The Vicor Corporation Powering Innovation podcast focuses on world-changing innovations, examining how electronics technologies can be applied to solve real-world challenges. The first episode in the series features DPI UAV Systems (DPI), a manufacturer of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems. This episode takes a deep dive into an Unmanned Multirotor Aerial Relay system and how DPI is extending communications range 3x with a new class of tethered UAVs. Joe Pawelczyk, Vice President of Operations at DPI, joins Robert Gendron, Vicor's Corporate Vice President, Product Development, to discuss the cutting-edge technology driving change that addresses real-world problems. The episode examines the communication networks needed for high-security communications, such as in military applications, and how DPI's technology is far exceeding today's standards.

Through ML we can address SE problems that cannot be completely algorithmically modeled, or for which existing solutions do not provide satisfactory results yet (e.g., defect/fault detection [16, 165, 180]). In addition, ML finds application in SE tasks where data cannot be easily analyzed with other algorithms (e.g., software requirements, code comments, code reviews, issues [9, 91, 174]). Another important aspect of ML is that it can significantly reduce manual effort in common SE tasks (e.g., automatic program repair [157], code suggestion [61], defect prediction [19], malware detection [147], feature location [40]) with great accuracy results [146, 164]. In fields such as health informatics ML and SE are considered complementary disciplines, since the growing scale and complexity of healthcare datasets have posed a challenge for clinical practice and medical research, requiring new engineering approaches from both fields [38]. In the early nineties, Huff and Selfridge [68] recognized the need for creating software systems that partially take some responsibility for their own evolution, offering the ability to implement, measure, and assess changes easily. These changes should also contribute to the overall improvement of the corresponding systems [142].

Standard evolutionary optimization algorithms assume that the evaluation of the objective and constraint functions is straightforward and computationally cheap. However, in many real-world optimization problems, these evaluations involve computationally expensive numerical simulations or physical experiments. Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) have recently gained increased attention for their performance in solving these types of problems. The main idea of SAEAs is the integration of an evolutionary algorithm with a selected surrogate model that approximates the computationally expensive function. In this paper, we propose a surrogate model based on a Lipschitz underestimation and use it to develop a differential evolution-based algorithm. The algorithm, called Lipschitz Surrogate-assisted Differential Evolution (LSADE), utilizes the Lipschitz-based surrogate model, along with a standard radial basis function surrogate model and a local search procedure. The experimental results on seven benchmark functions of dimensions 30, 50, 100, and 200 show that the proposed LSADE algorithm is competitive compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms under a limited computational budget, being especially effective for the very complicated benchmark functions in high dimensions.

Speech is the fundamental means of communication between humans. The advent of AI and sophisticated speech technologies have led to the rapid proliferation of human-to-computer-based interactions, fueled primarily by Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. ASR systems normally take human speech in the form of audio and convert it into words, but for some users, it cannot decode the speech, and any output text is filled with errors that are incomprehensible to the human reader. These systems do not work equally for everyone and actually hinder the productivity of some users. In this paper, we present research that addresses ASR biases against gender, race, and the sick and disabled, while exploring studies that propose ASR debiasing techniques for mitigating these discriminations. We also discuss techniques for designing a more accessible and inclusive ASR technology. For each approach surveyed, we also provide a summary of the investigation and methods applied, the ASR systems and corpora used, and the research findings, and highlight their strengths and/or weaknesses. Finally, we propose future opportunities for Natural Language Processing researchers to explore in the next level creation of ASR technologies.

We introduce Cohort Comfort Models, a new framework for predicting how new occupants would perceive their thermal environment. Cohort Comfort Models leverage historical data collected from a sample population, who have some underlying preference similarity, to predict thermal preference responses of new occupants. Our framework is capable of exploiting available background information such as physical characteristics and one-time on-boarding surveys (satisfaction with life scale, highly sensitive person scale, the Big Five personality traits) from the new occupant as well as physiological and environmental sensor measurements paired with thermal preference responses. We implemented our framework in two publicly available datasets containing longitudinal data from 55 people, comprising more than 6,000 individual thermal comfort surveys. We observed that, a Cohort Comfort Model that uses background information provided very little change in thermal preference prediction performance but uses none historical data. On the other hand, for half and one third of each dataset occupant population, using Cohort Comfort Models, with less historical data from target occupants, Cohort Comfort Models increased their thermal preference prediction by 8~\% and 5~\% on average, and up to 36~\% and 46~\% for some occupants, when compared to general-purpose models trained on the whole population of occupants. The framework is presented in a data and site agnostic manner, with its different components easily tailored to the data availability of the occupants and the buildings. Cohort Comfort Models can be an important step towards personalization without the need of developing a personalized model for each new occupant.

