The large population of home cooks with dietary restrictions is under-served by existing cooking resources and recipe generation models. To help them, we propose the task of controllable recipe editing: adapt a base recipe to satisfy a user-specified dietary constraint. This task is challenging, and cannot be adequately solved with human-written ingredient substitution rules or existing end-to-end recipe generation models. We tackle this problem with SHARE: a System for Hierarchical Assistive Recipe Editing, which performs simultaneous ingredient substitution before generating natural-language steps using the edited ingredients. By decoupling ingredient and step editing, our step generator can explicitly integrate the available ingredients. Experiments on the novel RecipePairs dataset -- 83K pairs of similar recipes where each recipe satisfies one of seven dietary constraints -- demonstrate that SHARE produces convincing, coherent recipes that are appropriate for a target dietary constraint. We further show through human evaluations and real-world cooking trials that recipes edited by SHARE can be easily followed by home cooks to create appealing dishes.

Chile's mining industry reported 58 accidents and 68 deaths in the last five years (2017-21), according to geology and mining bureau Sernageomin. Those grim figures could change with the internet of things and artificial intelligence through metrics and predictive models that manage human errors and save lives. That is the technological option of a local start-up, Gauss Control, which in 2020 received recognition from the MIT Technology Review as one of the main innovators in Latin America. Today it monitors more than 20,000 workers, many in the mining industry, where most accidents are caused by the operation of equipment such as trucks, buses, pick-ups, mechanical shovels, etc. To find out how new technological devices can help reduce accidents and fatalities in the mining sector, BNamericas spoke with José Rafael Campino, founder and CEO of Gauss Control.

The asteroidal main belt is crossed by a web of mean-motion and secular resonances, that occur when there is a commensurability between fundamental frequencies of the asteroids and planets. Traditionally, these objects were identified by visual inspection of the time evolution of their resonant argument, which is a combination of orbital elements of the asteroid and the perturbing planet(s). Since the population of asteroids affected by these resonances is, in some cases, of the order of several thousand, this has become a taxing task for a human observer. Recent works used Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) models to perform such task automatically. In this work, we compare the outcome of such models with those of some of the most advanced and publicly available CNN architectures, like the VGG, Inception and ResNet. The performance of such models is first tested and optimized for overfitting issues, using validation sets and a series of regularization techniques like data augmentation, dropout, and batch normalization. The three best-performing models were then used to predict the labels of larger testing databases containing thousands of images. The VGG model, with and without regularizations, proved to be the most efficient method to predict labels of large datasets. Since the Vera C. Rubin observatory is likely to discover up to four million new asteroids in the next few years, the use of these models might become quite valuable to identify populations of resonant minor bodies.

The compositionality and sparsity of high-throughput sequencing data poses a challenge for regression and classification. However, in microbiome research in particular, conditional modeling is an essential tool to investigate relationships between phenotypes and the microbiome. Existing techniques are often inadequate: they either rely on extensions of the linear log-contrast model (which adjusts for compositionality, but is often unable to capture useful signals), or they are based on black-box machine learning methods (which may capture useful signals, but ignore compositionality in downstream analyses). We propose KernelBiome, a kernel-based nonparametric regression and classification framework for compositional data. It is tailored to sparse compositional data and is able to incorporate prior knowledge, such as phylogenetic structure. KernelBiome captures complex signals, including in the zero-structure, while automatically adapting model complexity. We demonstrate on par or improved predictive performance compared with state-of-the-art machine learning methods. Additionally, our framework provides two key advantages: (i) We propose two novel quantities to interpret contributions of individual components and prove that they consistently estimate average perturbation effects of the conditional mean, extending the interpretability of linear log-contrast models to nonparametric models. (ii) We show that the connection between kernels and distances aids interpretability and provides a data-driven embedding that can augment further analysis. Finally, we apply the KernelBiome framework to two public microbiome studies and illustrate the proposed model analysis. KernelBiome is available as an open-source Python package at https://github.com/shimenghuang/KernelBiome.

