Oceania
Dogs get jealous when they imagine their owner is fussing another pooch, study finds
Dogs are devoted companions that offer unwavering loyalty to their humans, but new research has exposed the full extent of their inner green-eyed monster. Anecdotal evidence from owners is now backed up by scientists which have found pet pooches get jealous when their human strokes another dog. But research has also found dogs can get jealous just by imagining their owner is fussing another dog, even when they can't see the interaction. 'Research has supported what many dog owners firmly believe -- dogs exhibit jealous behaviour when their human companion interacts with a potential rival,' said study lead author Amalia Bastos from the University of Auckland. 'We wanted to study this behaviour more fully to determine if dogs could, like humans, mentally represent a situation that evoked jealousy.'
Robots threaten jobs less than fearmongers claim
THE COFFEESHOP is an engine of social mobility. Barista jobs require soft skills and little experience, making them a first port of call for young people and immigrants looking for work. So it may be worrying that robotic baristas are spreading. RC Coffee, which bills itself "Canada's first robotic café", opened in Toronto last summer. "[T]he barista-to-customer interaction is somewhat risky despite people's best efforts to maintain a safe environment," the firm says.
Towards Automated and Marker-less Parkinson Disease Assessment: Predicting UPDRS Scores using Sit-stand videos
Mehta, Deval, Asif, Umar, Hao, Tian, Bilal, Erhan, Von Cavallar, Stefan, Harrer, Stefan, Rogers, Jeffrey
This paper presents a novel deep learning enabled, video based analysis framework for assessing the Unified Parkinsons Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) that can be used in the clinic or at home. We report results from comparing the performance of the framework to that of trained clinicians on a population of 32 Parkinsons disease (PD) patients. In-person clinical assessments by trained neurologists are used as the ground truth for training our framework and for comparing the performance. We find that the standard sit-to-stand activity can be used to evaluate the UPDRS sub-scores of bradykinesia (BRADY) and posture instability and gait disorders (PIGD). For BRADY we find F1-scores of 0.75 using our framework compared to 0.50 for the video based rater clinicians, while for PIGD we find 0.78 for the framework and 0.45 for the video based rater clinicians. We believe our proposed framework has potential to provide clinically acceptable end points of PD in greater granularity without imposing burdens on patients and clinicians, which empowers a variety of use cases such as passive tracking of PD progression in spaces such as nursing homes, in-home self-assessment, and enhanced tele-medicine.
Assessment of the influence of features on a classification problem: an application to COVID-19 patients
Davila-Pena, L., García-Jurado, Ignacio, Casas-Méndez, B.
This paper deals with an important subject in classification problems addressed by machine learning techniques: the evaluation of the influence of each of the features on the classification of individuals. Specifically, a measure of that influence is introduced using the Shapley value of cooperative games. In addition, an axiomatic characterisation of the proposed measure is provided based on properties of efficiency and balanced contributions. Furthermore, some experiments have been designed in order to validate the appropriate performance of such measure. Finally, the methodology introduced is applied to a sample of COVID-19 patients to study the influence of certain demographic or risk factors on various events of interest related to the evolution of the disease.
Exploration of Spanish Olive Oil Quality with a Miniaturized Low-Cost Fluorescence Sensor and Machine Learning Techniques
Venturini, Francesca, Sperti, Michela, Michelucci, Umberto, Herzig, Ivo, Baumgartner, Michael, Caballero, Josep Palau, Jimenez, Arturo, Deriu, and Marco Agostino
Extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) is the highest quality of olive oil and is characterized by highly beneficial nutritional properties. The large increase in both consumption and fraud, for example through adulteration, creates new challenges and an increasing demand for developing new quality assessment methodologies that are easier and cheaper to perform. As of today, the determination of olive oil quality is performed by producers through chemical analysis and organoleptic evaluation. The chemical analysis requires the advanced equipment and chemical knowledge of certified laboratories, and has therefore a limited accessibility. In this work a minimalist, portable and low-cost sensor is presented, which can perform olive oil quality assessment using fluorescence spectroscopy. The potential of the proposed technology is explored by analyzing several olive oils of different quality levels, EVOO, virgin olive oil (VOO), and lampante olive oil (LOO). The spectral data were analyzed using a large number of machine learning methods, including artificial neural networks. The analysis performed in this work demonstrates the possibility of performing classification of olive oil in the three mentioned classes with an accuracy of 100$\%$. These results confirm that this minimalist low-cost sensor has the potential of substituting expensive and complex chemical analysis.
