Having a rich multimodal inner language is an important component of human intelligence that enables several necessary core cognitive functions such as multimodal prediction, translation, and generation. Building upon the Conscious Turing Machine (CTM), a machine model for consciousness proposed by Blum and Blum (2021), we describe the desiderata of a multimodal language called Brainish, comprising words, images, audio, and sensations combined in representations that the CTM's processors use to communicate with each other. We define the syntax and semantics of Brainish before operationalizing this language through the lens of multimodal artificial intelligence, a vibrant research area studying the computational tools necessary for processing and relating information from heterogeneous signals. Our general framework for learning Brainish involves designing (1) unimodal encoders to segment and represent unimodal data, (2) a coordinated representation space that relates and composes unimodal features to derive holistic meaning across multimodal inputs, and (3) decoders to map multimodal representations into predictions (for fusion) or raw data (for translation or generation). Through discussing how Brainish is crucial for communication and coordination in order to achieve consciousness in the CTM, and by implementing a simple version of Brainish and evaluating its capability of demonstrating intelligence on multimodal prediction and retrieval tasks on several real-world image, text, and audio datasets, we argue that such an inner language will be important for advances in machine models of intelligence and consciousness.

As the number of smart devices that surround us increases, so do the opportunities to create smart socially-aware systems. In this context, mobile devices can be used to collect data about students and to better understand how their day-to-day routines can influence their academic performance. Moreover, the Covid-19 pandemic led to new challenges and difficulties, also for students, with considerable impact on their lifestyle. In this paper we present a dataset collected using a smartphone application (ISABELA), which include passive data (e.g., activity and location) as well as self-reported data from questionnaires. We present several tests with different machine learning models, in order to classify students' performance. These tests were carried out using different time windows, showing that weekly time windows lead to better prediction and classification results than monthly time windows. Furthermore, it is shown that the created models can predict student performance even with data collected from different contexts, namely before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. SVMs, XGBoost and AdaBoost-SAMME with Random Forest were found to be the best algorithms, showing an accuracy greater than 78%. Additionally, we propose a pipeline that uses a decision level median voting algorithm to further improve the models' performance, by using historic data from the students to further improve the prediction. Using this pipeline, it is possible to further increase the performance of the models, with some of them obtaining an accuracy greater than 90%.

In this paper we share findings from our effort to build practical machine translation (MT) systems capable of translating across over one thousand languages. We describe results in three research domains: (i) Building clean, web-mined datasets for 1500+ languages by leveraging semi-supervised pre-training for language identification and developing data-driven filtering techniques; (ii) Developing practical MT models for under-served languages by leveraging massively multilingual models trained with supervised parallel data for over 100 high-resource languages and monolingual datasets for an additional 1000+ languages; and (iii) Studying the limitations of evaluation metrics for these languages and conducting qualitative analysis of the outputs from our MT models, highlighting several frequent error modes of these types of models. We hope that our work provides useful insights to practitioners working towards building MT systems for currently understudied languages, and highlights research directions that can complement the weaknesses of massively multilingual models in data-sparse settings.

When using medical images for diagnosis, either by clinicians or artificial intelligence (AI) systems, it is important that the images are of high quality. When an image is of low quality, the medical exam that produced the image often needs to be redone. In telemedicine, a common problem is that the quality issue is only flagged once the patient has left the clinic, meaning they must return in order to have the exam redone. This can be especially difficult for people living in remote regions, who make up a substantial portion of the patients at Portal Telemedicina, a digital healthcare organization based in Brazil. In this paper, we report on ongoing work regarding (i) the development of an AI system for flagging and explaining low-quality medical images in real-time, (ii) an interview study to understand the explanation needs of stakeholders using the AI system at OurCompany, and, (iii) a longitudinal user study design to examine the effect of including explanations on the workflow of the technicians in our clinics. To the best of our knowledge, this would be the first longitudinal study on evaluating the effects of XAI methods on end-users -- stakeholders that use AI systems but do not have AI-specific expertise. We welcome feedback and suggestions on our experimental setup.

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Cyber Security market report shows the competitive scenario of the major market players dependent on the sales income, client requests, organization profile, and the business tactics utilized in the market which will help the emerging market segments in making vital business decisions. This study also covers company profiling, specifications and product picture, market share, and contact information of various regional, international, and local vendors of the Global Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Cyber Security Market.

As robots are gradually introduced into various real-world environments, developers and roboticists will need to ensure that they can safely operate around humans. In recent years, they have introduced various approaches for estimating the positions and predicting the movements of robots in real-time. Researchers at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Brazil have recently created a new deep learning model to estimate the pose of robotic arms and predict their movements. This model, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, is specifically designed to enhance the safety of robots while they are collaborating or interacting with humans. "Motivated by the need to anticipate accidents during human-robot interaction (HRI), we explore a framework that improves the safety of people working in close proximity to robots," Djamel H. Sadok, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore.

