schreiber, Jens, Gensler, Andre, Sick, Bernhard
In this article, we proposed the Coopetititve Soft Gating Ensemble or CSGE for general machine learning tasks. The goal of machine learning is to create models which poses a high generalisation capability. But often problems are too complex to be solved by a single model. Therefore, ensemble methods combine predictions of multiple models. The CSGE comprises a comprehensible combination based on three different aspects relating to the overall global historical performance, the local-/situation-dependent and time-dependent performance of its ensemble members. The CSGE can be optimised according to arbitrary loss functions making it accessible for a wider range of problems. We introduce a novel training procedure including a hyper-parameter initialisation at its heart. We show that the CSGE approach reaches state-of-the-art performance for both classification and regression tasks. Still, the CSGE allows to quantify the influence of all base estimators by means of the three weighting aspects in a comprehensive way. In terms of Organic computing (OC), our CSGE approach combines multiple base models towards a self-organising complex system. Moreover, we provide a scikit-learn compatible implementation.
Approximate Survey Propagation for Statistical Inference
Antenucci, Fabrizio, Krzakala, Florent, Urbani, Pierfrancesco, Zdeborová, Lenka
Approximate message passing algorithm enjoyed considerable attention in the last decade. In this paper we introduce a variant of the AMP algorithm that takes into account glassy nature of the system under consideration. We coin this algorithm as the approximate survey propagation (ASP) and derive it for a class of low-rank matrix estimation problems. We derive the state evolution for the ASP algorithm and prove that it reproduces the one-step replica symmetry breaking (1RSB) fixed-point equations, well-known in physics of disordered systems. Our derivation thus gives a concrete algorithmic meaning to the 1RSB equations that is of independent interest. We characterize the performance of ASP in terms of convergence and mean-squared error as a function of the free Parisi parameter s. We conclude that when there is a model mismatch between the true generative model and the inference model, the performance of AMP rapidly degrades both in terms of MSE and of convergence, while ASP converges in a larger regime and can reach lower errors. Among other results, our analysis leads us to a striking hypothesis that whenever s (or other parameters) can be set in such a way that the Nishimori condition $M=Q>0$ is restored, then the corresponding algorithm is able to reach mean-squared error as low as the Bayes-optimal error obtained when the model and its parameters are known and exactly matched in the inference procedure.