Privacy protection is an ethical issue with broad concern in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Federated learning is a new machine learning paradigm to learn a shared model across users or organisations without direct access to the data. It has great potential to be the next-general AI model training framework that offers privacy protection and therefore has broad implications for the future of digital health and healthcare informatics. Implementing an open innovation framework in the healthcare industry, namely open health, is to enhance innovation and creative capability of health-related organisations by building a next-generation collaborative framework with partner organisations and the research community. In particular, this game-changing collaborative framework offers knowledge sharing from diverse data with a privacy-preserving. This chapter will discuss how federated learning can enable the development of an open health ecosystem with the support of AI. Existing challenges and solutions for federated learning will be discussed.

The Patent Office of South Africa has issued the world's first patent for an invention created by artificial intelligence. The DABUS system, which simulates human mental activity, has created a food container based on fractal geometry and has improved characteristics compared to containers of standard shapes. The application was submitted to the agency on September 17, 2019, indicating that the invention was generated by an autonomous artificial intelligence. The" author " of the invention is DABUS (Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience), an artificial intelligence system that simulates the human thought process to generate new ideas and inventions. DABUS was able to create a food container based on fractal geometry with improved structural strength and reduced heat transfer compared to conventional containers.

The past decade has seen a substantial rise in the amount of mis- and disinformation online, from targeted disinformation campaigns to influence politics, to the unintentional spreading of misinformation about public health. This development has spurred research in the area of automatic fact checking, from approaches to detect check-worthy claims and determining the stance of tweets towards claims, to methods to determine the veracity of claims given evidence documents. These automatic methods are often content-based, using natural language processing methods, which in turn utilise deep neural networks to learn higher-order features from text in order to make predictions. As deep neural networks are black-box models, their inner workings cannot be easily explained. At the same time, it is desirable to explain how they arrive at certain decisions, especially if they are to be used for decision making. While this has been known for some time, the issues this raises have been exacerbated by models increasing in size, and by EU legislation requiring models to be used for decision making to provide explanations, and, very recently, by legislation requiring online platforms operating in the EU to provide transparent reporting on their services. Despite this, current solutions for explainability are still lacking in the area of fact checking. This thesis presents my research on automatic fact checking, including claim check-worthiness detection, stance detection and veracity prediction. Its contributions go beyond fact checking, with the thesis proposing more general machine learning solutions for natural language processing in the area of learning with limited labelled data. Finally, the thesis presents some first solutions for explainable fact checking.

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) presents unique and unknown problem complexities and modeling challenges, where an imperative task is to model both its process and data uncertainties, represented in implicit and high-proportional undocumented infections, asymptomatic contagion, social reinforcement of infections, and various quality issues in the reported data. These uncertainties become even more phenomenal in the overwhelming mutation-dominated resurgences with vaccinated but still susceptible populations. Here we introduce a novel hybrid approach to (1) characterizing and distinguishing Undocumented (U) and Documented (D) infections commonly seen during COVID-19 incubation periods and asymptomatic infections by expanding the foundational compartmental epidemic Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model with two compartments, resulting in a new Susceptible-Undocumented infected-Documented infected-Recovered (SUDR) model; (2) characterizing the probabilistic density of infections by empowering SUDR to capture exogenous processes like clustering contagion interactions, superspreading and social reinforcement; and (3) approximating the density likelihood of COVID-19 prevalence over time by incorporating Bayesian inference into SUDR. Different from existing COVID-19 models, SUDR characterizes the undocumented infections during unknown transmission processes. To capture the uncertainties of temporal transmission and social reinforcement during the COVID-19 contagion, the transmission rate is modeled by a time-varying density function of undocumented infectious cases. We solve the modeling by sampling from the mean-field posterior distribution with reasonable priors, making SUDR suitable to handle the randomness, noise and sparsity of COVID-19 observations widely seen in the public COVID-19 case data.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to adversarial images, while their robustness in text classification is rarely studied. Several lines of text attack methods have been proposed in the literature, including character-level, word-level, and sentence-level attacks. However, it is still a challenge to minimize the number of word changes necessary to induce misclassification, while simultaneously ensuring lexical correctness, syntactic soundness, and semantic similarity. In this paper, we propose a Bigram and Unigram based adaptive Semantic Preservation Optimization (BU-SPO) method to examine the vulnerability of deep models. Our method has four major merits. Firstly, we propose to attack text documents not only at the unigram word level but also at the bigram level which better keeps semantics and avoids producing meaningless outputs. Secondly, we propose a hybrid method to replace the input words with options among both their synonyms candidates and sememe candidates, which greatly enriches the potential substitutions compared to only using synonyms. Thirdly, we design an optimization algorithm, i.e., Semantic Preservation Optimization (SPO), to determine the priority of word replacements, aiming to reduce the modification cost. Finally, we further improve the SPO with a semantic Filter (named SPOF) to find the adversarial example with the highest semantic similarity. We evaluate the effectiveness of our BU-SPO and BU-SPOF on IMDB, AG's News, and Yahoo! Answers text datasets by attacking four popular DNNs models. Results show that our methods achieve the highest attack success rates and semantics rates by changing the smallest number of words compared with existing methods.

