Oceania
Collaborative Three-Tier Architecture Non-contact Respiratory Rate Monitoring using Target Tracking and False Peaks Eliminating Algorithms
Mo, Haimiao, Ding, Shuai, Yang, Shanlin, Vasilakos, Athanasios V., Zheng, Xi
Monitoring the respiratory rate is crucial for helping us identify respiratory disorders. Devices for conventional respiratory monitoring are inconvenient and scarcely available. Recent research has demonstrated the ability of non-contact technologies, such as photoplethysmography and infrared thermography, to gather respiratory signals from the face and monitor breathing. However, the current non-contact respiratory monitoring techniques have poor accuracy because they are sensitive to environmental influences like lighting and motion artifacts. Furthermore, frequent contact between users and the cloud in real-world medical application settings might cause service request delays and potentially the loss of personal data. We proposed a non-contact respiratory rate monitoring system with a cooperative three-layer design to increase the precision of respiratory monitoring and decrease data transmission latency. To reduce data transmission and network latency, our three-tier architecture layer-by-layer decomposes the computing tasks of respiration monitoring. Moreover, we improved the accuracy of respiratory monitoring by designing a target tracking algorithm and an algorithm for eliminating false peaks to extract high-quality respiratory signals. By gathering the data and choosing several regions of interest on the face, we were able to extract the respiration signal and investigate how different regions affected the monitoring of respiration. The results of the experiment indicate that when the nasal region is used to extract the respiratory signal, it performs experimentally best. Our approach performs better than rival approaches while transferring fewer data.
Deep Model-Based Architectures for Inverse Problems under Mismatched Priors
Shoushtari, Shirin, Liu, Jiaming, Hu, Yuyang, Kamilov, Ulugbek S.
There is a growing interest in deep model-based architectures (DMBAs) for solving imaging inverse problems by combining physical measurement models and learned image priors specified using convolutional neural nets (CNNs). For example, well-known frameworks for systematically designing DMBAs include plug-and-play priors (PnP), deep unfolding (DU), and deep equilibrium models (DEQ). While the empirical performance and theoretical properties of DMBAs have been widely investigated, the existing work in the area has primarily focused on their performance when the desired image prior is known exactly. This work addresses the gap in the prior work by providing new theoretical and numerical insights into DMBAs under mismatched CNN priors. Mismatched priors arise naturally when there is a distribution shift between training and testing data, for example, due to test images being from a different distribution than images used for training the CNN prior. They also arise when the CNN prior used for inference is an approximation of some desired statistical estimator (MAP or MMSE). Our theoretical analysis provides explicit error bounds on the solution due to the mismatched CNN priors under a set of clearly specified assumptions. Our numerical results compare the empirical performance of DMBAs under realistic distribution shifts and approximate statistical estimators.
Multi-modal Misinformation Detection: Approaches, Challenges and Opportunities
As social media platforms are evolving from text-based forums into multi-modal environments, the nature of misinformation in social media is also changing accordingly. Taking advantage of the fact that visual modalities such as images and videos are more favorable and attractive to the users, and textual contents are sometimes skimmed carelessly, misinformation spreaders have recently targeted contextual correlations between modalities e.g., text and image. Thus, many research efforts have been put into development of automatic techniques for detecting possible cross-modal discordances in web-based media. In this work, we aim to analyze, categorize and identify existing approaches in addition to challenges and shortcomings they face in order to unearth new opportunities in furthering the research in the field of multi-modal misinformation detection.
Learning from Positive and Unlabeled Data with Augmented Classes
Li, Zhongnian, Yang, Liutao, Ma, Zhongchen, Sun, Tongfeng, Xu, Xinzheng, Zhang, Daoqiang
Positive Unlabeled (PU) learning aims to learn a binary classifier from only positive and unlabeled data, which is utilized in many real-world scenarios. However, existing PU learning algorithms cannot deal with the real-world challenge in an open and changing scenario, where examples from unobserved augmented classes may emerge in the testing phase. In this paper, we propose an unbiased risk estimator for PU learning with Augmented Classes (PUAC) by utilizing unlabeled data from the augmented classes distribution, which can be easily collected in many real-world scenarios. Besides, we derive the estimation error bound for the proposed estimator, which provides a theoretical guarantee for its convergence to the optimal solution. Experiments on multiple realistic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed approach.