Probabilistic Box Embeddings for Uncertain Knowledge Graph Reasoning
Chen, Xuelu, Boratko, Michael, Chen, Muhao, Dasgupta, Shib Sankar, Li, Xiang Lorraine, McCallum, Andrew
Knowledge bases often consist of facts which are harvested from a variety of sources, many of which are noisy and some of which conflict, resulting in a level of uncertainty for each triple. Knowledge bases are also often incomplete, prompting the use of embedding methods to generalize from known facts, however, existing embedding methods only model triple-level uncertainty, and reasoning results lack global consistency. To address these shortcomings, we propose BEUrRE, a novel uncertain knowledge graph embedding method with calibrated probabilistic semantics. BEUrRE models each entity as a box (i.e. axis-aligned hyperrectangle) and relations between two entities as affine transforms on the head and tail entity boxes. The geometry of the boxes allows for efficient calculation of intersections and volumes, endowing the model with calibrated probabilistic semantics and facilitating the incorporation of relational constraints. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that BEUrRE consistently outperforms baselines on confidence prediction and fact ranking due to its probabilistic calibration and ability to capture high-order dependencies among facts.
Characterization of Time-variant and Time-invariant Assessment of Suicidality on Reddit using C-SSRS
Gaur, Manas, Aribandi, Vamsi, Alambo, Amanuel, Kursuncu, Ugur, Thirunarayan, Krishnaprasad, Beich, Jonanthan, Pathak, Jyotishman, Sheth, Amit
Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S (1999-2019). However, predicting when someone will attempt suicide has been nearly impossible. In the modern world, many individuals suffering from mental illness seek emotional support and advice on well-known and easily-accessible social media platforms such as Reddit. While prior artificial intelligence research has demonstrated the ability to extract valuable information from social media on suicidal thoughts and behaviors, these efforts have not considered both severity and temporality of risk. The insights made possible by access to such data have enormous clinical potential - most dramatically envisioned as a trigger to employ timely and targeted interventions (i.e., voluntary and involuntary psychiatric hospitalization) to save lives. In this work, we address this knowledge gap by developing deep learning algorithms to assess suicide risk in terms of severity and temporality from Reddit data based on the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS). In particular, we employ two deep learning approaches: time-variant and time-invariant modeling, for user-level suicide risk assessment, and evaluate their performance against a clinician-adjudicated gold standard Reddit corpus annotated based on the C-SSRS. Our results suggest that the time-variant approach outperforms the time-invariant method in the assessment of suicide-related ideations and supportive behaviors (AUC:0.78), while the time-invariant model performed better in predicting suicide-related behaviors and suicide attempt (AUC:0.64). The proposed approach can be integrated with clinical diagnostic interviews for improving suicide risk assessments.
Towards Agrobots: Trajectory Control of an Autonomous Tractor Using Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Controllers
Kayacan, Erdal, Kayacan, Erkan, Ramon, Herman, Kaynak, Okyay, Saeys, Wouter
Provision of some autonomous functions to an agricultural vehicle would lighten the job of the operator but in doing so, the accuracy should not be lost to still obtain an optimal yield. Autonomous navigation of an agricultural vehicle involves the control of different dynamic subsystems, such as the yaw angle dynamics and the longitudinal speed dynamics. In this study, a proportional-integral-derivative controller is used to control the longitudinal velocity of the tractor. For the control of the yaw angle dynamics, a proportional-derivative controller works in parallel with a type-2 fuzzy neural network. In such an arrangement, the former ensures the stability of the related subsystem, while the latter learns the system dynamics and becomes the leading controller. In this way, instead of modeling the interactions between the subsystems prior to the design of model-based control, we develop a control algorithm which learns the interactions online from the measured feedback error. In addition to the control of the stated subsystems, a kinematic controller is needed to correct the errors in both the x- and the y- axis for the trajectory tracking problem of the tractor. To demonstrate the real-time abilities of the proposed control scheme, an autonomous tractor is equipped with the use of reasonably priced sensors and actuators. Experimental results show the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed learning algorithm.
XFORMAL: A Benchmark for Multilingual Formality Style Transfer
Briakou, Eleftheria, Lu, Di, Zhang, Ke, Tetreault, Joel
We take the first step towards multilingual style transfer by creating and releasing XFORMAL, a benchmark of multiple formal reformulations of informal text in Brazilian Portuguese, French, and Italian. Results on XFORMAL suggest that state-of-the-art style transfer approaches perform close to simple baselines, indicating that style transfer is even more challenging when moving multilingual.
GrASP: A Library for Extracting and Exploring Human-Interpretable Textual Patterns
Lertvittayakumjorn, Piyawat, Choshen, Leshem, Shnarch, Eyal, Toni, Francesca
Data exploration is an important step of every data science and machine learning project, including those involving textual data. We provide a Python library for GrASP, an existing algorithm for drawing patterns from textual data. The library is equipped with a web-based interface empowering human users to conveniently explore the data and the extracted patterns. We also demonstrate the use of the library in two settings (spam detection and argument mining) and discuss future deployments of the library, e.g., beyond textual data exploration.