Thanks to the advantages of flexible deployment and high mobility, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely applied in the areas of disaster management, agricultural plant protection, environment monitoring and so on. With the development of UAV and sensor technologies, UAV assisted data collection for Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted increasing attentions. In this article, the scenarios and key technologies of UAV assisted data collection are comprehensively reviewed. First, we present the system model including the network model and mathematical model of UAV assisted data collection for IoT. Then, we review the key technologies including clustering of sensors, UAV data collection mode as well as joint path planning and resource allocation. Finally, the open problems are discussed from the perspectives of efficient multiple access as well as joint sensing and data collection. This article hopefully provides some guidelines and insights for researchers in the area of UAV assisted data collection for IoT.

Recent hype surrounding the increasing sophistication of language processing models has renewed optimism regarding machines achieving a human-like command of natural language. Research in the area of natural language understanding (NLU) in artificial intelligence claims to have been making great strides in this area, however, the lack of conceptual clarity/consistency in how 'understanding' is used in this and other disciplines makes it difficult to discern how close we actually are. In this interdisciplinary research thesis, I integrate insights from cognitive science/psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive linguistics, and evaluate it against a critical review of current approaches in NLU to explore the basic requirements--and remaining challenges--for developing artificially intelligent systems with human-like capacities for language use and comprehension.

Cancer claims millions of lives yearly worldwide. While many therapies have been made available in recent years, by in large cancer remains unsolved. Exploiting computational predictive models to study and treat cancer holds great promise in improving drug development and personalized design of treatment plans, ultimately suppressing tumors, alleviating suffering, and prolonging lives of patients. A wave of recent papers demonstrates promising results in predicting cancer response to drug treatments while utilizing deep learning methods. These papers investigate diverse data representations, neural network architectures, learning methodologies, and evaluations schemes. However, deciphering promising predominant and emerging trends is difficult due to the variety of explored methods and lack of standardized framework for comparing drug response prediction models. To obtain a comprehensive landscape of deep learning methods, we conducted an extensive search and analysis of deep learning models that predict the response to single drug treatments. A total of 60 deep learning-based models have been curated and summary plots were generated. Based on the analysis, observable patterns and prevalence of methods have been revealed. This review allows to better understand the current state of the field and identify major challenges and promising solution paths.

In their paper The Lifecycle of "Facts": A Survey of Social Bias in Knowledge Graphs, Angelie Kraft and Ricardo Usbeck conducted a critical analysis of literature concerning biases at different steps of a knowledge graph lifecycle. Here, Angelie tells us more about knowledge graphs, how social biases become embedded in them, and what researchers can do to mitigate this. We wanted to understand where and how social biases enter knowledge graphs and how they take effect. To achieve this, we conducted a literature survey that considered a knowledge graph's full lifecycle, from creation to application. Knowledge graphs can be used to represent factual information in a structured way.

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to transform data analysis in many domains. Progress in each domain is driven by a growing body of annotated data, increased computational resources, and technological innovations. In medicine, the sensitivity of the data, the complexity of the tasks, the potentially high stakes, and a requirement of accountability give rise to a particular set of challenges. In this review, we focus on three key methodological approaches that address some of the particular challenges in AI-driven medical decision making. (1) Explainable AI aims to produce a human-interpretable justification for each output. Such models increase confidence if the results appear plausible and match the clinicians expectations. However, the absence of a plausible explanation does not imply an inaccurate model. Especially in highly non-linear, complex models that are tuned to maximize accuracy, such interpretable representations only reflect a small portion of the justification. (2) Domain adaptation and transfer learning enable AI models to be trained and applied across multiple domains. For example, a classification task based on images acquired on different acquisition hardware. (3) Federated learning enables learning large-scale models without exposing sensitive personal health information. Unlike centralized AI learning, where the centralized learning machine has access to the entire training data, the federated learning process iteratively updates models across multiple sites by exchanging only parameter updates, not personal health data. This narrative review covers the basic concepts, highlights relevant corner-stone and state-of-the-art research in the field, and discusses perspectives.