Deep learning has become an integral part of various computer vision systems in recent years due to its outstanding achievements for object recognition, facial recognition, and scene understanding. However, deep neural networks (DNNs) are susceptible to be fooled with nearly high confidence by an adversary. In practice, the vulnerability of deep learning systems against carefully perturbed images, known as adversarial examples, poses a dire security threat in the physical world applications. To address this phenomenon, we present, what to our knowledge, is the first ever image set based adversarial defence approach. Image set classification has shown an exceptional performance for object and face recognition, owing to its intrinsic property of handling appearance variability. We propose a robust deep Bayesian image set classification as a defence framework against a broad range of adversarial attacks. We extensively experiment the performance of the proposed technique with several voting strategies. We further analyse the effects of image size, perturbation magnitude, along with the ratio of perturbed images in each image set. We also evaluate our technique with the recent state-of-the-art defence methods, and single-shot recognition task. The empirical results demonstrate superior performance on CIFAR-10, MNIST, ETH-80, and Tiny ImageNet datasets.

Cricket is unarguably one of the most popular sports in the world. Predicting the outcome of a cricket match has become a fundamental problem as we are advancing in the field of machine learning. Multiple researchers have tried to predict the outcome of a cricket match or a tournament, or to predict the performance of players during a match, or to predict the players who should be selected as per their current performance, form, morale, etc. using machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques keeping in mind extensive detailing, features, and parameters. We discuss some of these techniques along with a brief comparison among these techniques.

In recent years, inductive graph embedding models, \emph{viz.}, graph neural networks (GNNs) have become increasingly accurate at link prediction (LP) in online social networks. The performance of such networks depends strongly on the input node features, which vary across networks and applications. Selecting appropriate node features remains application-dependent and generally an open question. Moreover, owing to privacy and ethical issues, use of personalized node features is often restricted. In fact, many publicly available data from online social network do not contain any node features (e.g., demography). In this work, we provide a comprehensive experimental analysis which shows that harnessing a transductive technique (e.g., Node2Vec) for obtaining initial node representations, after which an inductive node embedding technique takes over, leads to substantial improvements in link prediction accuracy. We demonstrate that, for a wide variety of GNN variants, node representation vectors obtained from Node2Vec serve as high quality input features to GNNs, thereby improving LP performance.

This conversation with the composer Philip Glass and me discusses an exciting project in partnership with OpenAi, in which we trained a neural net on a corpus of Glass' work. He offers commentary on the music created by "his AI", as well as insights on composition and creating art. We then talk about the different limitations and capacities of humans and Artificial Intelligence–if and how neural nets can help us create art, appreciate art, and find the same things humans find meaningful. Due to the covid-19 pandemic, this call took place over video conference in December 2020. Art and tech are both captivating to me because they frame the elevation and the limitations of being human. Art is also closely intertwined with technological advancements, as movement shifting art seems predicated on tech. For example, the photography of Martin Munkacsi from the 1920s and 1930s revolutionized the art, as he is often credited for being the first photographer to explore dynamic and candid styles. The emergence and ability of these new forms of creation coincided with the technological advancements at the time that enabled flash and faster shutters–candid and spontaneous movement shots wouldn't have been technically possible to make with the cameras that existed before. The advancements in machine learning today, likewise, excite me for the possibilities and new forms in art and creation. The goal of this project is to explore the capacities of artificial intelligence as a new medium (or instrument or tool?) for art, and to create a collaborative music composition with Philip Glass and "his AI." More details about the project can be found below. Philip: Nice to see you.

If there's a silver lining to the COVID-19 pandemic, it's how the world came together to find a solution as one. Throughout the pandemic, technology has enabled global collaboration, as more people shifted to working from home, while science allowed multiple COVID-19 vaccines to be developed and rolled out in record time, despite working remotely. The convergence of governments and industries, particularly biopharmaceuticals, to innovate and create a solution to the crisis was inspiring, but it raises questions around what's needed to see this pace of innovation again. Do we need a global crisis to innovate? Or can biopharma companies forge their own pathways to innovate, while making solutions more affordable and accessible to those who are most affected: patients?