AI has revolutionized the processing of various services, including the automatic facial verification of people. Automated approaches have demonstrated their speed and efficiency in verifying a large volume of faces, but they can face challenges when processing content from certain communities, including communities of people of color. This challenge has prompted the adoption of "human-in-the-loop" (HITL) approaches, where human workers collaborate with the AI to minimize errors. However, most HITL approaches do not consider workers' individual characteristics and backgrounds. This paper proposes a new approach, called Inclusive Portraits (IP), that connects with social theories around race to design a racially-aware human-in-the-loop system. Our experiments have provided evidence that incorporating race into human-in-the-loop (HITL) systems for facial verification can significantly enhance performance, especially for services delivered to people of color. Our findings also highlight the importance of considering individual worker characteristics in the design of HITL systems, rather than treating workers as a homogenous group. Our research has significant design implications for developing AI-enhanced services that are more inclusive and equitable.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been widely used for generating synthetic data for cases where there is a limited size real-world dataset or when data holders are unwilling to share their data samples. Recent works showed that GANs, due to overfitting and memorization, might leak information regarding their training data samples. This makes GANs vulnerable to Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs). Several defense strategies have been proposed in the literature to mitigate this privacy issue. Unfortunately, defense strategies based on differential privacy are proven to reduce extensively the quality of the synthetic data points. On the other hand, more recent frameworks such as PrivGAN and PAR-GAN are not suitable for small-size training datasets. In the present work, the overfitting in GANs is studied in terms of the discriminator, and a more general measure of overfitting based on the Bhattacharyya coefficient is defined. Then, inspired by Fano's inequality, our first defense mechanism against MIAs is proposed. This framework, which requires only a simple modification in the loss function of GANs, is referred to as the maximum entropy GAN or MEGAN and significantly improves the robustness of GANs to MIAs. As a second defense strategy, a more heuristic model based on minimizing the information leaked from generated samples about the training data points is presented. This approach is referred to as mutual information minimization GAN (MIMGAN) and uses a variational representation of the mutual information to minimize the information that a synthetic sample might leak about the whole training data set. Applying the proposed frameworks to some commonly used data sets against state-of-the-art MIAs reveals that the proposed methods can reduce the accuracy of the adversaries to the level of random guessing accuracy with a small reduction in the quality of the synthetic data samples.

Persistent homology is a popular computational tool for detecting non-trivial topology of point clouds, such as the presence of loops or voids. However, many real-world datasets with low intrinsic dimensionality reside in an ambient space of much higher dimensionality. We show that in this case vanilla persistent homology becomes very sensitive to noise and fails to detect the correct topology. The same holds true for most existing refinements of persistent homology. As a remedy, we find that spectral distances on the $k$-nearest-neighbor graph of the data, such as diffusion distance and effective resistance, allow persistent homology to detect the correct topology even in the presence of high-dimensional noise. Furthermore, we derive a novel closed-form expression for effective resistance in terms of the eigendecomposition of the graph Laplacian, and describe its relation to diffusion distances. Finally, we apply these methods to several high-dimensional single-cell RNA-sequencing datasets and show that spectral distances on the $k$-nearest-neighbor graph allow robust detection of cell cycle loops.

It has been noticed that through COVID-19 greenhouse gas emissions had a sudden reduction. Based on this significant observation, we decided to conduct a research to quantify the impact of scientific conferences' air-travelling, explore and suggest alternative ways for greener conferences to re-duce the global carbon footprint. Specifically, we focused on the most popular conferences for the Artificial Intelligence community based on their scientific impact factor, their scale, and the well-organized proceedings towards measuring the impact of air travelling participation. This is the first time that systematic quantification of a state-of-the-art subject like Artificial Intelligence takes place to define its conferencing footprint in the broader frames of environmental awareness. Our findings highlight that the virtual way is the first on the list of green conferences' conduction although there are serious concerns about it. Alternatives to optimal conferences' location selection have demonstrated savings on air-travelling CO2 emissions of up to 63.9%.

Warm-sector heavy rainfall often occurs along the coast of South China, and it is usually localized and long-lasting, making it challenging to predict. High-resolution numerical weather prediction (NWP) models are increasingly used to better resolve topographic features and forecast such high-impact weather events. However, when the grid spacing becomes comparable to the length scales of convection, known as the gray zone, the turbulent eddies in the atmospheric boundary layer are only partially resolved and parameterized to some extent. Whether using a convection parameterization (CP) scheme in the gray zone remains controversial. Scale-aware CP schemes are developed to enhance the representation of convective transport within the gray zone. The multi-scale Kain-Fritsch (MSKF) scheme includes modifications that allow for its effective implementation at a grid resolution as high as 2 km. In recent years, there has been an increasing application of machine learning (ML) models to various domains of atmospheric sciences, including the replacement of physical parameterizations with ML models. This work proposes a multi-output bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) model as a replace the scale-aware MSKF CP scheme. The Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model is used to generate training and testing data over South China at a horizontal resolution of 5 km. Furthermore, the WRF model is coupled with the ML based CP scheme and compared with WRF simulations with original MSKF scheme. The results demonstrate that the Bi-LSTM model can achieve high accuracy, indicating the potential use of ML models to substitute the MSKF scheme in the gray zone.