Over 12 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered at the time of writing. However, public perceptions of vaccines have been complex. We analyzed COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets to understand the evolving perceptions of COVID-19 vaccines. We finetuned a deep learning classifier using a state-of-the-art model, XLNet, to detect each tweet's sentiment automatically. We employed validated methods to extract the users' race or ethnicity, gender, age, and geographical locations from user profiles. Incorporating multiple data sources, we assessed the sentiment patterns among subpopulations and juxtaposed them against vaccine uptake data to unravel their interactive patterns. 11,211,672 COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets corresponding to 2,203,681 users over two years were analyzed. The finetuned model for sentiment classification yielded an accuracy of 0.92 on testing set. Users from various demographic groups demonstrated distinct patterns in sentiments towards COVID-19 vaccines. User sentiments became more positive over time, upon which we observed subsequent upswing in the population-level vaccine uptake. Surrounding dates where positive sentiments crest, we detected encouraging news or events regarding vaccine development and distribution. Positive sentiments in pregnancy-related tweets demonstrated a delayed pattern compared with trends in general population, with postponed vaccine uptake trends. Distinctive patterns across subpopulations suggest the need of tailored strategies. Global news and events profoundly involved in shaping users' thoughts on social media. Populations with additional concerns, such as pregnancy, demonstrated more substantial hesitancy since lack of timely recommendations. Feature analysis revealed hesitancies of various subpopulations stemmed from clinical trial logics, risks and complications, and urgency of scientific evidence.

Multiple kernel clustering (MKC) is committed to achieving optimal information fusion from a set of base kernels. Constructing precise and local kernel matrices is proved to be of vital significance in applications since the unreliable distant-distance similarity estimation would degrade clustering per-formance. Although existing localized MKC algorithms exhibit improved performance compared to globally-designed competi-tors, most of them widely adopt KNN mechanism to localize kernel matrix by accounting for {\tau} -nearest neighbors. However, such a coarse manner follows an unreasonable strategy that the ranking importance of different neighbors is equal, which is impractical in applications. To alleviate such problems, this paper proposes a novel local sample-weighted multiple kernel clustering (LSWMKC) model. We first construct a consensus discriminative affinity graph in kernel space, revealing the latent local structures. Further, an optimal neighborhood kernel for the learned affinity graph is output with naturally sparse property and clear block diagonal structure. Moreover, LSWMKC im-plicitly optimizes adaptive weights on different neighbors with corresponding samples. Experimental results demonstrate that our LSWMKC possesses better local manifold representation and outperforms existing kernel or graph-based clustering algo-rithms. The source code of LSWMKC can be publicly accessed from https://github.com/liliangnudt/LSWMKC.

This paper explores Deep Learning (DL) methods that are used or have the potential to be used for traffic video analysis, emphasizing driving safety for both Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and human-operated vehicles. We present a typical processing pipeline, which can be used to understand and interpret traffic videos by extracting operational safety metrics and providing general hints and guidelines to improve traffic safety. This processing framework includes several steps, including video enhancement, video stabilization, semantic and incident segmentation, object detection and classification, trajectory extraction, speed estimation, event analysis, modeling and anomaly detection. Our main goal is to guide traffic analysts to develop their own custom-built processing frameworks by selecting the best choices for each step and offering new designs for the lacking modules by providing a comparative analysis of the most successful conventional and DL-based algorithms proposed for each step. We also review existing open-source tools and public datasets that can help train DL models. To be more specific, we review exemplary traffic problems and mentioned requires steps for each problem. Besides, we investigate connections to the closely related research areas of drivers' cognition evaluation, Crowd-sourcing-based monitoring systems, Edge Computing in roadside infrastructures, Automated Driving Systems (ADS)-equipped vehicles, and highlight the missing gaps. Finally, we review commercial implementations of traffic monitoring systems, their future outlook, and open problems and remaining challenges for widespread use of such systems.

The oceans are a source of an impressive mixture of complex data that could be used to uncover relationships yet to be discovered. Such data comes from the oceans and their surface, such as Automatic Identification System (AIS) messages used for tracking vessels' trajectories. AIS messages are transmitted over radio or satellite at ideally periodic time intervals but vary irregularly over time. As such, this paper aims to model the AIS message transmission behavior through neural networks for forecasting upcoming AIS messages' content from multiple vessels, particularly in a simultaneous approach despite messages' temporal irregularities as outliers. We present a set of experiments comprising multiple algorithms for forecasting tasks with horizon sizes of varying lengths. Deep learning models (e.g., neural networks) revealed themselves to adequately preserve vessels' spatial awareness regardless of temporal irregularity. We show how convolutional layers, feed-forward networks, and recurrent neural networks can improve such tasks by working together. Experimenting with short, medium, and large-sized sequences of messages, our model achieved 36/37/38% of the Relative Percentage Difference - the lower, the better, whereas we observed 92/45/96% on the Elman's RNN, 51/52/40% on the GRU, and 129/98/61% on the LSTM. These results support our model as a driver for improving the prediction of vessel routes when analyzing multiple vessels of diverging types simultaneously under temporally noise data.