South America
Facebook is researching AI systems that see, hear, and remember everything you do
Facebook is pouring a lot of time and money into augmented reality, including building its own AR glasses with Ray-Ban. Right now, these gadgets can only record and share imagery, but what does the company think such devices will be used for in the future? A new research project led by Facebook's AI team suggests the scope of the company's ambitions. It imagines AI systems that are constantly analyzing peoples' lives using first-person video; recording what they see, do, and hear in order to help them with everyday tasks. Facebook's researchers have outlined a series of skills it wants these systems to develop, including "episodic memory" (answering questions like "where did I leave my keys?") and "audio-visual diarization" (remembering who said what when).
How AI is helping the natural sciences
The impact of climate change on Brazil's Atlantic coastline is a research focus at the University of São Paulo's machine-intelligence centre.Credit: Antonello Veneri/AFP via Getty Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly becoming a tool for researchers in other science and technology fields, forging collaborations across disciplines. Stanford University in California, which produces an index that tracks AI-related data, finds in its 2021 report that the number of AI journal publications grew by 34.5% from 2019 to 2020; up from 19.6% between 2018 and 2019 (see go.nature.com/3mdt2yq). AI publications represented 3.8% of all peer-reviewed scientific publications worldwide in 2019, up from 1.3% in 2011. Five AI researchers describe the fruits of these collaborations, beyond journal publications, and talk about how they are helping to break down barriers between disciplines. At the University of São Paulo in Brazil, where I lead the Center for Artificial Intelligence (C4AI), our main goal is to produce machine-intelligence research that has a direct impact on society and industry.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Enabled Drug Discovery and Clinical Trials Market Anticipated to Grow Globally at a CAGR of 23.6% during 2021-26
Dublin, Oct. 11, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Global Artificial Intelligence (AI) Enabled Drug Discovery and Clinical Trials Market Research Report: Forecast (2021-2026)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The "Global Artificial Intelligence (AI) Enabled Drug Discovery and Clinical Trials Market" is likely to grow at a CAGR of around 23.6% during the forecast period, i.e., 2021-26, says the author. The market growth primarily attributes to the rising demand for reducing the cost of novel drug discovery and their production. Additionally, the adoption of artificial intelligence is significantly increasing, as faster, efficient, and cost-effective drug discovery is gaining momentum amongst the pharmaceutical industry stakeholders. The research report, states that the burgeoning volume of data generated by the molecule screening processes & preclinical studies is another crucial factor fueling the adoption of artificial intelligence, thereby propelling market growth.
NLP Methods for Extraction of Symptoms from Unstructured Data for Use in Prognostic COVID-19 Analytic Models
Silverman, Greg M. | Sahoo, Himanshu S. (NLP/IE Program, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota) | Ingraham, Nicholas E. (Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine, University of Minnesota) | Lupei, Monica (Division of Critical Care, Department of Anesthesiology, University of Minnesota) | Puskarich, Michael A. (Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Minnesota) | Usher, Michael (Department of Medicine, University of Minnesota) | Dries, James (University of Minnesota) | Finzel, Raymond L. (NLP/IE Program, College of Pharmacy, University of Minnesota) | Murray, Eric (Information Technology, M Health Fairview) | Sartori, John (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota) | Simon, Gyorgy (Institute for Health Informatics, University of Minnesota ) | Zhang, Rui | Melton, Genevieve B. (NLP/IE Program, Department of Surgery, and Institute for Health Informatics, University of Minnesota, Fairview Health Services, Information Technology) | Tignanelli, Christopher J. (NLP/IE Program, Department of Surgery, University of Minnesota ) | Pakhomov, Serguei VS (NLP/IE Program, College of Pharmacy, University of Minnesota )
Statistical modeling of outcomes based on a patient's presenting symptoms (symptomatology) can help deliver high quality care and allocate essential resources, which is especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic. Patient symptoms are typically found in unstructured notes, and thus not readily available for clinical decision making. In an attempt to fill this gap, this study compared two methods for symptom extraction from Emergency Department (ED) admission notes. Both methods utilized a lexicon derived by expanding The Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Symptoms of Coronavirus list. The first method utilized a word2vec model to expand the lexicon using a dictionary mapping to the Uni ed Medical Language System (UMLS). The second method utilized the expanded lexicon as a rule-based gazetteer and the UMLS. These methods were evaluated against a manually annotated reference (f1-score of 0.87 for UMLS-based ensemble; and 0.85 for rule-based gazetteer with UMLS). Through analyses of associations of extracted symptoms used as features against various outcomes, salient risks among the population of COVID-19 patients, including increased risk of in-hospital mortality (OR 1.85, p-value < 0.001), were identified for patients presenting with dyspnea. Disparities between English and non-English speaking patients were also identified, the most salient being a concerning finding of opposing risk signals between fatigue and in-hospital mortality (non-English: OR 1.95, p-value = 0.02; English: OR 0.63, p-value = 0.01). While use of symptomatology for modeling of outcomes is not unique, unlike previous studies this study showed that models built using symptoms with the outcome of in-hospital mortality were not significantly different from models using data collected during an in-patient encounter (AUC of 0.9 with 95% CI of [0.88, 0.91] using only vital signs; AUC of 0.87 with 95% CI of [0.85, 0.88] using only symptoms). These findings indicate that prognostic models based on symptomatology could aid in extending COVID-19 patient care through telemedicine, replacing the need for in-person options. The methods presented in this study have potential for use in development of symptomatology-based models for other diseases, including for the study of Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC).
