Organisations must conduct end-to-end audits that consider both the social and technical aspects of artificial intelligence (AI) to fully understand the impacts of any given system, but a lack of understanding around how to conduct holistic audits and the limitations of the process is holding back progress, say algorithmic auditing experts. At the inaugural International Algorithmic Auditing Conference, hosted in Barcelona on 8 November by algorithmic auditing firm Eticas, experts had a wide-ranging discussion on what a "socio-technical" audit for AI should entail, as well as various challenges associated with the process. Attended by representatives from industry, academia and the third sector, the goal of the conference is to create a shared forum for experts to discuss developments in the field and help establish a roadmap for how organisations can manage their AI systems responsibly. Those involved in this first-of-its-kind gathering will go on to Brussels to meet with European Union (EU) officials and other representatives from digital rights organisations, so they can share their collective thinking on how AI audits can and should be regulated for. Gemma Galdon-Clavell, conference chair and director of Eticas, said: "Technical systems, when they're based on personal data, are not just technical, they are socio-technical, because the data comes from comes from social processes."

Outcome prediction is crucial for head and neck cancer patients as it can provide prognostic information for early treatment planning. Radiomics methods have been widely used for outcome prediction from medical images. However, these methods are limited by their reliance on intractable manual segmentation of tumor regions. Recently, deep learning methods have been proposed to perform end-to-end outcome prediction so as to remove the reliance on manual segmentation. Unfortunately, without segmentation masks, these methods will take the whole image as input, such that makes them difficult to focus on tumor regions and potentially unable to fully leverage the prognostic information within the tumor regions. In this study, we propose a radiomics-enhanced deep multi-task framework for outcome prediction from PET/CT images, in the context of HEad and neCK TumOR segmentation and outcome prediction challenge (HECKTOR 2022). In our framework, our novelty is to incorporate radiomics as an enhancement to our recently proposed Deep Multi-task Survival model (DeepMTS). The DeepMTS jointly learns to predict the survival risk scores of patients and the segmentation masks of tumor regions. Radiomics features are extracted from the predicted tumor regions and combined with the predicted survival risk scores for final outcome prediction, through which the prognostic information in tumor regions can be further leveraged. Our method achieved a C-index of 0.681 on the testing set, placing the 2nd on the leaderboard with only 0.00068 lower in C-index than the 1st place.

DBLP is the largest open-access repository of scientific articles on computer science and provides metadata associated with publications, authors, and venues. We retrieved more than 6 million publications from DBLP and extracted pertinent metadata (e.g., abstracts, author affiliations, citations) from the publication texts to create the DBLP Discovery Dataset (D3). D3 can be used to identify trends in research activity, productivity, focus, bias, accessibility, and impact of computer science research. We present an initial analysis focused on the volume of computer science research (e.g., number of papers, authors, research activity), trends in topics of interest, and citation patterns. Our findings show that computer science is a growing research field ( 15% annually), with an active and collaborative research community. While papers in recent years present more bibliographical entries in comparison to previous decades, the average number of citations has been declining. Investigating papers' abstracts reveals that recent topic trends are clearly reflected in D3. Finally, we list further applications of D3 and pose supplemental research questions. The D3 dataset, our findings, and source code are publicly available for research purposes.

The recent success of large language models for text generation poses a severe threat to academic integrity, as plagiarists can generate realistic paraphrases indistinguishable from original work. However, the role of large autoregressive transformers in generating machine-paraphrased plagiarism and their detection is still developing in the literature. This work explores T5 and GPT-3 for machine-paraphrase generation on scientific articles from arXiv, student theses, and Wikipedia. We evaluate the detection performance of six automated solutions and one commercial plagiarism detection software and perform a human study with 105 participants regarding their detection performance and the quality of generated examples. Our results suggest that large models can rewrite text humans have difficulty identifying as machine-paraphrased (53% mean acc.). Human experts rate the quality of paraphrases generated by GPT-3 as high as original texts (clarity 4.0/5, fluency 4.2/5, coherence 3.8/5). The best-performing detection model (GPT-3) achieves a 66% F1-score in detecting paraphrases.

Distance metrics can only serve as proxy for similarity in information retrieval of similar instances. Learning a good similarity function from human annotations improves the quality of retrievals. This work uses deep metric learning to learn these user-defined similarity functions from few annotations for a large football trajectory dataset. We adapt an entropy-based active learning method with recent work from triplet mining to collect easy-to-answer but still informative annotations from human participants and use them to train a deep convolutional network that generalizes to unseen samples. Our user study shows that our approach improves the quality of the information retrieval compared to a previous deep metric learning approach that relies on a Siamese network. Specifically, we shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of passive sampling heuristics and active learners alike by analyzing the participants' response efficacy. To this end, we collect accuracy, algorithmic time complexity, the participants' fatigue and time-to-response, qualitative self-assessment and statements, as well as the effects of mixed-expertise annotators and their consistency on model performance and transfer-learning.

