Something built to blend into a society where people have all of their limbs while serving functional use cases. On the other end of the spectrum are the highly optimized prosthetics used by Athletes, built for speed, low weight, and appearing nothing like a human limb. As a child under 12 years old, neither of these categories of prosthetics particularly speaks to you. Open Bionics, founded by Joel Gibbard and Samantha Payne, was started to create a third category of prosthetics. One that targets the fun, imaginative side of children, while still providing the daily functional requirements.

In recent years, there has been an exponential growth of applications, including dialogue systems, that handle sensitive personal information. This has brought to light the extremely important issue of personal data protection in virtual environments. Sensitive Information Detection (SID) approaches different domains and languages in literature. However, if we refer to the personal data domain, a shared benchmark or the absence of an available labeled resource makes comparison with the state-of-the-art difficult. We introduce and release SPeDaC , a new annotated resource for the identification of sensitive personal data categories in the English language. SPeDaC enables the evaluation of computational models for three different SID subtasks with increasing levels of complexity. SPeDaC 1 regards binary classification, a model has to detect if a sentence contains sensitive information or not; whereas, in SPeDaC 2 we collected labeled sentences using 5 categories that relate to macro-domains of personal information; in SPeDaC 3, the labeling is fine-grained (61 personal data categories). We conduct an extensive evaluation of the resource using different state-of-the-art-classifiers. The results show that SPeDaC is challenging, particularly with regard to fine-grained classification. The transformer models achieve the best results (acc. RoBERTa on SPeDaC 1 = 98.20%, DeBERTa on SPeDaC 2 = 95.81% and SPeDaC 3 = 77.63%).

Autonomous vehicle (AV) algorithms need to be tested extensively in order to make sure the vehicle and the passengers will be safe while using it after the implementation. Testing these algorithms in real world create another important safety critical point. Real world testing is also subjected to limitations such as logistic limitations to carry or drive the vehicle to a certain location. For this purpose, hardware in the loop (HIL) simulations as well as virtual environments such as CARLA and LG SVL are used widely. This paper discusses a method that combines the real vehicle with the virtual world, called vehicle in virtual environment (VVE). This method projects the vehicle location and heading into a virtual world for desired testing, and transfers back the information from sensors in the virtual world to the vehicle. As a result, while vehicle is moving in the real world, it simultaneously moves in the virtual world and obtains the situational awareness via multiple virtual sensors. This would allow testing in a safe environment with the real vehicle while providing some additional benefits on vehicle dynamics fidelity, logistics limitations and passenger experience testing. The paper also demonstrates an example case study where path following and the virtual sensors are utilized to test a radar based stopping algorithm.

Traditional approaches to RL have focused on learning decision policies directly from episodic decisions, while slowly and implicitly learning the semantics of compositional representations needed for generalization. While some approaches have been adopted to refine representations via auxiliary self-supervised losses while simultaneously learning decision policies, learning compositional representations from hand-designed and context-independent self-supervised losses (multi-view) still adapts relatively slowly to the real world, which contains many non-IID subspaces requiring rapid distribution shift in both time and spatial attention patterns at varying levels of abstraction. In contrast, supervised language model cascades have shown the flexibility to adapt to many diverse manifolds, and hints of self-learning needed for autonomous task transfer. However, to date, transfer methods for language models like few-shot learning and fine-tuning still require human supervision and transfer learning using self-learning methods has been underexplored. We propose a self-supervised loss policy called contrastive distillation which manifests latent variables with high mutual information with both source and target tasks from weights to tokens. We show how this outperforms common methods of transfer learning and suggests a useful design axis of trading off compute for generalizability for online transfer. Contrastive distillation is improved through sampling from memory and suggests a simple algorithm for more efficiently sampling negative examples for contrastive losses than random sampling.

Objective: Imbalances of the electrolyte concentration levels in the body can lead to catastrophic consequences, but accurate and accessible measurements could improve patient outcomes. While blood tests provide accurate measurements, they are invasive and the laboratory analysis can be slow or inaccessible. In contrast, an electrocardiogram (ECG) is a widely adopted tool which is quick and simple to acquire. However, the problem of estimating continuous electrolyte concentrations directly from ECGs is not well-studied. We therefore investigate if regression methods can be used for accurate ECG-based prediction of electrolyte concentrations. Methods: We explore the use of deep neural networks (DNNs) for this task. We analyze the regression performance across four electrolytes, utilizing a novel dataset containing over 290000 ECGs. For improved understanding, we also study the full spectrum from continuous predictions to binary classification of extreme concentration levels. To enhance clinical usefulness, we finally extend to a probabilistic regression approach and evaluate different uncertainty estimates. Results: We find that the performance varies significantly between different electrolytes, which is clinically justified in the interplay of electrolytes and their manifestation in the ECG. We also compare the regression accuracy with that of traditional machine learning models, demonstrating superior performance of DNNs. Conclusion: Discretization can lead to good classification performance, but does not help solve the original problem of predicting continuous concentration levels. While probabilistic regression demonstrates potential practical usefulness, the uncertainty estimates are not particularly well-calibrated. Significance: Our study is a first step towards accurate and reliable ECG-based prediction of electrolyte concentration levels.