How drones, robots and artificial intelligence are helping emergency services tackle wildfires
Britain recorded its hottest day on record last Tuesday, sparking a series of wildfires across the UK. Firefighters in London described the blazes tearing through homes and buildings as'absolute hell' after receiving 1,600 calls for assistance. They warned the public that wildfires are likely to break out every three years, and that the destruction of homes should be a'wake-up call' to the country. Global experts are urging countries to reach their net-zero targets and halt climate change. This is widely agreed to be the leading cause of the recent spate of wildfires, as rising temperatures evaporate more moisture from the ground, drying out the soil and making vegetation more flammable if sparked.
Kmart halts use of in-store facial recognition amid Australian privacy investigation
Retailers in Australia are the latest companies to back away from facial recognition, albeit under pressure. The Guardian reports Kmart and Bunnings have temporarily halted use of facial recognition in their local stores while the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) investigates the privacy implications of their systems. The two chains were trialing the technology to spot banned customers, prevent refund fraud and reduce theft. The investigation started in mid-July, a month after the consumer advocacy group Choice learned that Kmart and Bunnings were testing facial recognition. Bunnings had already paused use as it migrated to a new system.
Google fires software engineer who says AI chatbot LaMDA has feelings
Google has fired a senior software engineer who says the company's artificial intelligence chatbot system has feelings. Blake Lemoine, a software engineer and AI researcher, went public last month with his claim that Google's language technology was sentient and should consequently have its "wants" respected. Google has denied Mr Lemoine's suggestion. It has now confirmed he had been dismissed. The tech giant said Mr Lemoine's claims about The Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) being sentient were "wholly unfounded", and the company had "worked to clarify that with him for many months".
MAPIE: an open-source library for distribution-free uncertainty quantification
Taquet, Vianney, Blot, Vincent, Morzadec, Thomas, Lacombe, Louis, Brunel, Nicolas
Estimating uncertainties associated with the predictions of Machine Learning (ML) models is of crucial importance to assess their robustness and predictive power. In this submission, we introduce MAPIE (Model Agnostic Prediction Interval Estimator), an open-source Python library that quantifies the uncertainties of ML models for single-output regression and multi-class classification tasks. MAPIE implements conformal prediction methods, allowing the user to easily compute uncertainties with strong theoretical guarantees on the marginal coverages and with mild assumptions on the model or on the underlying data distribution. MAPIE is hosted on scikit-learn-contrib and is fully "scikit-learn-compatible". As such, it accepts any type of regressor or classifier coming with a scikit-learn API.
Black-box Few-shot Knowledge Distillation
Nguyen, Dang, Gupta, Sunil, Do, Kien, Venkatesh, Svetha
Knowledge distillation (KD) is an efficient approach to transfer the knowledge from a large "teacher" network to a smaller "student" network. Traditional KD methods require lots of labeled training samples and a white-box teacher (parameters are accessible) to train a good student. However, these resources are not always available in real-world applications. The distillation process often happens at an external party side where we do not have access to much data, and the teacher does not disclose its parameters due to security and privacy concerns. To overcome these challenges, we propose a black-box few-shot KD method to train the student with few unlabeled training samples and a black-box teacher. Our main idea is to expand the training set by generating a diverse set of out-of-distribution synthetic images using MixUp and a conditional variational auto-encoder. These synthetic images along with their labels obtained from the teacher are used to train the student. We conduct extensive experiments to show that our method significantly outperforms recent SOTA few/zero-shot KD methods on image classification tasks. The code and models are available at: https://github.com/nphdang/FS-BBT