How to Cut Cake Fairly.

This page includes forthcoming AAAI sponsored conferences, conferences presented by AAAI Affiliates, and conferences held in cooperation with AAAI. AI Magazine also maintains a calendar listing that includes nonaffiliated conferences at www.aaai.org/Magazine/calendar.php. IEA/AIE-2017 will be AAAI Spring Symposium Series. The New Orleans, Louisiana USA. held June 17-21, 2017 in Arras, AAAI 2017 Spring Symposium Series LPN-Orleans Riverside Hotel, New Orleans, MR'17 will be held July 3-6, 2017 in Eleventh International AAAI Conference Louisiana USA. ICWSM-17 will be held May 15-18 in Montréal, Québec, Canada.

An estimated 17.5 million people died from a cardiovascular disease in 2012, representing 31 percent of all global deaths. Most acute coronary events result from rupture of the protective fibrous cap overlying an atherosclerotic plaque. The task of early identification of plaque types that can potentially rupture is, therefore, of great importance. The state-of-the-art approach to imaging blood vessels is intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT). However, currently, this is an offline approach where the images are first collected and then manually analyzed an image at a time to identify regions at risk of thrombosis. This process is extremely laborious, time consuming and prone to human error. We are building a system that, when complete, will provide interactive 3D visualization of a blood vessel as an IVOCT is in progress. The visualization will highlight different plaque types and enable quick identification of regions at risk for thrombosis. In this paper, we describe our approach, focusing on machine learning methods that are a key enabling technology. Our empirical results using real OCT data show that our approach can identify different plaque types efficiently with high accuracy across multiple patients.

Foodborne illness afflicts 48 million people annually in the U.S. alone. Over 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die from the infection. While preventable with proper food safety practices, the traditional restaurant inspection process has limited impact given the predictability and low frequency of inspections, and the dynamic nature of the kitchen environment. Despite this reality, the inspection process has remained largely unchanged for decades. CDC has even identified food safety as one of seven ”winnable battles”; however, progress to date has been limited. In this work, we demonstrate significant improvements in food safety by marrying AI and the standard inspection process. We apply machine learning to Twitter data, develop a system that automatically detects venues likely to pose a public health hazard, and demonstrate its efficacy in the Las Vegas metropolitan area in a double-blind experiment conducted over three months in collaboration with Nevada’s health department. By contrast, previous research in this domain has been limited to indirect correlative validation using only aggregate statistics. We show that adaptive inspection process is 64 percent more effective at identifying problematic venues than the current state of the art. If fully deployed, our approach could prevent over 9,000 cases of foodborne illness and 557 hospitalizations annually in Las Vegas alone. Additionally, adaptive inspections result in unexpected benefits, including the identification of venues lacking permits, contagious kitchen staff, and fewer customer complaints filed with the Las Vegas health department.

Poaching is considered a major driver for the population drop of key species such as tigers, elephants, and rhinos, which can be detrimental to whole ecosystems. While conducting foot patrols is the most commonly used approach in many countries to prevent poaching, such patrols often do not make the best use of the limited patrolling resources.

This close relationship between AI Magazine and IAAI is no coincidence. Much of our society knows about and interacts with AI mainly through its applications. Applications are the source of many problems that AI research seeks to address, and we often measure our progress through successful applications. Applications are how AI makes an impact on the world. Hence, as "the journal of record for the AI community," it is only logical for AI Magazine to cover AI applications extensively.

