A scanned lace monitor lizard (Varanus varius) image produced by using new technology. Blue-tongue lizards and sulphur-crested cockatoos are among the native animals frequently smuggled overseas. While the number of live animals seized by the Australian Government has tripled since 2017, the full scale of the problem eludes us as authorities don't often know where and how wildlife is trafficked. Now, we can add a new technology to Australia's arsenal against this cruel and inhumane industry. Our research shows the potential for new technology to detect illegal wildlife in luggage or mail.

The $k$ nearest neighbor algorithm ($k$NN) is one of the most popular nonparametric methods used for various purposes, such as treatment effect estimation, missing value imputation, classification, and clustering. The main advantage of $k$NN is its simplicity of hyperparameter optimization. It often produces favorable results with minimal effort. This paper proposes a generic semiparametric (or nonparametric if required) approach named Local Resampler (LR). LR utilizes $k$NN to create subsamples from the original sample and then generates synthetic values that are drawn from locally estimated distributions. LR can accurately create synthetic samples, even if the original sample has a non-convex distribution. Moreover, LR shows better or similar performance to other popular synthetic data methods with minimal model optimization with parametric distributional assumptions.

Functional data clustering is to identify heterogeneous morphological patterns in the continuous functions underlying the discrete measurements/observations. Application of functional data clustering has appeared in many publications across various fields of sciences, including but not limited to biology, (bio)chemistry, engineering, environmental science, medical science, psychology, social science, etc. The phenomenal growth of the application of functional data clustering indicates the urgent need for a systematic approach to develop efficient clustering methods and scalable algorithmic implementations. On the other hand, there is abundant literature on the cluster analysis of time series, trajectory data, spatio-temporal data, etc., which are all related to functional data. Therefore, an overarching structure of existing functional data clustering methods will enable the cross-pollination of ideas across various research fields. We here conduct a comprehensive review of original clustering methods for functional data. We propose a systematic taxonomy that explores the connections and differences among the existing functional data clustering methods and relates them to the conventional multivariate clustering methods. The structure of the taxonomy is built on three main attributes of a functional data clustering method and therefore is more reliable than existing categorizations. The review aims to bridge the gap between the functional data analysis community and the clustering community and to generate new principles for functional data clustering.

Automatically converting text descriptions into images using transformer architectures has recently received considerable attention. Such advances have implications for many applied design disciplines across fashion, art, architecture, urban planning, landscape design and the future tools available to such disciplines. However, a detailed analysis capturing the capabilities of such models, specifically with a focus on the built environment, has not been performed to date. In this work, we investigate the capabilities and biases of such text-to-image methods as it applies to the built environment in detail. We use a systematic grammar to generate queries related to the built environment and evaluate resulting generated images. We generate 1020 different images and find that text to image transformers are robust at generating realistic images across different domains for this use-case. Generated imagery can be found at the github: https://github.com/sachith500/DALLEURBAN

Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) contain clinical narrative text that is of great potential value to medical researchers. However, this information is mixed with Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that presents risks to patient and clinician confidentiality. This paper presents an end-to-end deidentification framework to automatically remove PII from Australian hospital discharge summaries. Our corpus included 600 hospital discharge summaries which were extracted from the EMRs of two principal referral hospitals in Sydney, Australia. Our end-to-end de-identification framework consists of three components: 1) Annotation: labelling of PII in the 600 hospital discharge summaries using five pre-defined categories: person, address, date of birth, individual identification number, phone/fax number; 2) Modelling: training six named entity recognition (NER) deep learning base-models on balanced and imbalanced datasets; and evaluating ensembles that combine all six base-models, the three base-models with the best F1 scores and the three base-models with the best recall scores respectively, using token-level majority voting and stacking methods; and 3) De-identification: removing PII from the hospital discharge summaries. Our results showed that the ensemble model combined using the stacking Support Vector Machine (SVM) method on the three base-models with the best F1 scores achieved excellent results with a F1 score of 99.16% on the test set of our corpus. We also evaluated the robustness of our modelling component on the 2014 i2b2 de-identification dataset. Our ensemble model, which uses the token-level majority voting method on all six basemodels, achieved the highest F1 score of 96.24% at strict entity matching and the highest F1 score of 98.64% at binary token-level matching compared to two state-of-the-art methods.

