The health industry is embracing the power of big data, cloud computing, and clinical analytics, harnessing data to deliver insights that can improve care and efficiency. Still, unstructured text remains a challenge--made even more complex by barriers of language. Doctors' notes and other unstructured text are often left unreferenced, are hard to parse and learn from, and are difficult to extract insights from, which leads to missed opportunities for diagnosis and better care. Microsoft recognizes the need to enable healthcare organizations worldwide to gather insights from this data--for better, faster, and more personalized care, and to improve health equity. With Text Analytics for Health, a part of Azure Cognitive Services, healthcare organizations around the world can now extract meaningful insights from unstructured text in seven languages and process it in a way that enables clinical decision support like never before.

The OGB Large-Scale Challenge (LSC) [Hu et al., 2021] is a Machine Learning (ML) challenge to predict a quantum chemical property, the HUMO-LUMO gap of small molecules. This ground truth is obtained via a density-functional theory (DFT) computation which is known to be time-consuming and could take several hours, even for small molecules. With the rapid advancement of machine learning technology, it is promising to use fast, GPU-accelerated and accurate ML models to replace this expensive DFT optimization process. The PCQM4Mv2 dataset, based on the PubChemQC project Nakata and Shimazaki [2017], provides us with a welldefined ML task of predicting the HOMO-LUMO gap of molecules given their 2D molecular graphs. Each molecule has two natural views. The 2D graph incorporates topological structures defined by bonds, and the 3D view provides spatial information that better reflects the geometry and spatial relation of the different bonds in the molecule.

Many of the new developments in machine learning are connected with gradient-based optimization methods. Recently, these methods have been studied using a variational perspective (Betancourt et al., 2018). This has opened up the possibility of introducing variational and symplectic methods using geometric integration. In particular, in this paper, we introduce variational integrators (Marsden and West, 2001) which allow us to derive different methods for optimization. Using both, Hamilton's and Lagrange-d'Alembert's principle, we derive two families of optimization methods in one-to-one correspondence that generalize Polyak's heavy ball (Polyak, 1964) and Nesterov's accelerated gradient (Nesterov, 1983), the second of which mimics the behavior of the latter reducing the oscillations of classical momentum methods. However, since the systems considered are explicitly time-dependent, the preservation of symplecticity of autonomous systems occurs here solely on the fibers.

Automated bin-picking is a prerequisite for fully automated manufacturing and warehouses. To successfully pick an item from an unstructured bin the robot needs to first detect possible grasps for the objects, decide on the object to remove and consequently plan and execute a feasible trajectory to retrieve the chosen object. Over the last years significant progress has been made towards solving these problems. However, when multiple robot arms are cooperating the decision and planning problems become exponentially harder. We propose an integrated multi-arm bin-picking pipeline (IMAPIP), and demonstrate that it is able to reliably pick objects from a bin in real-time using multiple robot arms. IMAPIP solves the multi-arm bin-picking task first at high-level using a geometry-aware policy integrated in a combined task and motion planning framework. We then plan motions consistent with this policy using the BIT* algorithm on the motion planning level. We show that this integrated solution enables robot arm cooperation. In our experiments, we show the proposed geometry-aware policy outperforms a baseline by increasing bin-picking time by 28\% using two robot arms. The policy is robust to changes in the position of the bin and number of objects. We also show that IMAPIP to successfully scale up to four robot arms working in close proximity.

Understanding the fundamental mechanism behind the success of transformer networks is still an open problem in the deep learning literature. Although their remarkable performance has been mostly attributed to the self-attention mechanism, the literature still lacks a solid analysis of these networks and interpretation of the functions learned by them. To this end, we study the training problem of attention/transformer networks and introduce a novel convex analytic approach to improve the understanding and optimization of these networks. Particularly, we first introduce a convex alternative to the self-attention mechanism and reformulate the regularized training problem of transformer networks with our alternative convex attention. Then, we cast the reformulation as a convex optimization problem that is interpretable and easier to optimize. Moreover, as a byproduct of our convex analysis, we reveal an implicit regularization mechanism, which promotes sparsity across tokens. Therefore, we not only improve the optimization of attention/transformer networks but also provide a solid theoretical understanding of the functions learned by them. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our theory through several numerical experiments.

The Israeli medical imaging vendor Nanox says it has a vision for the future of healthcare to address health disparities and lack of access to care. It envisions a new business model and plans to leverage a package of new technologies, including cold-cathode X-ray technology to help reduce costs, coupled with a new and inexpensive imaging system that combines teleradiology with artificial intelligence (AI). The business model is to enable any clinic or hospital in the developing world or rural areas to access its technology and no upfront costs using a pay-per-exam fee. The exams will be read by remote teleradiologists, including subspecialists, and AI will help augment clinical staff and radiologists to offer additional health screenings for all patients scanned. After a few years of talk, the vendor now appears on the edge of making this a reality.

Federated learning is the process of developing machine learning models over datasets distributed across data centers such as hospitals, clinical research labs, and mobile devices while preventing data leakage. This survey examines previous research and studies on federated learning in the healthcare sector across a range of use cases and applications. Our survey shows what challenges, methods, and applications a practitioner should be aware of in the topic of federated learning. This paper aims to lay out existing research and list the possibilities of federated learning for healthcare industries.

This paper introduces ArtELingo, a new benchmark and dataset, designed to encourage work on diversity across languages and cultures. Following ArtEmis, a collection of 80k artworks from WikiArt with 0.45M emotion labels and English-only captions, ArtELingo adds another 0.79M annotations in Arabic and Chinese, plus 4.8K in Spanish to evaluate "cultural-transfer" performance. More than 51K artworks have 5 annotations or more in 3 languages. This diversity makes it possible to study similarities and differences across languages and cultures. Further, we investigate captioning tasks, and find diversity improves the performance of baseline models. ArtELingo is publicly available at https://www.artelingo.org/ with standard splits and baseline models. We hope our work will help ease future research on multilinguality and culturally-aware AI.

Supervised learning tasks such as cancer survival prediction from gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) are a critical challenge in computational pathology that requires modeling complex features of the tumor microenvironment. These learning tasks are often solved with deep multi-instance learning (MIL) models that do not explicitly capture intratumoral heterogeneity. We develop a novel variance pooling architecture that enables a MIL model to incorporate intratumoral heterogeneity into its predictions. Two interpretability tools based on "representative patches" are illustrated to probe the biological signals captured by these models. An empirical study with 4,479 gigapixel WSIs from the Cancer Genome Atlas shows that adding variance pooling onto MIL frameworks improves survival prediction performance for five cancer types.

We propose a new uniform framework for text classification and ranking that can automate the process of identifying check-worthy sentences in political debates and speech transcripts. Our framework combines the semantic analysis of the sentences, with additional entity embeddings obtained through the identified entities within the sentences. In particular, we analyse the semantic meaning of each sentence using state-of-the-art neural language models such as BERT, ALBERT, and RoBERTa, while embeddings for entities are obtained from knowledge graph (KG) embedding models. Specifically, we instantiate our framework using five different language models, entity embeddings obtained from six different KG embedding models, as well as two combination methods leading to several Entity-Assisted neural language models. We extensively evaluate the effectiveness of our framework using two publicly available datasets from the CLEF' 2019 & 2020 CheckThat! Labs. Our results show that the neural language models significantly outperform traditional TF.IDF and LSTM methods. In addition, we show that the ALBERT model is consistently the most effective model among all the tested neural language models. Our entity embeddings significantly outperform other existing approaches from the literature that are based on similarity and relatedness scores between the entities in a sentence, when used alongside a KG embedding.