The Neural Data Router: Adaptive Control Flow in Transformers Improves Systematic Generalization
Csordás, Róbert, Irie, Kazuki, Schmidhuber, Jürgen
Despite successes across a broad range of applications, Transformers have limited success in systematic generalization. The situation is especially frustrating in the case of algorithmic tasks, where they often fail to find intuitive solutions that route relevant information to the right node/operation at the right time in the grid represented by Transformer columns. To facilitate the learning of useful control flow, we propose two modifications to the Transformer architecture, copy gate and geometric attention. Our novel Neural Data Router (NDR) achieves 100% length generalization accuracy on the classic compositional table lookup task, as well as near-perfect accuracy on the simple arithmetic task and a new variant of ListOps testing for generalization across computational depth. NDR's attention and gating patterns tend to be interpretable as an intuitive form of neural routing. Our code is public.
LAGr: Labeling Aligned Graphs for Improving Systematic Generalization in Semantic Parsing
Jambor, Dora, Bahdanau, Dzmitry
Semantic parsing is the task of producing a structured meaning representation for natural language utterances or questions. Recent research has pointed out that the commonly-used sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) semantic parsers struggle to generalize systematically, i.e. to handle examples that require recombining known knowledge in novel settings. In this work, we show that better systematic generalization can be achieved by producing the meaning representation (MR) directly as a graph and not as a sequence. To this end we propose LAGr, the Labeling Aligned Graphs algorithm that produces semantic parses by predicting node and edge labels for a complete multi-layer input-aligned graph. The strongly-supervised LAGr algorithm requires aligned graphs as inputs, whereas weakly-supervised LAGr infers alignments for originally unaligned target graphs using an approximate MAP inference procedure. On the COGS and CFQ compositional generalization benchmarks the strongly- and weakly- supervised LAGr algorithms achieve significant improvements upon the baseline seq2seq parsers.
ConditionalQA: A Complex Reading Comprehension Dataset with Conditional Answers
Sun, Haitian, Cohen, William W., Salakhutdinov, Ruslan
We describe a Question Answering (QA) dataset that contains complex questions with conditional answers, i.e. the answers are only applicable when certain conditions apply. We call this dataset ConditionalQA. In addition to conditional answers, the dataset also features: (1) long context documents with information that is related in logically complex ways; (2) multi-hop questions that require compositional logical reasoning; (3) a combination of extractive questions, yes/no questions, questions with multiple answers, and not-answerable questions; (4) questions asked without knowing the answers. We show that ConditionalQA is challenging for many of the existing QA models, especially in selecting answer conditions. We believe that this dataset will motivate further research in answering complex questions over long documents. Data and leaderboard are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/haitian-sun/ConditionalQA}.
Expert-driven Trace Clustering with Instance-level Constraints
De Koninck, Pieter, Nelissen, Klaas, Broucke, Seppe vanden, Baesens, Bart, Snoeck, Monique, De Weerdt, Jochen
Within the field of process mining, several different trace clustering approaches exist for partitioning traces or process instances into similar groups. Typically, this partitioning is based on certain patterns or similarity between the traces, or driven by the discovery of a process model for each cluster. The main drawback of these techniques, however, is that their solutions are usually hard to evaluate or justify by domain experts. In this paper, we present two constrained trace clustering techniques that are capable to leverage expert knowledge in the form of instance-level constraints. In an extensive experimental evaluation using two real-life datasets, we show that our novel techniques are indeed capable of producing clustering solutions that are more justifiable without a substantial negative impact on their quality.
Unsupervised Object Learning via Common Fate
Tangemann, Matthias, Schneider, Steffen, von Kügelgen, Julius, Locatello, Francesco, Gehler, Peter, Brox, Thomas, Kümmerer, Matthias, Bethge, Matthias, Schölkopf, Bernhard
In human vision, the Principle of Common Fate of Gestalt Psychology (Wertheimer, 2012) has been shown to play an important role for object learning (Spelke, 1990). It posits that elements that are moving together tend to be perceived as one--a perceptual bias that may have evolved to be able to recognize camouflaged predators (Troscianko et al., 2009). In our work, we show that this principle can be successfully used also for machine vision by using it in a multi-stage object learning approach (Figure 1): First, we use unsupervised motion segmentation to obtain a candidate segmentation of a video frame. Second, we train generative object and background models on this segmentation. While the regions obtained by the motion segmentation are caused by objects moving in 3D, only visible parts can be segmented. To learn the actual objects (i.e., the causes), a crucial task for the object model is learning to generalize beyond the occlusions present in its input data. To measure success, we provide a dataset including object ground truth. As the last stage, we show that the learned object and background models can be combined into a flexible scene model that allows sampling manipulated novel scenes. Thus, in contrast to existing object-centric models trained end-to-end, our work aims at decomposing object learning into evaluable subproblems and testing the potential of exploiting object motions for building scalable object-centric models that allow for causally meaningful interventions in generation.
E-Commerce Dispute Resolution Prediction
Tsurel, David, Doron, Michael, Nus, Alexander, Dagan, Arnon, Guy, Ido, Shahaf, Dafna
E-Commerce marketplaces support millions of daily transactions, and some disagreements between buyers and sellers are unavoidable. Resolving disputes in an accurate, fast, and fair manner is of great importance for maintaining a trustworthy platform. Simple cases can be automated, but intricate cases are not sufficiently addressed by hard-coded rules, and therefore most disputes are currently resolved by people. In this work we take a first step towards automatically assisting human agents in dispute resolution at scale. We construct a large dataset of disputes from the eBay online marketplace, and identify several interesting behavioral and linguistic patterns. We then train classifiers to predict dispute outcomes with high accuracy. We explore the model and the dataset, reporting interesting correlations, important features, and insights.