Deep learning has achieved remarkable success in many machine learning tasks such as image classification, speech recognition, and game playing. However, these breakthroughs are often difficult to translate into real-world engineering systems because deep learning models require a massive number of training samples, which are costly to obtain in practice. To address labeled data scarcity, few-shot meta-learning optimizes learning algorithms that can efficiently adapt to new tasks quickly. While meta-learning is gaining significant interest in the machine learning literature, its working principles and theoretic fundamentals are not as well understood in the engineering community. This review monograph provides an introduction to meta-learning by covering principles, algorithms, theory, and engineering applications. After introducing meta-learning in comparison with conventional and joint learning, we describe the main meta-learning algorithms, as well as a general bilevel optimization framework for the definition of meta-learning techniques. Then, we summarize known results on the generalization capabilities of meta-learning from a statistical learning viewpoint. Applications to communication systems, including decoding and power allocation, are discussed next, followed by an introduction to aspects related to the integration of meta-learning with emerging computing technologies, namely neuromorphic and quantum computing. The monograph is concluded with an overview of open research challenges.

Neural Combinatorial Optimization approaches have recently leveraged the expressiveness and flexibility of deep neural networks to learn efficient heuristics for hard Combinatorial Optimization (CO) problems. However, most of the current methods lack generalization: for a given CO problem, heuristics which are trained on instances with certain characteristics underperform when tested on instances with different characteristics. While some previous works have focused on varying the training instances properties, we postulate that a one-size-fit-all model is out of reach. Instead, we formalize solving a CO problem over a given instance distribution as a separate learning task and investigate meta-learning techniques to learn a model on a variety of tasks, in order to optimize its capacity to adapt to new tasks. Through extensive experiments, on two CO problems, using both synthetic and realistic instances, we show that our proposed meta-learning approach significantly improves the generalization of two state-of-the-art models.

Current breakthroughs in natural language processing have benefited dramatically from neural language models, through which distributional semantics can leverage neural data representations to facilitate downstream applications. Since neural embeddings use context prediction on word co-occurrences to yield dense vectors, they are inevitably prone to capture more semantic association than semantic similarity. To improve vector space models in deriving semantic similarity, we post-process neural word embeddings through deep metric learning, through which we can inject lexical-semantic relations, including syn/antonymy and hypo/hypernymy, into a distributional space. We introduce hierarchy-fitting, a novel semantic specialization approach to modelling semantic similarity nuances inherently stored in the IS-A hierarchies. Hierarchy-fitting attains state-of-the-art results on the common- and rare-word benchmark datasets for deriving semantic similarity from neural word embeddings. It also incorporates an asymmetric distance function to specialize hypernymy's directionality explicitly, through which it significantly improves vanilla embeddings in multiple evaluation tasks of detecting hypernymy and directionality without negative impacts on semantic similarity judgement. The results demonstrate the efficacy of hierarchy-fitting in specializing neural embeddings with semantic relations in late fusion, potentially expanding its applicability to aggregating heterogeneous data and various knowledge resources for learning multimodal semantic spaces.

Recent work on transformer-based neural networks has led to impressive advances on multiple-choice natural language understanding (NLU) problems, such as Question Answering (QA) and abductive reasoning. Despite these advances, there is limited work still on understanding whether these models respond to perturbed multiple-choice instances in a sufficiently robust manner that would allow them to be trusted in real-world situations. We present four confusion probes, inspired by similar phenomena first identified in the behavioral science community, to test for problems such as prior bias and choice paralysis. Experimentally, we probe a widely used transformer-based multiple-choice NLU system using four established benchmark datasets. Here we show that the model exhibits significant prior bias and to a lesser, but still highly significant degree, choice paralysis, in addition to other problems. Our results suggest that stronger testing protocols and additional benchmarks may be necessary before the language models are used in front-facing systems or decision making with real world consequences.

Data-driven decision making is becoming an integral part of manufacturing companies. Data is collected and commonly used to improve efficiency and produce high quality items for the customers. IoT-based and other forms of object tracking are an emerging tool for collecting movement data of objects/entities (e.g. human workers, moving vehicles, trolleys etc.) over space and time. Movement data can provide valuable insights like process bottlenecks, resource utilization, effective working time etc. that can be used for decision making and improving efficiency. Turning movement data into valuable information for industrial management and decision making requires analysis methods. We refer to this process as movement analytics. The purpose of this document is to review the current state of work for movement analytics both in manufacturing and more broadly. We survey relevant work from both a theoretical perspective and an application perspective. From the theoretical perspective, we put an emphasis on useful methods from two research areas: machine learning, and logic-based knowledge representation. We also review their combinations in view of movement analytics, and we discuss promising areas for future development and application. Furthermore, we touch on constraint optimization. From an application perspective, we review applications of these methods to movement analytics in a general sense and across various industries. We also describe currently available commercial off-the-shelf products for tracking in manufacturing, and we overview main concepts of digital twins and their applications.