Federated learning (FL) is a key enabler for efficient communication and computing, leveraging devices' distributed computing capabilities. However, applying FL in practice is challenging due to the local devices' heterogeneous energy, wireless channel conditions, and non-independently and identically distributed (non-IID) data distributions. To cope with these issues, this paper proposes a novel learning framework by integrating FL and width-adjustable slimmable neural networks (SNN). Integrating FL with SNNs is challenging due to time-varying channel conditions and data distributions. In addition, existing multi-width SNN training algorithms are sensitive to the data distributions across devices, which makes SNN ill-suited for FL. Motivated by this, we propose a communication and energy-efficient SNN-based FL (named SlimFL) that jointly utilizes superposition coding (SC) for global model aggregation and superposition training (ST) for updating local models. By applying SC, SlimFL exchanges the superposition of multiple-width configurations decoded as many times as possible for a given communication throughput. Leveraging ST, SlimFL aligns the forward propagation of different width configurations while avoiding inter-width interference during backpropagation. We formally prove the convergence of SlimFL. The result reveals that SlimFL is not only communication-efficient but also deals with non-IID data distributions and poor channel conditions, which is also corroborated by data-intensive simulations.

Digital platforms, including online forums and helplines, have emerged as avenues of support for caregivers suffering from postpartum mental health distress. Understanding support seekers' experiences as shared on these platforms could provide crucial insight into caregivers' needs during this vulnerable time. In the current work, we provide a descriptive analysis of the concerns, psychological states, and motivations shared by healthy and distressed postpartum support seekers on two digital platforms, a one-on-one digital helpline and a publicly available online forum. Using a combination of human annotations, dictionary models and unsupervised techniques, we find stark differences between the experiences of distressed and healthy mothers. Distressed mothers described interpersonal problems and a lack of support, with 8.60% - 14.56% reporting severe symptoms including suicidal ideation. In contrast, the majority of healthy mothers described childcare issues, such as questions about breastfeeding or sleeping, and reported no severe mental health concerns. Across the two digital platforms, we found that distressed mothers shared similar content. However, the patterns of speech and affect shared by distressed mothers differed between the helpline vs. the online forum, suggesting the design of these platforms may shape meaningful measures of their support-seeking experiences. Our results provide new insight into the experiences of caregivers suffering from postpartum mental health distress. We conclude by discussing methodological considerations for understanding content shared by support seekers and design considerations for the next generation of support tools for postpartum parents.

Esports, a sports competition using video games, has become one of the most important sporting events in recent years. Although the amount of esports data is increasing than ever, only a small fraction of those data accompanies text commentaries for the audience to retrieve and understand the plays. Therefore, in this study, we introduce a task of generating game commentaries from structured data records to address the problem. We first build a large-scale esports data-to-text dataset using structured data and commentaries from a popular esports game, League of Legends. On this dataset, we devise several data preprocessing methods including linearization and data splitting to augment its quality. We then introduce several baseline encoder-decoder models and propose a hierarchical model to generate game commentaries. Considering the characteristics of esports commentaries, we design evaluation metrics including three aspects of the output: correctness, fluency, and strategic depth. Experimental results on our large-scale esports dataset confirmed the advantage of the hierarchical model, and the results revealed several challenges of this novel task.

Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown impressive results in games and simulation, real-world application of RL suffers from its instability under changing environment conditions and hyperparameters. We give a first impression of the extent of this instability by showing that the hyperparameters found by automatic hyperparameter optimization (HPO) methods are not only dependent on the problem at hand, but even on how well the state describes the environment dynamics. Specifically, we show that agents in contextual RL require different hyperparameters if they are shown how environmental factors change. In addition, finding adequate hyperparameter configurations is not equally easy for both settings, further highlighting the need for research into how hyperparameters influence learning and generalization in RL.

We explore the use of large language models (LLMs) for zero-shot semantic parsing. Semantic parsing involves mapping natural language utterances to task-specific meaning representations. Language models are generally trained on the publicly available text and code and cannot be expected to directly generalize to domain-specific parsing tasks in a zero-shot setting. In this work, we propose ZEROTOP, a zero-shot task-oriented parsing method that decomposes a semantic parsing problem into a set of abstractive and extractive question-answering (QA) problems, enabling us to leverage the ability of LLMs to zero-shot answer reading comprehension questions. For each utterance, we prompt the LLM with questions corresponding to its top-level intent and a set of slots and use the LLM generations to construct the target meaning representation. We observe that current LLMs fail to detect unanswerable questions; and as a result, cannot handle questions corresponding to missing slots. To address this problem, we fine-tune a language model on public QA datasets using synthetic negative samples. Experimental results show that our QA-based decomposition paired with the fine-tuned LLM can correctly parse ~16% of utterances in the MTOP dataset without requiring any annotated data.