We have conducted a study investigating the use of automated tutors for educating players in the context of serious gaming (i.e., game designed as a professional training tool). Historically, researchers and practitioners have developed automated tutors through a process of manually codifying domain knowledge and translating that into a human-interpretable format. This process is laborious and leaves much to be desired. Instead, we seek to apply novel machine learning techniques to, first, learn a model from domain experts' demonstrations how to solve such problems, and, second, use this model to teach novices how to think like experts. In this work, we present a study comparing the performance of an automated and a traditional, manually-constructed tutor. To our knowledge, this is the first investigation using learning from demonstration techniques to learn from experts and use that knowledge to teach novices.

Current approaches to autonomous exploration focus on collecting observations in the absence of prior knowledge of the phenomena under investigation. However, it is unlikely that robots will arrive at planetary bodies without scientists having formed one or more hypotheses explaining data collected by precursor operations such as satellite images. These exploring robots collect observations to falsify the proposed hypotheses, incorporating those hypotheses can increase the efficiency of observation collection. This paper presents a novel algorithm, formulated in an exploration/exploitation framework, that directs robots to collect samples to determine which of a collection of hypotheses best explain data observed in situ by robots. We simulate a geologic exploration mission with a lander vehicle that can hop between locations of interest. This application is analogous to exploring of, e.g., the Aitken Basin of the south pole of Earth's Moon where sampling sites need to be separated hundreds or thousands of meters. We demonstrate that sampling algorithms aware of the hypotheses under investigation perform statistically significantly better than standard approaches, making more effective use of mission resources.

Within population health information systems, indicators are commonly presented as independent, cross-sectional measures, neglecting the multivariate, longitudinal nature of disease progression and health care use. We use administrative claims data for patients with a previous diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Montreal, Canada to explore two approaches to facilitating the discovery and interpretation of patterns across indicators and over time. The first approach identifies regional clusters based on patterns across four health service indicators. Our second approach uses a hidden Markov model to analyze individuallevel trajectories based on the same four indicators. Both approaches offer additional insights, such as a dual interpretation of low use of general practitioner services. These approaches to the analysis and visualization of health indicators can provide a foundation for information displays that will help decision makers identify areas of concern, predict future disease burden, and implement appropriate policies.

Recent studies have shown that information mined from Craigslist can be used for informing public health policy or monitoring risk behavior. This paper presents a text-mining method for conducting public health surveillance of marijuana use concerns in the U.S. using online classified ads in Craigslist. We scraped more than 200 thousands of rental ads in the housing categories in Craigslist and devised text-mining methods for efficiently and accurately extract rental ads associated with concerns about the uses of marijuana in different states across the U.S. We linked the extracted ads to their geographic locations and computed summary statistics of the ads having marijuana use concerns. Our data is then compared with the State Marijuana Laws Map published by the U.S. government and marijuana related keywords search in Google to verify our collected data with respect to the demographics of marijuana use concerns. Our data not only indicates strong correlations between Craigslist ads, Google search and the State Marijuana Laws Map in states where marijuana uses are legal, but also reveals some hidden world of marijuana use concerns in other states where marijuana use is illegal. Our approach can be utilized as a marijuana surveillance tool for policy makers to develop public health policy and regulations.

We envision an integrated framework for supporting the development and deployment of human-aware, general artificial intelligence (AI) that needs to collaborate in uncertain, changing environments. We examine the technology and system requirements of building assistive care agents for dementia or cognitive impaired patients through the continuum of care. We summarize the new AI capabilities and show examples of how an evolving, adaptive development approach would be able to support the basic functionalities and applications in a sound, practical, and scalable manner. We highlight the challenges and the opportunities involved in realizing the proposed framework, and call for future research and development efforts from the AI community to work in this challenging and important domain.

Traditional data on influenza vaccination has several limitations: high cost, limited coverage of underrepresented groups, and low sensitivity to emerging public health issues. Social media, such as Twitter, provide an alternative way to understand a population’s vaccination-related opinions and behaviors. In this study, we build and employ several natural language classifiers to examine and analyze behavioral patterns regarding influenza vaccination in Twitter across three dimensions: temporality (by week and month), geography (by US region), and demography (by gender). Our best results are highly correlated official government data, with a correlation over 0.90, providing validation of our approach. We then suggest a number of directions for future work.

Predictive analytics have proved promising capabilities and opportunities to many aspects of healthcare practice. Data-driven insights can provide an important part of the solution for curbing rising costs and improving care quality. The paper implements machine learning techniques in an attempt to support decision making in relation to elderly healthcare in Ireland, with a particular focus on hip fracture care. We adopt a combination of unsupervised and supervised learning for predicting patient outcomes. Initially, elderly patients are grouped based on the similarity of age, length of stay (LOS) and elapsed time to surgery. Using the K-Means algorithm, our clustering experiments suggest the presence of three coherent clusters of patients. Subsequently, the discovered clusters are utilised to train prediction models that address a particular cluster of patients individually. In particular, two machine learning models are trained for every cluster of patients in order to predict the inpatient LOS, and discharge destination. The developed models are claimed to make predictions with relatively high accuracy. Furthermore, the potential usefulness of the clustering-guided approach of prediction is discussed in general.

As datasets for machine learning grow larger, parallelization strategies become more and more important. Recent approaches to distributed modelfitting rely heavily either on consensus ADMM, where each node solves smallsub-problems using only local data, or on stochastic gradient methods thatdon't scale well to large numbers of cores in a cluster setting. For this reason, GPU clusters have become common prerequisites to large-scale machinelearning. This paper describes an unconventional training method that uses alternating direction methods and Bregman iteration to train a variety of machine learning models on CPUs while avoiding the drawbacks of consensus methods and without gradient descent steps. Using transpose reduction strategies, the proposed method reduces the optimization problems to a sequence of minimization sub-steps that can each be solved globally in closed form. The method provides strong scaling in the distributed setting, yielding linear speedups even when split over thousands of cores.

We introduce a novel approach for parallelizing MCMC inference in models with spatially determined conditional independence relationships, for which existing techniques exploiting graphical model structure are not applicable. Our approach is motivated by a model of seismic events and signals, where events detected in distant regions are approximately independent given those in intermediate regions. We perform parallel inference by coloring a factor graph defined over regions of latent space, rather than individual model variables. Evaluating on a model of seismic event detection, we achieve significant speedups over serial MCMC with no degradation in inference quality.

In this paper, we propose an efficient transfer leaning methods for training a personalized language model using a recurrent neural network with long short-term memory architecture. With our proposed fast transfer learning schemes, a general language model is updated to a personalized language model with a small amount of user data and a limited computing resource. These methods are especially useful for a mobile device environment while the data is prevented from transferring out of the device for privacy purposes. Through experiments on dialogue data in a drama, it is verified that our transfer learning methods have successfully generated the personalized language model, whose output is more similar to the personal language style in both qualitative and quantitative aspects.