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Federated and distributed learning applications for electronic health records and structured medical data: A scoping review

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Federated learning (FL) has gained popularity in clinical research in recent years to facilitate privacy-preserving collaboration. Structured data, one of the most prevalent forms of clinical data, has experienced significant growth in volume concurrently, notably with the widespread adoption of electronic health records in clinical practice. This review examines FL applications on structured medical data, identifies contemporary limitations and discusses potential innovations. We searched five databases, SCOPUS, MEDLINE, Web of Science, Embase, and CINAHL, to identify articles that applied FL to structured medical data and reported results following the PRISMA guidelines. Each selected publication was evaluated from three primary perspectives, including data quality, modeling strategies, and FL frameworks. Out of the 1160 papers screened, 34 met the inclusion criteria, with each article consisting of one or more studies that used FL to handle structured clinical/medical data. Of these, 24 utilized data acquired from electronic health records, with clinical predictions and association studies being the most common clinical research tasks that FL was applied to. Only one article exclusively explored the vertical FL setting, while the remaining 33 explored the horizontal FL setting, with only 14 discussing comparisons between single-site (local) and FL (global) analysis. The existing FL applications on structured medical data lack sufficient evaluations of clinically meaningful benefits, particularly when compared to single-site analyses. Therefore, it is crucial for future FL applications to prioritize clinical motivations and develop designs and methodologies that can effectively support and aid clinical practice and research.


Dinosaur with scissor-like claws roamed Britain 168 million years ago

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Mysterious ancient teeth found in three English counties are believed to belong to a dinosaur with scissor-like claws which roamed Britain 168 million years ago. Paleontologists said the fossils unearthed in Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Dorset were the first ever examples of therizinosaur and troodontid dinosaurs on UK soil. Not only that, but the remains are the world's oldest-known evidence of those species and could represent some of the earliest relatives of birds ever discovered. Therizinosaurus – which featured in the most recent Jurassic World film – was a large herbivore dinosaur from the late Cretaceous known for its distinctive long scissor-like claw bones. Along with the troodontid and well-known Velociraptor, it belonged to a group of ancient creatures called the maniraptorans.


A New Model Predicts Depression and Anxiety Using Artificial Intelligence and Social Media - Neuroscience News

#artificialintelligence

Summary: Utilizing data from Twitter and applying natural language processing artificial intelligence algorithms, researchers created a new, accurate prediction model for depression and anxiety. Researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil are using artificial intelligence (AI) and Twitter, one of the world's largest social media platforms, to try to create anxiety and depression prediction models that could in future provide signs of these disorders before clinical diagnosis. The study is reported in an article published in the journal Language Resources and Evaluation. Construction of a database, called SetembroBR, was the first step in the study. The name is a reference to Yellow September, an annual suicide awareness and prevention campaign, and also to the fact that data collection for the study began one day in September. The second step is still in progress but has provided some preliminary findings, such as the possibility of detecting whether a person is likely to develop depression solely on the basis of their social media friends and followers, without taking their own posts into account.


China races to regulate AI after playing catchup to ChatGPT

Al Jazeera

Taipei, Taiwan – After playing catchup to ChatGPT, China is racing to regulate the rapidly-advancing field of artificial intelligence (AI). Under draft regulations released this week, Chinese tech companies will need to register generative AI products with China's cyberspace agency and submit them to a security assessment before they can be released to the public. The regulations cover practically all aspects of generative AI, from how it is trained to how users interact with it, in an apparent bid by Beijing to control the at times unwieldy technology, the break-neck development of which has prompted warnings from tech leaders including Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Under the rules unveiled by the Cyberspace Administration of China on Tuesday, tech companies will be responsible for the "legitimacy of the source of pre-training data" to ensure content reflects the "core value of socialism". Companies must ensure AI does not call for the "subversion of state power" or the overthrow of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), incite moves to "split the country" or "undermine national unity", produce content that is pornographic, or encourage violence, extremism, terrorism or discrimination.


Hulk: Graph Neural Networks for Optimizing Regionally Distributed Computing Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large deep learning models have shown great potential for delivering exceptional results in various applications. However, the training process can be incredibly challenging due to the models' vast parameter sizes, often consisting of hundreds of billions of parameters. Common distributed training methods, such as data parallelism, tensor parallelism, and pipeline parallelism, demand significant data communication throughout the process, leading to prolonged wait times for some machines in physically distant distributed systems. To address this issue, we propose a novel solution called Hulk, which utilizes a modified graph neural network to optimize distributed computing systems. Hulk not only optimizes data communication efficiency between different countries or even different regions within the same city, but also provides optimal distributed deployment of models in parallel. For example, it can place certain layers on a machine in a specific region or pass specific parameters of a model to a machine in a particular location. By using Hulk in experiments, we were able to improve the time efficiency of training large deep learning models on distributed systems by more than 20\%. Our open source collection of unlabeled data:https://github.com/DLYuanGod/Hulk.


