Oceania
Early prediction of respiratory failure in the intensive care unit
Hüser, Matthias, Faltys, Martin, Lyu, Xinrui, Barber, Chris, Hyland, Stephanie L., Merz, Tobias M., Rätsch, Gunnar
The development of respiratory failure is common among patients in intensive care units (ICU). Large data quantities from ICU patient monitoring systems make timely and comprehensive analysis by clinicians difficult but are ideal for automatic processing by machine learning algorithms. Early prediction of respiratory system failure could alert clinicians to patients at risk of respiratory failure and allow for early patient reassessment and treatment adjustment. We propose an early warning system that predicts moderate/severe respiratory failure up to 8 hours in advance. Our system was trained on HiRID-II, a data-set containing more than 60,000 admissions to a tertiary care ICU. An alarm is typically triggered several hours before the beginning of respiratory failure. Our system outperforms a clinical baseline mimicking traditional clinical decision-making based on pulse-oximetric oxygen saturation and the fraction of inspired oxygen. To provide model introspection and diagnostics, we developed an easy-to-use web browser-based system to explore model input data and predictions visually.
Sufficient reasons for classifier decisions in the presence of constraints
Recent work has unveiled a theory for reasoning about the decisions made by binary classifiers: a classifier describes a Boolean function, and the reasons behind an instance being classified as positive are the prime-implicants of the function that are satisfied by the instance. One drawback of these works is that they do not explicitly treat scenarios where the underlying data is known to be constrained, e.g., certain combinations of features may not exist, may not be observable, or may be required to be disregarded. We propose a more general theory, also based on prime-implicants, tailored to taking constraints into account. The main idea is to view classifiers in the presence of constraints as describing partial Boolean functions, i.e., that are undefined on instances that do not satisfy the constraints. We prove that this simple idea results in reasons that are no less (and sometimes more) succinct. That is, not taking constraints into account (e.g., ignored, or taken as negative instances) results in reasons that are subsumed by reasons that do take constraints into account. We illustrate this improved parsimony on synthetic classifiers and classifiers learned from real data.
An Open-Source Tool for Classification Models in Resource-Constrained Hardware
da Silva, Lucas Tsutsui, Souza, Vinicius M. A., Batista, Gustavo E. A. P. A.
Abstract-- Applications that need to sense, measure, and gather real-time information from the environment frequently face three main restrictions: power consumption, cost, and lack of infrastructure. Most of the challenges imposed by these limitations can be better addressed by embedding Machine Learning (ML) classifiers in the hardware that senses the environment, creating smart sensors able to interpret the low-level data stream. However, for this approach to be cost-effective, we need highly efficient classifiers suitable to execute in unresourceful hardware, such as low-power microcontrollers. In this paper, we present an open-source tool named EmbML - Embedded Machine Learning that implements a pipeline to develop classifiers for resource-constrained hardware. We describe its implementation details and provide a comprehensive analysis of its classifiers considering accuracy, classification time, and memory usage. Moreover, we compare the performance of its classifiers with classifiers produced by related tools to demonstrate that our tool provides a diverse set of classification algorithms that are both compact and accurate. Therefore, these smart sensors are more powerefficient since they eliminate the need for communicating all the raw data. PPLICATIONS that need to sense, measure, and gather real-time information from the environment frequently of interest - e.g., a dry soil crop area that needs watering or face three main restrictions [1]: power consumption, cost, the capture of a disease-vector mosquito.
Spelling Correction with Denoising Transformer
Kuznetsov, Alex, Urdiales, Hector
We present a novel method of performing spelling correction on short input strings, such as search queries or individual words. At its core lies a procedure for generating artificial typos which closely follow the error patterns manifested by humans. This procedure is used to train the production spelling correction model based on a transformer architecture. This model is currently served in the HubSpot product search. We show that our approach to typo generation is superior to the widespread practice of adding noise, which ignores human patterns. We also demonstrate how our approach may be extended to resource-scarce settings and train spelling correction models for Arabic, Greek, Russian, and Setswana languages, without using any labeled data.
Exploring the Similarity of Representations in Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning
Goerttler, Thomas, Obermayer, Klaus
In past years model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) has been one of the most promising approaches in meta-learning. It can be applied to different kinds of problems, e.g., reinforcement learning, but also shows good results on few-shot learning tasks. Besides their tremendous success in these tasks, it has still not been fully revealed yet, why it works so well. Recent work proposes that MAML rather reuses features than rapidly learns. In this paper, we want to inspire a deeper understanding of this question by analyzing MAML's representation. We apply representation similarity analysis (RSA), a well-established method in neuroscience, to the few-shot learning instantiation of MAML. Although some part of our analysis supports their general results that feature reuse is predominant, we also reveal arguments against their conclusion. The similarity-increase of layers closer to the input layers arises from the learning task itself and not from the model. In addition, the representations after inner gradient steps make a broader change to the representation than the changes during meta-training.