In this study, we delve into the dynamic landscape of machine learning research evolution. Initially, through the utilization of Latent Dirichlet Allocation, we discern pivotal themes and fundamental concepts that have emerged within the realm of machine learning. Subsequently, we undertake a comprehensive analysis to track the evolutionary trajectories of these identified themes. To quantify the novelty and divergence of research contributions, we employ the Kullback-Leibler Divergence metric. This statistical measure serves as a proxy for ``surprise'', indicating the extent of differentiation between the content of academic papers and the subsequent developments in research. By amalgamating these insights, we gain the ability to ascertain the pivotal roles played by prominent researchers and the significance of specific academic venues (periodicals and conferences) within the machine learning domain.

Consistency-based diagnosis is an established approach to diagnose technical applications, but suffers from significant modeling efforts, especially for dynamic multi-modal time series. Machine learning seems to be an obvious solution, which becomes less obvious when looking at details: Which notion of consistency can be used? If logical calculi are still to be used, how can dynamic time series be transferred into the discrete world? This paper presents the methodology Discret2Di for automated learning of logical expressions for consistency-based diagnosis. While these logical calculi have advantages by providing a clear notion of consistency, they have the key problem of relying on a discretization of the dynamic system. The solution presented combines machine learning from both the time series and the symbolic domain to automate the learning of logical rules for consistency-based diagnosis.

Over the last decade there has been an increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires across the globe, posing significant threats to human and animal lives, ecosystems, and socio-economic stability. Therefore urgent action is required to mitigate their devastating impact and safeguard Earth's natural resources. Robust Machine Learning methods combined with the abundance of high-resolution satellite imagery can provide accurate and timely mappings of the affected area in order to assess the scale of the event, identify the impacted assets and prioritize and allocate resources effectively for the proper restoration of the damaged region. In this work, we create and introduce a machine-learning ready dataset we name FLOGA (Forest wiLdfire Observations for the Greek Area). This dataset is unique as it comprises of satellite imagery acquired before and after a wildfire event, it contains information from Sentinel-2 and MODIS modalities with variable spatial and spectral resolution, and contains a large number of events where the corresponding burnt area ground truth has been annotated by domain experts. FLOGA covers the wider region of Greece, which is characterized by a Mediterranean landscape and climatic conditions. We use FLOGA to provide a thorough comparison of multiple Machine Learning and Deep Learning algorithms for the automatic extraction of burnt areas, approached as a change detection task. We also compare the results to those obtained using standard specialized spectral indices for burnt area mapping. Finally, we propose a novel Deep Learning model, namely BAM-CD. Our benchmark results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed technique in the automatic extraction of burnt areas, outperforming all other methods in terms of accuracy and robustness. Our dataset and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/Orion-AI-Lab/FLOGA.

While GPT-4V(ision) impressively models both visual and textual information simultaneously, it's hallucination behavior has not been systematically assessed. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new benchmark, namely, the Bias and Interference Challenges in Visual Language Models (Bingo). This benchmark is designed to evaluate and shed light on the two common types of hallucinations in visual language models: bias and interference. Here, bias refers to the model's tendency to hallucinate certain types of responses, possibly due to imbalance in its training data. Interference pertains to scenarios where the judgment of GPT-4V(ision) can be disrupted due to how the text prompt is phrased or how the input image is presented. We identify a notable regional bias, whereby GPT-4V(ision) is better at interpreting Western images or images with English writing compared to images from other countries or containing text in other languages. Moreover, GPT-4V(ision) is vulnerable to leading questions and is often confused when interpreting multiple images together. Popular mitigation approaches, such as self-correction and chain-of-thought reasoning, are not effective in resolving these challenges. We also identified similar biases and interference vulnerabilities with LLaVA and Bard. Our results characterize the hallucination challenges in GPT-4V(ision) and state-of-the-art visual-language models, and highlight the need for new solutions. The Bingo benchmark is available at https://github.com/gzcch/Bingo.

The integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into shared airspace for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations presents significant challenges but holds transformative potential for sectors like transportation, construction, energy and defense. A critical prerequisite for this integration is equipping UAVs with enhanced situational awareness to ensure safe operations. Current approaches mainly target single object detection or classification, or simpler sensing outputs that offer limited perceptual understanding and lack the rapid end-to-end processing needed to convert sensor data into safety-critical insights. In contrast, our study leverages radar technology for novel end-to-end semantic segmentation of aerial point clouds to simultaneously identify multiple collision hazards. By adapting and optimizing the PointNet architecture and integrating aerial domain insights, our framework distinguishes five distinct classes: mobile drones (DJI M300 and DJI Mini) and airplanes (Ikarus C42), and static returns (ground and infrastructure) which results in enhanced situational awareness for UAVs. To our knowledge, this is the first approach addressing simultaneous identification of multiple collision threats in an aerial setting, achieving a robust 94% accuracy. This work highlights the potential of radar technology to advance situational awareness in UAVs, facilitating safe and efficient BVLOS operations.