In this paper, we present a novel approach to adapt a sequence-to-sequence Transformer-Transducer ASR system to the keyword spotting (KWS) task. We achieve this by replacing the keyword in the text transcription with a special token and training the system to detect the token in an audio stream. At inference time, we create a decision function inspired by conventional KWS approaches, to make our approach more suitable for the KWS task. Furthermore, we introduce a specific keyword spotting loss by adapting the sequence-discriminative Minimum Bayes-Risk training technique. We find that our approach significantly outperforms ASR based KWS systems. When compared with a conventional keyword spotting system, our proposal has similar performance while bringing the advantages and flexibility of sequence-to-sequence training. Additionally, when combined with the conventional KWS system, our approach can improve the performance at any operation point.

Following the outbreak of a global pandemic, online content is filled with hate speech. Donald Trump's ''Chinese Virus'' tweet shifted the blame for the spread of the Covid-19 virus to China and the Chinese people, which triggered a new round of anti-China hate both online and offline. This research intends to examine China-related hate speech on Twitter during the two years following the burst of the pandemic (2020 and 2021). Through Twitter's API, in total 2,172,333 tweets hashtagged #china posted during the time were collected. By employing multiple state-of-the-art pretrained language models for hate speech detection, we identify a wide range of hate of various types, resulting in an automatically labeled anti-China hate speech dataset. We identify a hateful rate in #china tweets of 2.5% in 2020 and 1.9% in 2021. This is well above the average rate of online hate speech on Twitter at 0.6% identified in Gao et al., 2017. We further analyzed the longitudinal development of #china tweets and those identified as hateful in 2020 and 2021 through visualizing the daily number and hate rate over the two years. Our keyword analysis of hate speech in #china tweets reveals the most frequently mentioned terms in the hateful #china tweets, which can be used for further social science studies.

Explainable artificial intelligence is an emerging and evolving concept. Its impact on construction, though yet to be realised, will be profound in the foreseeable future. Still, XAI has received limited attention in construction. As a result, no evaluation frameworks have been propagated to enable construction organisations to understand the what, why, how, and when of XAI. Our paper aims to fill this void by developing a content, context, process, and outcome evaluation framework that can be used to justify the adoption and effective management of XAI. After introducing and describing this novel framework, we discuss its implications for future research. While our novel framework is conceptual, it provides a frame of reference for construction organisations to make headway toward realising XAI business value and benefits.

We study speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) that translates speech from one language into another language and focuses on building systems to support languages without standard text writing systems. We use English-Taiwanese Hokkien as a case study, and present an end-to-end solution from training data collection, modeling choices to benchmark dataset release. First, we present efforts on creating human annotated data, automatically mining data from large unlabeled speech datasets, and adopting pseudo-labeling to produce weakly supervised data. On the modeling, we take advantage of recent advances in applying self-supervised discrete representations as target for prediction in S2ST and show the effectiveness of leveraging additional text supervision from Mandarin, a language similar to Hokkien, in model training. Finally, we release an S2ST benchmark set to facilitate future research in this field. The demo can be found at https://huggingface.co/spaces/facebook/Hokkien_Translation .

Kernel methods provide a flexible and theoretically grounded approach to nonlinear and nonparametric learning. While memory requirements hinder their applicability to large datasets, many approximate solvers were recently developed for scaling up kernel methods, such as random Fourier features. However, these scalable approaches are based on approximations of isotropic kernels, which are incapable of removing the influence of possibly irrelevant features. In this work, we design random Fourier features for automatic relevance determination kernels, widely used for variable selection, and propose a new method based on joint optimization of the kernel machine parameters and the kernel relevances. Additionally, we present a new optimization algorithm that efficiently tackles the resulting objective function, which is non-convex. Numerical validation on synthetic and real-world data shows that our approach achieves low prediction error and effectively identifies relevant predictors. Our solution is modular and uses the PyTorch framework.

The fact that we can build models from data, and therefore refine our models with more data from experiments, is usually given for granted in scientific inquiry. However, how much information can we extract, and how precise can we expect our learned model to be, if we have only a finite amount of data at our disposal? Nuclear physics demands an high degree of precision from models that are inferred from the limited number of nuclei that can be possibly made in the laboratories. In manuscript I will introduce some concepts of computational science, such as statistical theory of learning and Hamiltonian complexity, and use them to contextualise the results concerning the amount of data necessary to extrapolate a mass model to a given precision.