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Albumin as a Blood Biomarker of Aging

#artificialintelligence

The application of artificial intelligence to the study of aging in 2013 led to the development of tools for measuring biological age and predicting mortality, which is defined as the frequency of death in a defined population during a specified interval [1]. Public access to these tools creates the opportunity for self-studies, allowing individuals to gain insights into how their bodies would respond to diet, lifestyle, exercise, and supplementation interventions aimed at changing their biological ages or risks of death. In 2013, Steve Horvath developed a highly accurate artificial intelligence-driven method of determining biological age [2]. This long-awaited development ushered in a new era of aging research. For the first time, it enabled researchers in academia and industry to measure the results of their work in terms of changes in biological age. For example, in 2019, Dr. Greg Fahy and his colleagues carried out an experiment aimed at regenerating the thymus.


JavaScript Library Lets Devs Add AI Capabilities to Web - The New Stack

#artificialintelligence

AI company Hugging Face has released a new open source JavaScript library that allows frontend and web developers to add machine learning capabilities to webpages and apps. Traditionally, Python notebooks are the toolkit for data scientists, but for most web and frontend developers, it's JavaScript. Until now, adding those functions meant a Python app on the backend that did the work, said Jeff Boudier, head of product and growth at the startup. Using JavaScript, the browser can request machine learning models to serve predictions and obtain answers for a visitor. "We provide some low code/no code tools, but if you want to dig in a little bit, you still have to whip out some Python notebooks, etc. And that's the traditional toolkit of data scientists," Boudier told The New Stack.


Language models might be able to self-correct biases--if you ask them

MIT Technology Review

The second test used a data set designed to check how likely a model is to assume the gender of someone in a particular profession, and the third tested for how much race affected the chances of a would-be applicant's acceptance to a law school if a language model was asked to do the selection--something that, thankfully, doesn't happen in the real world. The team found that just prompting a model to make sure its answers didn't rely on stereotyping had a dramatically positive effect on its output, particularly in those that had completed enough rounds of RLHF and had more than 22 billion parameters, the variables in an AI system that get tweaked during training. GPT-3 has around 175 million parameters.) In some cases, the model even started to engage in positive discrimination in its output. Crucially, as with much deep-learning work, the researchers don't really know exactly why the models are able to do this, although they have some hunches.


Learn Python for Beginners - Full Course in 10 Hours

#artificialintelligence

Programming is one aspect of computer science and software engineering. The primary goal of this course is to build a solid foundation of programming knowledge and skills. With what learned in this course, the students should find it is easier to learn more advanced concepts in computer science. Not everyone will be or want to be a software engineer, however, this course can help them realize how a problem can be solved by using computer program; how Python can help scientists and engineers improve their productivity. Believe or not, software developers usually join a product development from the very beginning to the very end.


Breaking Bad Habits: Learning Computer Vision Instead of Just Binge-Watching Netflix

#artificialintelligence

Computer vision is a field of artificial intelligence that has become increasingly popular in recent years. It involves teaching machines to understand and interpret visual information, and it has many applications in areas like facial recognition, self-driving cars, and medical imaging. If you're interested in learning computer vision from scratch, here's a step-by-step guide that includes algorithms to get you started. Python is a widely used programming language in the field of computer vision. It's easy to learn, and there are many libraries available that make it easy to perform complex tasks.


Agent-based Simulation for Online Mental Health Matching

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Online mental health communities (OMHCs) are an effective and accessible channel to give and receive social support for individuals with mental and emotional issues. However, a key challenge on these platforms is finding suitable partners to interact with given that mechanisms to match users are currently underdeveloped. In this paper, we collaborate with one of the world's largest OMHC to develop an agent-based simulation framework and explore the trade-offs in different matching algorithms. The simulation framework allows us to compare current mechanisms and new algorithmic matching policies on the platform, and observe their differing effects on a variety of outcome metrics. Our findings include that usage of the deferred-acceptance algorithm can significantly better the experiences of support-seekers in one-on-one chats while maintaining low waiting time. We note key design considerations that agent-based modeling reveals in the OMHC context, including the potential benefits of algorithmic matching on marginalized communities.


