Datasets play a central role in the training and evaluation of machine learning (ML) models. But they are also the root cause of many undesired model behaviors, such as biased predictions. To overcome this situation, the ML community is proposing a data-centric cultural shift where data issues are given the attention they deserve, and more standard practices around the gathering and processing of datasets start to be discussed and established. So far, these proposals are mostly high-level guidelines described in natural language and, as such, they are difficult to formalize and apply to particular datasets. In this sense, and inspired by these proposals, we define a new domain-specific language (DSL) to precisely describe machine learning datasets in terms of their structure, data provenance, and social concerns. We believe this DSL will facilitate any ML initiative to leverage and benefit from this data-centric shift in ML (e.g., selecting the most appropriate dataset for a new project or better replicating other ML results). The DSL is implemented as a Visual Studio Code plugin, and it has been published under an open source license.

When designing clustering algorithms, the choice of initial centers is crucial for the quality of the learned clusters. In this paper, we develop a new initialization scheme, called HST initialization, for the $k$-median problem in the general metric space (e.g., discrete space induced by graphs), based on the construction of metric embedding tree structure of the data. From the tree, we propose a novel and efficient search algorithm, for good initial centers that can be used subsequently for the local search algorithm. Our proposed HST initialization can produce initial centers achieving lower errors than those from another popular initialization method, $k$-median++, with comparable efficiency. The HST initialization can also be extended to the setting of differential privacy (DP) to generate private initial centers. We show that the error from applying DP local search followed by our private HST initialization improves previous results on the approximation error, and approaches the lower bound within a small factor. Experiments justify the theory and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our approach can also be extended to the $k$-means problem.

The incorporation of data analytics in the healthcare industry has made significant progress, driven by the demand for efficient and effective big data analytics solutions. Knowledge graphs (KGs) have proven utility in this arena and are rooted in a number of healthcare applications to furnish better data representation and knowledge inference. However, in conjunction with a lack of a representative KG construction taxonomy, several existing approaches in this designated domain are inadequate and inferior. This paper is the first to provide a comprehensive taxonomy and a bird's eye view of healthcare KG construction. Additionally, a thorough examination of the current state-of-the-art techniques drawn from academic works relevant to various healthcare contexts is carried out. These techniques are critically evaluated in terms of methods used for knowledge extraction, types of the knowledge base and sources, and the incorporated evaluation protocols. Finally, several research findings and existing issues in the literature are reported and discussed, opening horizons for future research in this vibrant area.

The development of emotion detection technology has emerged as a highly valuable possibility in the corporate sector due to the nearly limitless uses of this new discipline, particularly with the unceasing propagation of social data. In recent years, the electronic marketplace has witnessed the establishment of a large number of start-up businesses with an almost sole focus on building new commercial and open-source tools and APIs for emotion detection and recognition. Yet, these tools and APIs must be continuously reviewed and evaluated, and their performances should be reported and discussed. There is a lack of research to empirically compare current emotion detection technologies in terms of the results obtained from each model using the same textual dataset. Also, there is a lack of comparative studies that apply benchmark comparison to social data. This study compares eight technologies; IBM Watson NLU, ParallelDots, Symanto-Ekman, Crystalfeel, Text to Emotion, Senpy, Textprobe, and NLP Cloud. The comparison was undertaken using two different datasets. The emotions from the chosen datasets were then derived using the incorporated APIs. The performance of these APIs was assessed using the aggregated scores that they delivered as well as the theoretically proven evaluation metrics such as the micro-average of accuracy, classification error, precision, recall, and f1-score. Lastly, the assessment of these APIs incorporating the evaluation measures is reported and discussed.

Classical medium access control (MAC) protocols are interpretable, yet their task-agnostic control signaling messages (CMs) are ill-suited for emerging mission-critical applications. By contrast, neural network (NN) based protocol models (NPMs) learn to generate task-specific CMs, but their rationale and impact lack interpretability. To fill this void, in this article we propose, for the first time, a semantic protocol model (SPM) constructed by transforming an NPM into an interpretable symbolic graph written in the probabilistic logic programming language (ProbLog). This transformation is viable by extracting and merging common CMs and their connections while treating the NPM as a CM generator. By extensive simulations, we corroborate that the SPM tightly approximates its original NPM while occupying only 0.02% memory. By leveraging its interpretability and memory-efficiency, we demonstrate several SPM-enabled applications such as SPM reconfiguration for collision-avoidance, as well as comparing different SPMs via semantic entropy calculation and storing multiple SPMs to cope with non-stationary environments. Traditionally, cellular medium access control (MAC) protocols have been designed primarily for general purposes. Ko is with Inha University, Incheon, Korea (e-mail: swko@inha.ac.kr). This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. While handshaking rules and scheduling policies can partly be manipulated (e.g., grant-free access prioritization [2]), their control signaling messages (CMs) remain unchanged even when tasks and other environmental characteristics vary over time.