AI Models Close to your Chest: Robust Federated Learning Strategies for Multi-site CT

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

While it is well known that population differences from genetics, sex, race, and environmental factors contribute to disease, AI studies in medicine have largely focused on locoregional patient cohorts with less diverse data sources. Such limitation stems from barriers to large-scale data share and ethical concerns over data privacy. Federated learning (FL) is one potential pathway for AI development that enables learning across hospitals without data share. In this study, we show the results of various FL strategies on one of the largest and most diverse COVID-19 chest CT datasets: 21 participating hospitals across five continents that comprise >10,000 patients with >1 million images. We also propose an FL strategy that leverages synthetically generated data to overcome class and size imbalances. We also describe the sources of data heterogeneity in the context of FL, and show how even among the correctly labeled populations, disparities can arise due to these biases.


Who Evaluates the Evaluators? On Automatic Metrics for Assessing AI-based Offensive Code Generators

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

AI-based code generators are an emerging solution for automatically writing programs starting from descriptions in natural language, by using deep neural networks (Neural Machine Translation, NMT). In particular, code generators have been used for ethical hacking and offensive security testing by generating proof-of-concept attacks. Unfortunately, the evaluation of code generators still faces several issues. The current practice uses output similarity metrics, i.e., automatic metrics that compute the textual similarity of generated code with ground-truth references. However, it is not clear what metric to use, and which metric is most suitable for specific contexts. This work analyzes a large set of output similarity metrics on offensive code generators. We apply the metrics on two state-of-the-art NMT models using two datasets containing offensive assembly and Python code with their descriptions in the English language. We compare the estimates from the automatic metrics with human evaluation and provide practical insights into their strengths and limitations.


Designing Nonlinear Photonic Crystals for High-Dimensional Quantum State Engineering

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We propose a novel, physically-constrained and differentiable approach for the generation of D-dimensional qudit states via spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) in quantum optics. We circumvent any limitations imposed by the inherently stochastic nature of the physical process and incorporate a set of stochastic dynamical equations governing its evolution under the SPDC Hamiltonian. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model through the design of structured nonlinear photonic crystals (NLPCs) and shaped pump beams; and show, theoretically and experimentally, how to generate maximally entangled states in the spatial degree of freedom. The learning of NLPC structures offers a promising new avenue for shaping and controlling arbitrary quantum states and enables all-optical coherent control of the generated states. We believe that this approach can readily be extended from bulky crystals to thin Metasurfaces and potentially applied to other quantum systems sharing a similar Hamiltonian structures, such as superfluids and superconductors.


MLOps Spanning Whole Machine Learning Life Cycle: A Survey

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Google AlphaGos win has significantly motivated and sped up machine learning (ML) research and development, which led to tremendous ML technical advances and wider adoptions in various domains (e.g., Finance, Health, Defense, and Education). These advances have resulted in numerous new concepts and technologies, which are too many for people to catch up to and even make them confused, especially for newcomers to the ML area. This paper is aimed to present a clear picture of the state-of-the-art of the existing ML technologies with a comprehensive survey. We lay out this survey by viewing ML as a MLOps (ML Operations) process, where the key concepts and activities are collected and elaborated with representative works and surveys. We hope that this paper can serve as a quick reference manual (a survey of surveys) for newcomers (e.g., researchers, practitioners) of ML to get an overview of the MLOps process, as well as a good understanding of the key technologies used in each step of the ML process, and know where to find more details.


Verbs in Action: Improving verb understanding in video-language models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Understanding verbs is crucial to modelling how people and objects interact with each other and the environment through space and time. Recently, state-of-the-art video-language models based on CLIP have been shown to have limited verb understanding and to rely extensively on nouns, restricting their performance in real-world video applications that require action and temporal understanding. In this work, we improve verb understanding for CLIP-based video-language models by proposing a new Verb-Focused Contrastive (VFC) framework. This consists of two main components: (1) leveraging pretrained large language models (LLMs) to create hard negatives for cross-modal contrastive learning, together with a calibration strategy to balance the occurrence of concepts in positive and negative pairs; and (2) enforcing a fine-grained, verb phrase alignment loss. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results for zero-shot performance on three downstream tasks that focus on verb understanding: video-text matching, video question-answering and video classification. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work which proposes a method to alleviate the verb understanding problem, and does not simply highlight it.