In this series of blogs, I will try to investigate various types of dialogue systems or more commonly knows as chatbots that exist and what are some of the design techniques and algorithms used to develop these systems. Since their inception in the 1960s dialogue systems have gained increasing attention due to their ability to streamline conversations between humans and machines. User experience and involvement have become an important factor for the growth of businesses across the globe and dialogue systems are a perfect way to engage a user to enhance their overall experience. Taking this into account this blog will cover the various chatbot architectures ranging from rule-based to generation-based. I will further investigate the social responsiveness of these dialogue systems and how we can achieve the architecture for the implementation of these chatbots in the next blog.

Objective: Temporal electronic health records (EHRs) can be a wealth of information for secondary uses, such as clinical events prediction or chronic disease management. However, challenges exist for temporal data representation. We therefore sought to identify these challenges and evaluate novel methodologies for addressing them through a systematic examination of deep learning solutions. Methods: We searched five databases (PubMed, EMBASE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers [IEEE] Xplore Digital Library, the Association for Computing Machinery [ACM] digital library, and Web of Science) complemented with hand-searching in several prestigious computer science conference proceedings. We sought articles that reported deep learning methodologies on temporal data representation in structured EHR data from January 1, 2010, to August 30, 2020. We summarized and analyzed the selected articles from three perspectives: nature of time series, methodology, and model implementation. Results: We included 98 articles related to temporal data representation using deep learning. Four major challenges were identified, including data irregularity, data heterogeneity, data sparsity, and model opacity. We then studied how deep learning techniques were applied to address these challenges. Finally, we discuss some open challenges arising from deep learning. Conclusion: Temporal EHR data present several major challenges for clinical prediction modeling and data utilization. To some extent, current deep learning solutions can address these challenges. Future studies can consider designing comprehensive and integrated solutions. Moreover, researchers should incorporate additional clinical domain knowledge into study designs and enhance the interpretability of the model to facilitate its implementation in clinical practice.

We present a short survey of ways in which existing scientific knowledge are included when constructing models with neural networks. The inclusion of domain-knowledge is of special interest not just to constructing scientific assistants, but also, many other areas that involve understanding data using human-machine collaboration. In many such instances, machine-based model construction may benefit significantly from being provided with human-knowledge of the domain encoded in a sufficiently precise form. This paper examines the inclusion of domain-knowledge by means of changes to: the input, the loss-function, and the architecture of deep networks. The categorisation is for ease of exposition: in practice we expect a combination of such changes will be employed. In each category, we describe techniques that have been shown to yield significant changes in network performance.

In the past decade, a lot of progress has been made in the design and evaluation of logic locking; a premier technique to safeguard the integrity of integrated circuits throughout the electronics supply chain. However, the widespread proliferation of machine learning has recently introduced a new pathway to evaluating logic locking schemes. This paper summarizes the recent developments in logic locking attacks and countermeasures at the frontiers of contemporary machine learning models. Based on the presented work, the key takeaways, opportunities, and challenges are highlighted to offer recommendations for the design of next-generation logic locking.

What is the best simulation tool for robotics? This is a hard question to answer because many people (or their companies) specialize in one tool or another. Some simulators are better at one aspect of robotics than at others. When I'm asked to recommend the best simulation tool for robotics I have to find an expert and hope that they are current and across a wide range of simulation tools in order to give me the best advice, which was why I took particular note of the recent review paper from Australia's CSIRO, "A Review of Physics Simulators for Robotics Applications" by Jack Collins, Shelvin Chand, Anthony Vanderkop, and David Howard, published in IEEE Access (Volume: 9). "We have compiled a broad review of physics simulators for use within the major fields of robotics research. More specifically, we navigate through key sub-domains and discuss the features, benefits, applications and use-cases of the different simulators categorised by the respective research communities. Our review provides an extensive index of the leading physics simulators applicable to robotics researchers and aims to assist them in choosing the best simulator for their use case."