Regret has been established as a foundational concept in online learning, and likewise has important applications in the analysis of learning dynamics in games. Regret quantifies the difference between a learner’s performance against a baseline in hindsight. It is well known that regret-minimizing algorithms converge to certain classes of equilibria in games; however, traditional forms of regret used in game theory predominantly consider baselines that permit deviations to deterministic actions or strategies. In this paper, we revisit our understanding of regret from the perspective of deviations over partitions of the full mixed strategy space (i.e., probability distributions over pure strategies), under the lens of the previously-established Φ-regret framework, which provides a continuum of stronger regret measures. Importantly, Φ-regret enables learning agents to consider deviations from and to mixed strategies, generalizing several existing notions of regret such as external, internal, and swap regret, and thus broadening the insights gained from regret-based analysis of learning algorithms. We prove here that the well-studied evolutionary learning algorithm of replicator dynamics (RD) seamlessly minimizes the strongest possible form of Φ-regret in generic 2 × 2 games, without any modification of the underlying algorithm itself. We subsequently conduct experiments validating our theoretical results in a suite of 144 2 × 2 games wherein RD exhibits a diverse set of behaviors. We conclude by providing empirical evidence of Φ-regret minimization by RD in some larger games, hinting at further opportunity for Φ-regret based study of such algorithms from both a theoretical and empirical perspective.

Ottawa, Canada, June 2017: Carlton University's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering announced the development of a technology that would revolutionise the future of space travel. As man goes ever further in his attempts to colonise space, technology is being developed – as mentioned – through which a 3D printer can self-replicate using materials collected on the surface of a specific celestial body. According to Japanese-born astrophysicist Michio Kaku – a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard University: "Man is led to believe that, in order to explore the stars, you need a huge spaceship, but this is not the case. However – apart from the help of warp drive and wormholes (faster-than light travels according to the Einstein-Rosen bridge theory) – at that juncture, instead of spaceships full of humans, could not the universe be explored and populated with probes like von Neumann's? Exploration scientists have been working for decades on the project of turning mankind into mechanical or transhuman beings in order to create an entire cloned race of robots. Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement that advocates improving the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies that can greatly enhance longevity and cognition. Ottawa, Canada, June 2017: Carlton University's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering announced the development of a technology that would revolutionise the future of space travel. As man goes ever further in his attempts to colonise space, technology is being developed – as mentioned – through which a 3D printer can self-replicate using materials collected on the surface of a specific celestial body. According to Japanese-born astrophysicist Michio Kaku – a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard University: "Man is led to believe that, in order to explore the stars, you need a huge spaceship, but this is not the case.

Researchers have developed a process using Machine Learning (ML) methods to find rock art in remote, hard-to-access areas of Australia. The study, co-led by Dr. Andrea Jalandoni, a digital archaeologist from Griffith University's Center for Social and Cultural Research, was published in the Aug. 2022 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science. In the study, university researchers trained a ML model to detect whether painted rock art was present in an image by feeding it hundreds of images of rock art found in Kakadu National Park. The model achieved an impressive 89% success rate. Dr. Jalandoni told the Australian Associated Press, "Our machine learning model picks up whether an area photographed potentially contains previously undiscovered rock art, scientists can then go in and verify if there is rock art present and do more research."

We introduce a new algorithm, Regression based Supervised Learning (RSL), for learning per instance Neural Network (NN) defined heuristic functions for classical planning problems. RSL uses regression to select relevant sets of states at a range of different distances from the goal. RSL then formulates a Supervised Learning problem to obtain the parameters that define the NN heuristic, using the selected states labeled with exact or estimated distances to goal states. Our experimental study shows that RSL outperforms, in terms of coverage, previous classical planning NN heuristics functions while requiring two orders of magnitude less training time.

Neural networks have had discernible achievements in a wide range of applications. The wide-spread adoption also raises the concern of their dependability and reliability. Similar to traditional decision-making programs, neural networks can have defects that need to be repaired. The defects may cause unsafe behaviors, raise security concerns or unjust societal impacts. In this work, we address the problem of repairing a neural network for desirable properties such as fairness and the absence of backdoor. The goal is to construct a neural network that satisfies the property by (minimally) adjusting the given neural network's parameters (i.e., weights). Specifically, we propose CARE (\textbf{CA}usality-based \textbf{RE}pair), a causality-based neural network repair technique that 1) performs causality-based fault localization to identify the `guilty' neurons and 2) optimizes the parameters of the identified neurons to reduce the misbehavior. We have empirically evaluated CARE on various tasks such as backdoor removal, neural network repair for fairness and safety properties. Our experiment results show that CARE is able to repair all neural networks efficiently and effectively. For fairness repair tasks, CARE successfully improves fairness by $61.91\%$ on average. For backdoor removal tasks, CARE reduces the attack success rate from over $98\%$ to less than $1\%$. For safety property repair tasks, CARE reduces the property violation rate to less than $1\%$. Results also show that thanks to the causality-based fault localization, CARE's repair focuses on the misbehavior and preserves the accuracy of the neural networks.