For millions of people with swallowing disorders, preventing potentially deadly aspiration pneumonia requires following prescribed safe eating strategies. But adherence is poor, and caregivers’ ability to encourage adherence is limited by the onerous and socially aversive need to monitoring another’s eating. We have developed an early prototype for an intelligent assistant that monitors adherence and provides feedback to the patient, and tested monitoring precision with healthy subjects for one strategy called a “chin tuck.” Results indicate that adaptations of current generation machine vision and personal assistant technologies could effectively monitor chin tuck adherence, and suggest the feasibility of a more general assistant that encourages adherence to a wide range of safe eating strategies.

Wireless sensor networks play a major role in smart grids and smart buildings. They are not just used for sensing, but they are also used as actuating. In terms of sensing they are used to measure temperature, humidity, light, to detect motion, etc. Sensors are often operated on a battery and hence we often face a trade-off between obtaining frequent sensor readings versus maximizing their battery life. There have been several approaches to maximizing their battery life from hardware level to software level such as reducing components energy consumption, limiting node operation capabilities, using power-aware routing protocols, and adding solar energy support. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach: we model the sensor readings in a wireless network using a dynamic Gaussian Bayesian network (dGBn) whose structure is automatically learned from data. dGBn allows us to integrate information across sensors and infer missing readings more accurately. Through active inference for dGBns, we are able to actively choose which sensors should be pulled for a reading and which ones can stay in a power-saving mode at each time step, maximizing prediction accuracy while staying within the budgetary constraints on battery consumption.

In intensive care units (ICU), electrocardiogram (ECG) waveforms show diverse variationsunder different patients' physical conditions.In general, physicians can diagnose patients efficientlyby detecting any disorder of heart rate or rhythm and any change in the morphological pattern of ECG data,which contain underlying semantics.To help physicians better analyze ECG data in a fairly short time,it is essential to develop a novel method for mining semantics from ECG patterns.This paper is the very first time to characterize ECG patterns by using Prefix Scalable Pattern Tree (PSP-Tree).Comparing with similar currently existing methods, PSP-Tree can mine significant semantics,such as scalability, temporality and hierarchy over ECG patterns.We conduct extensive experiments on real ECG data set which are obtained from PhysioBank Community and Beijing No.3 People Hospital.The experiment results show that our method performs more feasibly and effectively than other related work.

We propose a new model for learning bilingual word representations from non-parallel document-aligned data. Following the recent advances in word representation learning, our model learns dense real-valued word vectors, that is, bilingual word embeddings (BWEs). Unlike prior work on inducing BWEs which heavily relied on parallel sentence-aligned corpora and/or readily available translation resources such as dictionaries, the article reveals that BWEs may be learned solely on the basis of document-aligned comparable data without any additional lexical resources nor syntactic information. We present a comparison of our approach with previous state-of-the-art models for learning bilingual word representations from comparable data that rely on the framework of multilingual probabilistic topic modeling (MuPTM), as well as with distributional local context-counting models. We demonstrate the utility of the induced BWEs in two semantic tasks: (1) bilingual lexicon extraction, (2) suggesting word translations in context for polysemous words. Our simple yet effective BWE-based models significantly outperform the MuPTM-based and context-counting representation models from comparable data as well as prior BWE-based models, and acquire the best reported results on both tasks for all three tested language pairs.

Model-Based Diagnosis (MBD) is a principled and domain-independent way of analyzing why a system under examination is not behaving as expected. Given an abstract description (model) of the system's components and their behavior when functioning normally, MBD techniques rely on observations about the actual system behavior to reason about possible causes when there are discrepancies between the expected and observed behavior. Due to its generality, MBD has been successfully applied in a variety of application domains over the last decades. In many application domains of MBD, testing different hypotheses about the reasons for a failure can be computationally costly, e.g., because complex simulations of the system behavior have to be performed. In this work, we therefore propose different schemes of parallelizing the diagnostic reasoning process in order to better exploit the capabilities of modern multi-core computers. We propose and systematically evaluate parallelization schemes for Reiter's hitting set algorithm for finding all or a few leading minimal diagnoses using two different conflict detection techniques. Furthermore, we perform initial experiments for a basic depth-first search strategy to assess the potential of parallelization when searching for one single diagnosis. Finally, we test the effects of parallelizing "direct encodings" of the diagnosis problem in a constraint solver.

