We present an accurate, fast and efficient method for segmentation and muscle mask propagation in 3D freehand ultrasound data, towards accurate volume quantification. To this end, we propose a deep Siamese 3D Encoder-Decoder network that captures the evolution of the muscle appearance and shape for contiguous slices and uses it to propagate a reference mask annotated by a clinical expert. To handle longer changes of the muscle shape over the entire volume and to provide an accurate propagation, we devised a Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory module. To train our model with a minimal amount of training samples, we propose a strategy to combine learning from few annotated 2D ultrasound slices with sequential pseudo-labeling of the unannotated slices. To promote few-shot learning, we propose a decremental update of the objective function to guide the model convergence in the absence of large amounts of annotated data. Finally, to handle the class-imbalance between foreground and background muscle pixels, we propose a parametric Tversky loss function that learns to adaptively penalize false positives and false negatives. We validate our approach for the segmentation, label propagation, and volume computation of the three low-limb muscles on a dataset of 44 subjects. We achieve a dice score coefficient of over $95~\%$ and a small fraction of error with $1.6035~\pm~0.587$.

Greyparrot, a start-up which uses computer vision for waste management, has been voted the winner of the Innovation Factory Grand Finale held as part of the year-round AI for Good Summit 2020. The Innovation Factory is AI for Good's platform to showcase startups which use artificial intelligence to tackle global challenges, providing them with feedback, mentorship and potential partnerships in social impact entrepreneurship. Greyparrot and three other start-ups received the highest scores for their innovative, scalable AI solutions for waste management, air quality, child malnutrition and agriculture. Meet the expert jury During the live Innovation Factory Grand Finale, these four startups recognized as Innovation Champions presented their solutions to a jury of experts and a public audience who then voted for a winner. Greyparrot seeks to resolve the waste crisis by using AI-based computer vision to provide actionable insights for the 530 billion-dollar global waste management industry.

Two-sided mobility platforms, such as Uber and Lyft, widely emerged in the urban mobility landscape, bringing disruptive changes to transportation systems worldwide. This calls for a simulation framework where researchers from various and across disciplines may introduce models aimed at representing the dynamics of platform-driven urban mobility systems. In this work, we present MaaSSim, an agent-based simulator reproducing the transport system used by two kind of agents: (i) travellers, requesting to travel from their origin to destination at a given time, and (ii) drivers supplying their travel needs by offering them rides. An intermediate agent, the platform, allows demand to be matched with supply. Agents are decision makers, specifically, travellers may decide which mode they use or reject an incoming offer. Similarly, drivers may opt-out from the system or reject incoming requests. All of the above behaviours are modelled through user-defined modules, representing agents' taste variations (heterogeneity), their previous experiences (learning) and available information (system control). MaaSSim is an open-source library available at a public repository github.com/RafalKucharskiPK/MaaSSim, along with a set of tutorials and reproducible use-case scenarios.

Qualitative numerical planning is classical planning extended with non-negative real variables that can be increased or decreased "qualitatively", i.e., by positive indeterminate amounts. While deterministic planning with numerical variables is undecidable in general, qualitative numerical planning is decidable and provides a convenient abstract model for generalized planning. The solutions to qualitative numerical problems (QNPs) were shown to correspond to the strong cyclic solutions of an associated fully observable non-deterministic (FOND) problem that terminate. This leads to a generate-and-test algorithm for solving QNPs where solutions to a FOND problem are generated one by one and tested for termination. The computational shortcomings of this approach for solving QNPs, however, are that it is not simple to amend FOND planners to generate all solutions, and that the number of solutions to check can be doubly exponential in the number of variables. In this work we address these limitations while providing additional insights on QNPs. More precisely, we introduce two polynomial-time reductions, one from QNPs to FOND problems and the other from FOND problems to QNPs both of which do not involve termination tests. A result of these reductions is that QNPs are shown to have the same expressive power and the same complexity as FOND problems.

The emergence of COVID-19 has necessitated many efforts by the scientific community for its proper management. An urgent clinical reaction is required in the face of the unending devastation being caused by the pandemic. These efforts include technological innovations for improvement in screening, treatment, vaccine development, contact tracing and, survival prediction. The use of Deep Learning (DL) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be sought in all of the above-mentioned spheres. This paper aims to review the role of Deep Learning and Artificial intelligence in various aspects of the overall COVID-19 management and particularly for COVID-19 detection and classification. The DL models are developed to analyze clinical modalities like CT scans and X-Ray images of patients and predict their pathological condition. A DL model aims to detect the COVID-19 pneumonia, classify and distinguish between COVID-19, Community-Acquired Pneumonia (CAP), Viral and Bacterial pneumonia, and normal conditions. Furthermore, sophisticated models can be built to segment the affected area in the lungs and quantify the infection volume for a better understanding of the extent of damage. Many models have been developed either independently or with the help of pre-trained models like VGG19, ResNet50, and AlexNet leveraging the concept of transfer learning. Apart from model development, data preprocessing and augmentation are also performed to cope with the challenge of insufficient data samples often encountered in medical applications. It can be evaluated that DL and AI can be effectively implemented to withstand the challenges posed by the global emergency