A Survey of Demonstration Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the fast improvement of machine learning, reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to automate human tasks in different areas. However, training such agents is difficult and restricted to expert users. Moreover, it is mostly limited to simulation environments due to the high cost and safety concerns of interactions in the real world. Demonstration Learning is a paradigm in which an agent learns to perform a task by imitating the behavior of an expert shown in demonstrations. It is a relatively recent area in machine learning, but it is gaining significant traction due to having tremendous potential for learning complex behaviors from demonstrations. Learning from demonstration accelerates the learning process by improving sample efficiency, while also reducing the effort of the programmer. Due to learning without interacting with the environment, demonstration learning would allow the automation of a wide range of real world applications such as robotics and healthcare. This paper provides a survey of demonstration learning, where we formally introduce the demonstration problem along with its main challenges and provide a comprehensive overview of the process of learning from demonstrations from the creation of the demonstration data set, to learning methods from demonstrations, and optimization by combining demonstration learning with different machine learning methods. We also review the existing benchmarks and identify their strengths and limitations. Additionally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the paradigm as well as its main applications. Lastly, we discuss our perspective on open problems and research directions for this rapidly growing field.


Multi-armed Bandit Learning on a Graph

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The multi-armed bandit(MAB) problem is a simple yet powerful framework that has been extensively studied in the context of decision-making under uncertainty. In many real-world applications, such as robotic applications, selecting an arm corresponds to a physical action that constrains the choices of the next available arms (actions). Motivated by this, we study an extension of MAB called the graph bandit, where an agent travels over a graph to maximize the reward collected from different nodes. The graph defines the agent's freedom in selecting the next available nodes at each step. We assume the graph structure is fully available, but the reward distributions are unknown. Built upon an offline graph-based planning algorithm and the principle of optimism, we design a learning algorithm, G-UCB, that balances long-term exploration-exploitation using the principle of optimism. We show that our proposed algorithm achieves $O(\sqrt{|S|T\log(T)}+D|S|\log T)$ learning regret, where $|S|$ is the number of nodes and $D$ is the diameter of the graph, which matches the theoretical lower bound $\Omega(\sqrt{|S|T})$ up to logarithmic factors. To our knowledge, this result is among the first tight regret bounds in non-episodic, un-discounted learning problems with known deterministic transitions. Numerical experiments confirm that our algorithm outperforms several benchmarks.


GPT-based Open-Ended Knowledge Tracing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In education applications, knowledge tracing refers to the problem of estimating students' time-varying concept/skill mastery level from their past responses to questions and predicting their future performance. One key limitation of most existing knowledge tracing methods is that they treat student responses to questions as binary-valued, i.e., whether they are correct or incorrect. Response correctness analysis/prediction ignores important information on student knowledge contained in the exact content of the responses, especially for open-ended questions. In this paper, we conduct the first exploration into open-ended knowledge tracing (OKT) by studying the new task of predicting students' exact open-ended responses to questions. Our work is grounded in the domain of computer science education with programming questions. We develop an initial solution to the OKT problem, a student knowledge-guided code generation approach, that combines program synthesis methods using language models with student knowledge tracing methods. We also conduct a series of quantitative and qualitative experiments on a real-world student code dataset to validate OKT and demonstrate its promise in educational applications.


Curiosity-based Robot Navigation under Uncertainty in Crowded Environments

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Mobile robots have become more and more popular in large-scale and crowded environments, such as airports, shopping malls, etc. However, due to sparse landmarks and crowd noise, localization in this environment is a great challenge. Furthermore, it is unreliable for the robot to navigate safely in crowds while considering human comfort. Thus, how to navigate safely with localization precision in that environment is a critical problem. To solve this problem, we proposed a curiosity-based framework that can find an effective path with the consideration of human comfort and crowds, localization uncertainty, and the cost-to-go to the target. Three parts are involved in the proposed framework: the distance assessment module, the Curiosity for Positive Content (CPC), namely information-rich areas, and the Curiosity for Negative Content (CNC), namely crowded areas. CPC is introduced when the real-time localization uncertainty evaluation is not satisfied. This factor is predicted through the propagation of uncertainty along the candidate trajectory to provoke the robot to approach localization-referenced landmarks. The Human Comfort and Crowd Density Map (HCCDM) based on the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is established to calculate CNC, which drives the robot to bypass the crowd and consider human comfort. The evaluation is conducted in a series of large-scale and crowded environments. The results show that our method can find a feasible path that can consider the localization uncertainty while simultaneously avoiding the crowded area.