Machine learning is a branch of computer science that has the potential to transform epidemiologic sciences. Amid a growing focus on "Big Data," it offers epidemiologists new tools to tackle problems for which classical methods are not well-suited. In order to critically evaluate the value of integrating machine learning algorithms and existing methods, however, it is essential to address language and technical barriers between the two fields that can make it difficult for epidemiologists to read and assess machine learning studies. Here, we provide an overview of the concepts and terminology used in machine learning literature, which encompasses a diverse set of tools with goals ranging from prediction to classification to clustering. We provide a brief introduction to 5 common machine learning algorithms and 4 ensemble-based approaches. We then summarize epidemiologic applications of machine learning techniques in the published literature. We recommend approaches to incorporate machine learning in epidemiologic research and discuss opportunities and challenges for integrating machine learning and existing epidemiologic research methods. Machine learning is a branch of computer science that broadly aims to enable computers to "learn" without being directly programmed (1). It has origins in the artificial intelligence movement of the 1950s and emphasizes practical objectives and applications, particularly prediction and optimization. Computers "learn" in machine learning by improving their performance at tasks through "experience" (2, p. xv). In practice, "experience" usually means fitting to data; hence, there is not a clear boundary between machine learning and statistical approaches. Indeed, whether a given methodology is considered "machine learning" or "statistical" often reflects its history as much as genuine differences, and many algorithms (e.g., least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), stepwise regression) may or may not be considered machine learning depending on who you ask. Still, despite methodological similarities, machine learning is philosophically and practically distinguishable. At the liberty of (considerable) oversimplification, machine learning generally emphasizes predictive accuracy over hypothesis-driven inference, usually focusing on large, high-dimensional (i.e., having many covariates) data sets (3, 4). Regardless of the precise distinction between approaches, in practice, machine learning offers epidemiologists important tools. In particular, a growing focus on "Big Data" emphasizes problems and data sets for which machine learning algorithms excel while more commonly used statistical approaches struggle. This primer provides a basic introduction to machine learning with the aim of providing readers a foundation for critically reading studies based on these methods and a jumping-off point for those interested in using machine learning techniques in epidemiologic research.

Data-driven analysis and detection of abusive online content covers many different tasks, phenomena, contexts, and methodologies. This paper systematically reviews abusive language dataset creation and content in conjunction with an open website for cataloguing abusive language data. This collection of knowledge leads to a synthesis providing evidence-based recommendations for practitioners working with this complex and highly diverse data.

With the advancements in computer technology, there is a rapid development of intelligent systems to understand the complex relationships in data to make predictions and classifications. Artificail Intelligence based framework is rapidly revolutionizing the healthcare industry. These intelligent systems are built with machine learning and deep learning based robust models for early diagnosis of diseases and demonstrates a promising supplementary diagnostic method for frontline clinical doctors and surgeons. Machine Learning and Deep Learning based systems can streamline and simplify the steps involved in diagnosis of diseases from clinical and image-based data, thus providing significant clinician support and workflow optimization. They mimic human cognition and are even capable of diagnosing diseases that cannot be diagnosed with human intelligence. This paper focuses on the survey of machine learning and deep learning applications in across 16 medical specialties, namely Dental medicine, Haematology, Surgery, Cardiology, Pulmonology, Orthopedics, Radiology, Oncology, General medicine, Psychiatry, Endocrinology, Neurology, Dermatology, Hepatology, Nephrology, Ophthalmology, and Drug discovery. In this paper along with the survey, we discuss the advancements of medical practices with these systems and also the impact of these systems on medical professionals.

Detection of change points constitutes a canonical statistical problem due to numerous applications in diverse areas, including economics and finance (Basseville et al. [1993], Frisén [2008]), quality process control (Qiu [2013]), functional genomics and neuroscience (Koepcke et al. [2016]). The offline version of the problem, wherein one examines the data retrospectively and aims to detect the presence and/or location of change points has been studied extensively for a variety of statistical models, including signal plus noise, regression, graphical, random graph, factor and time series models and various algorithms have been developed to accomplish this task -dynamic programming, regularized cost functions, binary segmentation, multiscale methods, etc., see, e.g. the review article Niu et al. [2016]. In the presence of multiple change points, consistency of the estimated location of the change points under certain regularity assumptions on the temporal spacing between change points and on the magnitude of the changes in the underlying model parameters have been established, see, e.g. Fryzlewicz [2014], Frick et al. [2014] and Wang and Samworth [2018] amongst several others, here the former two are under a fixed p framework and the latter under a high dimensional framework. Further, when a single change point has been assumed, the asymptotic distribution of the change point estimator has been established for various statistical models, see, e.g., [Bai, 1994, 1997], Csorgo and Horváth [1997], under fixed p setting, and [Bhattacharjee et al., 2017, 2019], [Kaul et al., 2020, 2021], under diverging dimensionality, where the last two articles allow potential high dimensionality.

Machine learning algorithms such as random forests or xgboost are gaining more importance and are increasingly incorporated into production processes in order to enable comprehensive digitization and, if possible, automation of processes. Hyperparameters of these algorithms used have to be set appropriately, which can be referred to as hyperparameter tuning or optimization. Based on the concept of tunability, this article presents an overview of theoretical and practical results for popular machine learning algorithms. This overview is accompanied by an experimental analysis of 30 hyperparameters from six relevant machine learning algorithms. In particular, it provides (i) a survey of important hyperparameters, (ii) two parameter tuning studies, and (iii) one extensive global parameter tuning study, as well as (iv) a new way, based on consensus ranking, to analyze results from multiple algorithms. The R package mlr is used as a uniform interface to the machine learning models. The R package SPOT is used to perform the actual tuning (optimization). All additional code is provided together with this paper.