In the post-pandemic world, the onus seems to be on artificial intelligence (AI) to carry the healthcare sector forward. Maja Dragovic finds out how the attitudes towards AI in the sector have changed over the last 12 months. The focus on AI has definitely shifted since the pandemic, with data being seen as a tool to improve the health and care of a population in a safe, trusted and transparent way. The government's recent data strategy for health and care has set the direction for the use of data in a post-pandemic healthcare system with AI playing a significant role, especially in screening services where the technology can help scan numerous hospital images for irregularities. For Chris Scarisbrick, sales director at Sectra, an accelerator of AI use in screening was the development of the National Lung Screening pilot.

At the end of my Melbourne street there's a new system being installed for traffic management. I hadn't even noticed the extra cameras, vehicle and pedestrian sensors, LiDAR and radar on the intersection, but these tools are all part of a larger system, with researchers hoping that a 2.5km section of Nicholson Street, in Carlton, will eventually be run by an artificial intelligence (AI). This might sound a little nerve-wracking to the average commuter, but these "smart corridors" are popping up around the world – systems that promise to provide us with less traffic and better safety. "Many cities around the world have dedicated corridors or smart motorways that are equipped with sensors, CCTV cameras and AI for predicting the traffic flow, speed, or occupancy at a specific moment in time," says Dr Adriana-Simona Mihaita, an AI infrastructure researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, who was not involved in the research. "Accurate predictions will provide transport operators with the means to make informed decisions and apply new control plans, or adjust the current ones according to ongoing traffic or eventual disruptions."

Meta's quest to translate underserved languages is marking its first victory with the open source release of a language model able to decipher 202 languages. Named after Meta's No Language Left Behind initiative and dubbed NLLB-200, the model is the first able to translate so many languages, according to its makers, all with the goal to improve translation for languages overlooked by similar projects. "The vast majority of improvements made in machine translation in the last decades have been for high-resource languages," Meta researchers wrote in a paper [PDF]. "While machine translation continues to grow, the fruits it bears are unevenly distributed," they said. According to the announcement of NLLB-200, the model can translate 55 African languages "with high-quality results."

HCI researchers have been gradually shifting attention from individual users to communities when engaging in research, design, and system development. However, our field has yet to establish a cohesive, systematic understanding of the challenges, benefits, and commitments of community-collaborative approaches to research. We conducted a systematic review and thematic analysis of 47 computing research papers discussing participatory research with communities for the development of technological artifacts and systems, published over the last two decades. From this review, we identified seven themes associated with the evolution of a project: from establishing community partnerships to sustaining results. Our findings suggest that several tensions characterize these projects, many of which relate to the power and position of researchers, and the computing research environment, relative to community partners. We discuss the implications of our findings and offer methodological proposals to guide HCI, and computing research more broadly, towards practices that center communities.

Deep learning (DL) in general and Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in particular have seen high success levels in sequence based applications. This paper pertains to RNNs for time series modelling and forecasting. We propose a novel RNN architecture capturing (stochastic) seasonal correlations intelligently while capable of accurate multi-step forecasting. It is motivated from the well-known encoder-decoder (ED) architecture and multiplicative seasonal auto-regressive model. It incorporates multi-step (multi-target) learning even in the presence (or absence) of exogenous inputs. It can be employed on single or multiple sequence data. For the multiple sequence case, we also propose a novel greedy recursive procedure to build (one or more) predictive models across sequences when per-sequence data is less. We demonstrate via extensive experiments the utility of our proposed architecture both in single sequence and multiple sequence scenarios.

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.