Hashtags are useful in many applications, such as tweet classification, clustering, searching, indexing and social network analysis. This study seeks to recommend relevant Twitter hashtags for health-related keywords based on distributed language representations, generated by the state-of-the-art Deep Learning technology. The word embeddings are built from billions of tweet words without supervision. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of applying distributed language representations to recommending hashtags for keywords. The experiment showed that this approach outperformed the baseline approach that is based on keyword and hashtag co-occurrence in tweets.

It is well known that the title of an article impacts how well it is discovered by potential readers and read. With both people and search engines, acting on behalf of people, accessing papers from digital libraries, it is important that the paper titles should promote discovery. In this paper, we investigate the characteristics of titles of AI papers and then propose au- tomatic ways to augment them so that they can be better in- dexed and discovered by users. A user study with researchers shows that they overwhelmingly prefer the augmented titles over the originals for being more helpful.

The general public shows great potential for utilizing scientific research. For example, a singer discovered her ectopic pregnancy by looking up clinical case reports. However, an exorbitant paywall impedes the public’s access to scientific literature. Our case study on a social network demonstrates a growing need for non-open access publications, especially for biomedical literature. The challenge is that non-open access papers are protected by copyright licenses that bar free distribution. In this paper, we propose a technical framework that leverages the doctrine of "idea-expression dichotomy" to bring ideas across paywalls. Idea-expression dichotomy prevents copyright holders from monopolizing ideas, theories, facts, and concepts. Therefore facts may pass through paywalls unencumbered by copyright license restrictions. Existing fact extraction methods (such as information extraction) require either large training sets or domain knowledge, which is intractable for the diverse biomedical scope spanning from clinical findings to genomics. We therefore develop a rule-based system to represent and extract facts. Social networkers and academics validated the effectiveness of our approach. 7 out of 9 users rated the paper’s information from the facts to be above average (≥6/10). Only 7% of the extracted facts were rated misleading.

Scientific charts in the web, whether as images or embedded in digital documents, contain valuable information that is not fully available to information retrieval tools. The information used to describe these charts is typically extracted from the image metadata rather than the information the graphic was initially designed to express. The problem of understanding digital charts found in scholarly documents, and inferring useful textual information from their graphical components is the focus of this study. We present an approach to automatically read the chart data, specifically bar charts, and provide the user with a textual summary of the chart. The proposed method follows a knowledge discovery approach that relies on a versatile graph representation of the chart. This representation is derived from analyzing a chart's original data values, from which useful features are extracted. The data features are in turn used to construct a semantic-graph. To generate a summary, the semantic-graph of the chart is mapped to appropriately crafted protoforms, which are constructs based on fuzzy logic. We verify the effectiveness of our framework by conducting experiments on bar charts extracted from over 1,000 PDF documents. Our preliminary results show that, under certain assumptions, 83% of the produced summaries provide plausible descriptions of the bar charts.

This paper describes Hy-CIRCA, an architecture for verified, correct-by-construction planning and execution for hy- brid systems, including non-linear continuous dynamics. Hy-CIRCA addresses the high computational complexity of such systems by first planning at an abstract level, and then progressively refining the original plan. Hy-CIRCA is an extension of our Playbook approach, which aims to make it easy for users to exert supervisory control over multiple autonomous systems by “calling a play.” The Playbook approach is implemented by combining (1) a human-machine interface for commanding and monitoring the autonomous systems; (2) a hierarchical planner for translating commands into executable plans; and (3) a smart executive to manage plan execution by coordinating the control systems of the individual autonomous agents, tracking plan execution, and triggering replanning when necessary. Hy-CIRCA integrates the dReal non-linear SMT solver, with enhanced versions of the SHOP2 HTN planner and the CIRCA Controller Synthesis Module (CSM). Hy-CIRCA’s planning process has 5 steps: (1) Using SHOP2, compute an approximate mission plan. While computing this plan, compute a hybrid automaton model of the plan, featuring more expressive continuous dynamics. (2) Using dReal, solve this hybrid model, establishing the correctness of the plan, and computing values for its continuous parameters. To execute the plan, (3) extract from the plan specifications for closed-loop, hard real-time supervisory controllers for the agents that must execute the plan. (4) Based upon these specifications, use the CIRCA CSM to plan the controllers. To ensure correct execution, (5) verify the CSM-generated controllers with dReal.