An exciting branch of machine learning research focuses on methods for learning, optimizing, and integrating unknown functions that are difficult or costly to evaluate. A popular Bayesian approach to this problem uses a Gaussian process (GP) to construct a posterior distribution over the function of interest given a set of observed measurements, and selects new points to evaluate using the statistics of this posterior. Here we extend these methods to exploit derivative information from the unknown function. We describe methods for Bayesian optimization (BO) and Bayesian quadrature (BQ) in settings where first and second derivatives may be evaluated along with the function itself. We perform sampling-based inference in order to incorporate uncertainty over hyperparameters, and show that both hyperparameter and function uncertainty decrease much more rapidly when using derivative information. Moreover, we introduce techniques for overcoming ill-conditioning issues that have plagued earlier methods for gradient-enhanced Gaussian processes and kriging. We illustrate the efficacy of these methods using applications to real and simulated Bayesian optimization and quadrature problems, and show that exploting derivatives can provide substantial gains over standard methods.

Classifiers deployed in the real world operate in a dynamic environment, where the data distribution can change over time. These changes, referred to as concept drift, can cause the predictive performance of the classifier to drop over time, thereby making it obsolete. To be of any real use, these classifiers need to detect drifts and be able to adapt to them, over time. Detecting drifts has traditionally been approached as a supervised task, with labeled data constantly being used for validating the learned model. Although effective in detecting drifts, these techniques are impractical, as labeling is a difficult, costly and time consuming activity. On the other hand, unsupervised change detection techniques are unreliable, as they produce a large number of false alarms. The inefficacy of the unsupervised techniques stems from the exclusion of the characteristics of the learned classifier, from the detection process. In this paper, we propose the Margin Density Drift Detection (MD3) algorithm, which tracks the number of samples in the uncertainty region of a classifier, as a metric to detect drift. The MD3 algorithm is a distribution independent, application independent, model independent, unsupervised and incremental algorithm for reliably detecting drifts from data streams. Experimental evaluation on 6 drift induced datasets and 4 additional datasets from the cybersecurity domain demonstrates that the MD3 approach can reliably detect drifts, with significantly fewer false alarms compared to unsupervised feature based drift detectors. The reduced false alarms enables the signaling of drifts only when they are most likely to affect classification performance. As such, the MD3 approach leads to a detection scheme which is credible, label efficient and general in its applicability.

Toxicity analysis and prediction are of paramount importance to human health and environmental protection. Existing computational methods are built from a wide variety of descriptors and regressors, which makes their performance analysis difficult. For example, deep neural network (DNN), a successful approach in many occasions, acts like a black box and offers little conceptual elegance or physical understanding. The present work constructs a common set of microscopic descriptors based on established physical models for charges, surface areas and free energies to assess the performance of multi-task convolutional neural network (MT-CNN) architectures and a few other approaches, including random forest (RF) and gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT), on an equal footing. Comparison is also given to convolutional neural network (CNN) and non-convolutional deep neural network (DNN) algorithms. Four benchmark toxicity data sets (i.e., endpoints) are used to evaluate various approaches. Extensive numerical studies indicate that the present MT-CNN architecture is able to outperform the state-of-the-art methods.

Accurate and reliable predictions of infectious disease dynamics can be valuable to public health organizations that plan interventions to decrease or prevent disease transmission. A great variety of models have been developed for this task, using different model structures, covariates, and targets for prediction. Experience has shown that the performance of these models varies; some tend to do better or worse in different seasons or at different points within a season. Ensemble methods combine multiple models to obtain a single prediction that leverages the strengths of each model. We considered a range of ensemble methods that each form a predictive density for a target of interest as a weighted sum of the predictive densities from component models. In the simplest case, equal weight is assigned to each component model; in the most complex case, the weights vary with the region, prediction target, week of the season when the predictions are made, a measure of component model uncertainty, and recent observations of disease incidence. We applied these methods to predict measures of influenza season timing and severity in the United States, both at the national and regional levels, using three component models. We trained the models on retrospective predictions from 14 seasons (1997/1998 - 2010/2011) and evaluated each model's prospective, out-of-sample performance in the five subsequent influenza seasons. In this test phase, the ensemble methods showed overall performance that was similar to the best of the component models, but offered more consistent performance across seasons than the component models. Ensemble methods offer the potential to deliver more reliable predictions to public health decision makers.