This paper describes a French dialect recognition system that will appropriately distinguish between different regional French dialects. A corpus of five regions - Monaco, French-speaking, Belgium, French-speaking Switzerland, French-speaking Canada and France, which is targeted forconstruction by the Sketch Engine. The content of the corpus is related to the four themes of eating, drinking, sleeping and living, which are closely linked to popular life. The experimental results were obtained through the processing of a python coded pre-processor and Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) data analytic tool which contains many filters and classifiers for machine learning.

Image captioning models tend to describe images in an object-centric way, emphasising visible objects. But image descriptions can also abstract away from objects and describe the type of scene depicted. In this paper, we explore the potential of a state-of-the-art Vision and Language model, VinVL, to caption images at the scene level using (1) a novel dataset which pairs images with both object-centric and scene descriptions. Through (2) an in-depth analysis of the effect of the fine-tuning, we show (3) that a small amount of curated data suffices to generate scene descriptions without losing the capability to identify object-level concepts in the scene; the model acquires a more holistic view of the image compared to when object-centric descriptions are generated. We discuss the parallels between these results and insights from computational and cognitive science research on scene perception.

With the success of the prompt-tuning paradigm in Natural Language Processing (NLP), various prompt templates have been proposed to further stimulate specific knowledge for serving downstream tasks, e.g., machine translation, text generation, relation extraction, and so on. Existing prompt templates are mainly shared among all training samples with the information of task description. However, training samples are quite diverse. The sharing task description is unable to stimulate the unique task-related information in each training sample, especially for tasks with the finite-label space. To exploit the unique task-related information, we imitate the human decision process which aims to find the contrastive attributes between the objective factual and their potential counterfactuals. Thus, we propose the \textbf{C}ounterfactual \textbf{C}ontrastive \textbf{Prompt}-Tuning (CCPrompt) approach for many-class classification, e.g., relation classification, topic classification, and entity typing. Compared with simple classification tasks, these tasks have more complex finite-label spaces and are more rigorous for prompts. First of all, we prune the finite label space to construct fact-counterfactual pairs. Then, we exploit the contrastive attributes by projecting training instances onto every fact-counterfactual pair. We further set up global prototypes corresponding with all contrastive attributes for selecting valid contrastive attributes as additional tokens in the prompt template. Finally, a simple Siamese representation learning is employed to enhance the robustness of the model. We conduct experiments on relation classification, topic classification, and entity typing tasks in both fully supervised setting and few-shot setting. The results indicate that our model outperforms former baselines.

Surface electromyogram (sEMG) is arguably the most sought-after physiological signal with a broad spectrum of biomedical applications, especially in miniaturized rehabilitation robots such as multifunctional prostheses. The widespread use of sEMG to drive pattern recognition (PR)-based control schemes is primarily due to its rich motor information content and non-invasiveness. Moreover, sEMG recordings exhibit non-linear and non-uniformity properties with inevitable interferences that distort intrinsic characteristics of the signal, precluding existing signal processing methods from yielding requisite motor control information. Therefore, we propose a multiresolution decomposition driven by dual-polynomial interpolation (MRDPI) technique for adequate denoising and reconstruction of multi-class EMG signals to guarantee the dual-advantage of enhanced signal quality and motor information preservation. Parameters for optimal MRDPI configuration were constructed across combinations of thresholding estimation schemes and signal resolution levels using EMG datasets of amputees who performed up to 22 predefined upper-limb motions acquired in-house and from the public NinaPro database. Experimental results showed that the proposed method yielded signals that led to consistent and significantly better decoding performance for all metrics compared to existing methods across features, classifiers, and datasets, offering a potential solution for practical deployment of intuitive EMG-PR-based control schemes for multifunctional prostheses and other miniaturized rehabilitation robotic systems that utilize myoelectric signals as control inputs.

Several recent studies [8, 41, 55, 67, 75] propose various learning strategies for AI models to be well-calibrated across all protected subgroups, while others focus on collecting responsible datasets [57, 82, 124] to make sure evaluations of AI models are accurate and algorithmic bias can be measured while promoting data privacy. There has been much criticism regarding the design choice of the publicly used datasets, such as for ImageNet [36, 38, 56, 70]. Discussions are mostly focused on concerns around collecting sensitive data about people without their consent. Casual Conversations v1 [57] was one of the first benchmarks that was designed with permission from participants. However, that dataset has several limitations: samples were collected only in the US, the gender label is limited to three options, and only age and gender labels are self-provided with the permission of the participants.