In this paper, a deep learning (DL) framework for the optimization of the resource allocation in multi-channel cellular systems with device-to-device (D2D) communication is proposed. Thereby, the channel assignment and discrete transmit power levels of the D2D users, which are both integer variables, are optimized to maximize the overall spectral efficiency whilst maintaining the quality-of-service (QoS) of the cellular users. Depending on the availability of channel state information (CSI), two different configurations are considered, namely 1) centralized operation with full CSI and 2) distributed operation with partial CSI, where in the latter case, the CSI is encoded according to the capacity of the feedback channel. Instead of solving the resulting resource allocation problem for each channel realization, a DL framework is proposed, where the optimal resource allocation strategy for arbitrary channel conditions is approximated by deep neural network (DNN) models. Furthermore, we propose a new training strategy that combines supervised and unsupervised learning methods and a local CSI sharing strategy to achieve near-optimal performance while enforcing the QoS constraints of the cellular users and efficiently handling the integer optimization variables based on a few ground-truth labels. Our simulation results confirm that near-optimal performance can be attained with low computation time, which underlines the real-time capability of the proposed scheme. Moreover, our results show that not only the resource allocation strategy but also the CSI encoding strategy can be efficiently determined using a DNN. Furthermore, we show that the proposed DL framework can be easily extended to communications systems with different design objectives.

Imagery is frequently used to model, represent and communicate knowledge. In particular, graphs are one of the most powerful tools, being able to represent relations between objects. Causal relations are frequently represented by directed graphs, with nodes denoting causes and links denoting causal influence. A causal graph is a skeletal picture, showing causal associations and impact between entities. Common methods used for graphically representing causal scenarios are neurons, truth tables, causal Bayesian networks, cognitive maps and Petri Nets. Causality is often defined in terms of precedence (the cause precedes the effect), concurrency (often, an effect is provoked simultaneously by two or more causes), circularity (a cause provokes the effect and the effect reinforces the cause) and imprecision (the presence of the cause favors the effect, but not necessarily causes it). We will show that, even though the traditional graphical models are able to represent separately some of the properties aforementioned, they fail trying to illustrate indistinctly all of them. To approach that gap, we will introduce Fuzzy Stochastic Timed Petri Nets as a graphical tool able to represent time, co-occurrence, looping and imprecision in causal flow.

Distinguishing COVID-19 from other flu-like illnesses can be difficult due to ambiguous symptoms and still an initial experience of doctors. Whereas, it is crucial to filter out those sick patients who do not need to be tested for SARS-CoV-2 infection, especially in the event of the overwhelming increase in disease. As a part of the presented research, logistic regression and XGBoost classifiers, that allow for effective screening of patients for COVID-19, were generated. Each of the methods was tuned to achieve an assumed acceptable threshold of negative predictive values during classification. Additionally, an explanation of the obtained classification models was presented. The explanation enables the users to understand what was the basis of the decision made by the model. The obtained classification models provided the basis for the DECODE service (decode.polsl.pl), which can serve as support in screening patients with COVID-19 disease. Moreover, the data set constituting the basis for the analyses performed is made available to the research community. This data set consisting of more than 3,000 examples is based on questionnaires collected at a hospital in Poland.

High-dimensional representations for words, text, images, knowledge graphs and other structured data are commonly used in different paradigms of machine learning and data mining. These representations have different degrees of interpretability, with efficient distributed representations coming at the cost of the loss of feature to dimension mapping. This implies that there is obfuscation in the way concepts are captured in these embedding spaces. Its effects are seen in many representations and tasks, one particularly problematic one being in language representations where the societal biases, learned from underlying data, are captured and occluded in unknown dimensions and subspaces. As a result, invalid associations (such as different races and their association with a polar notion of good versus bad) are made and propagated by the representations, leading to unfair outcomes in different tasks where they are used. This work addresses some of these problems pertaining to the transparency and interpretability of such representations. A primary focus is the detection, quantification, and mitigation of socially biased associations in language representation.

Corruption grows when accountability is low -- it is hard to imagine a politician abusing their power for personal gain if they knew for certain that they would get caught and punished. This is why improving accountability is a wining strategy for fighting corruption, and Artificial Intelligence technology can help us do that. Whether we realize it or not, AI technologies that spot wrongdoing are already all around us. Credit card companies, for example, have been using it for years -- if your card is used in strange countries, to buy strange products, in a price range that is strange to your normal behavior, the company's AI models are likely to flag it as suspicious. And it does so incredibly fast for millions and millions of transactions everyday.