NLP for Climate Policy: Creating a Knowledge Platform for Holistic and Effective Climate Action
Swarnakar, Pradip, Modi, Ashutosh
Climate change is a burning issue of our time, with the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13 of the United Nations demanding global climate action. Realizing the urgency, in 2015 in Paris, world leaders signed an agreement committing to taking voluntary action to reduce carbon emissions. However, the scale, magnitude, and climate action processes vary globally, especially between developed and developing countries. Therefore, from parliament to social media, the debates and discussions on climate change gather data from wide-ranging sources essential to the policy design and implementation. The downside is that we do not currently have the mechanisms to pool the worldwide dispersed knowledge emerging from the structured and unstructured data sources. The paper thematically discusses how NLP techniques could be employed in climate policy research and contribute to society's good at large. In particular, we exemplify symbiosis of NLP and Climate Policy Research via four methodologies. The first one deals with the major topics related to climate policy using automated content analysis. We investigate the opinions (sentiments) of major actors' narratives towards climate policy in the second methodology. The third technique explores the climate actors' beliefs towards pro or anti-climate orientation. Finally, we discuss developing a Climate Knowledge Graph. The present theme paper further argues that creating a knowledge platform would help in the formulation of a holistic climate policy and effective climate action. Such a knowledge platform would integrate the policy actors' varied opinions from different social sectors like government, business, civil society, and the scientific community. The research outcome will add value to effective climate action because policymakers can make informed decisions by looking at the diverse public opinion on a comprehensive platform.
Unsupervised Knowledge Graph Alignment by Probabilistic Reasoning and Semantic Embedding
Qi, Zhiyuan, Zhang, Ziheng, Chen, Jiaoyan, Chen, Xi, Xiang, Yuejia, Zhang, Ningyu, Zheng, Yefeng
Knowledge Graph (KG) alignment is to discover the mappings (i.e., equivalent entities, relations, and others) between two KGs. The existing methods can be divided into the embedding-based models, and the conventional reasoning and lexical matching based systems. The former compute the similarity of entities via their cross-KG embeddings, but they usually rely on an ideal supervised learning setting for good performance and lack appropriate reasoning to avoid logically wrong mappings; while the latter address the reasoning issue but are poor at utilizing the KG graph structures and the entity contexts. In this study, we aim at combining the above two solutions and thus propose an iterative framework named PRASE which is based on probabilistic reasoning and semantic embedding. It learns the KG embeddings via entity mappings from a probabilistic reasoning system named PARIS, and feeds the resultant entity mappings and embeddings back into PARIS for augmentation. The PRASE framework is compatible with different embedding-based models, and our experiments on multiple datasets have demonstrated its state-of-the-art performance.
The AI arms race has us on the road to Armageddon
It's now a given that countries worldwide are battling for AI supremacy. To date, most of the public discussion surrounding this competition has focused on commercial gains flowing from the technology. But the AI arms race for military applications is racing ahead as well, and concerned scientists, academics, and AI industry leaders have been sounding the alarm. Compared to existing military capabilities, AI-enabled technology can make decisions on the battlefield with mathematical speed and accuracy and never get tired. However, countries and organizations developing this tech are only just beginning to articulate ideas about how ethics will influence the wars of the near future.
How The Big Four Dodged Pandemic And Made Record Earnings
"The big tech is banking heavily on AI, Cloud and 5G technologies to retain customers and drive growth" A global emergency can smother your business, government lawsuits can break your company, competitors with trillion-dollar market value can wipe your organisation off the map. But what would happen when all three come together in the same year? The pandemic brought the world to a standstill. The internet giants, however, came out of it unscathed. Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook, popularly known as the big four, have not only survived a combination of calamities but registered profits and left the Wall Street analysts dumbfounded.
How Transport for NSW is tapping machine learning
At the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Australian transport agency Transport for New South Wales (NSW) had to restore public confidence in the state's transportation network and curb the spread of the disease. One of the ways it did that was to analyse the travel history recorded by Opal transit cards – with an individual's permission – and inform the commuter if the regular buses and train services that they had been taking were Covid-safe. Chris Bennetts, executive director for digital product delivery at Transport for NSW, said those insights were derived using a machine learning model that predicts how full a bus or train carriage was going to be at a given time. Based on the predictions, commuters would be advised if they could continue using their regular services or switch to a different service or mode of transport. "That was interesting for us because it was our first foray into personalisation to offer more choices for customers," said Bennetts.