AI-assisted tools have begun to make a mark on healthcare, with a 2020 study finding 64 FDA-approved devices and algorithms based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Yet, the systematic review found a lack of evidence to support the technologies. "Despite the plethora of claims for the benefits of AI in enhancing clinical outcomes, there is a paucity of robust evidence. In this systematic review, we identified only a handful of RCTs comparing AI-assisted tools with standard-of-care management in various medical conditions," the authors wrote. Many of the 39 studies had limitations that affect the generalizability of their results.

BEIJING/TAIPEI – China on Monday dismissed complaints from Taiwan about repeated harassment by Chinese drones very close to Taiwanese-controlled islands as not anything "to make a fuss about", prompting Taipei to label Beijing as nothing more than thieves. Since China began war games and military drills near Taiwan earlier this month after the visit of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the Chinese-claimed island, the government in Taipei has reported repeated flights by drones on islets it controls close to the Chinese coast. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites. If this does not resolve the issue or you are unable to add the domains to your allowlist, please see this support page.

Taiwan has said it would shoot down drones that intrude into its Kinmen island from the mainland, amid tensions in the Taiwan Strait. The Kinmen Defense Command said in a statement that it would drive Chinese drones out of Kinmen County, and shoot them down if warnings are ignored. The announcement comes a week after a Chinese civilian drone intruded into Taiwanese territory and recorded visuals of two soldiers manning a guardhouse. These visuals were later widely circulated on Chinese social media Sina Weibo. Taiwanese military sources then claimed it fired warning flares to repel Chinese drones while refraining from more aggressive measures such as shooting aircraft down to avoid further escalating cross-strait tensions.

Temporal variations of apparent magnitude, called light curves, are observational statistics of interest captured by telescopes over long periods of time. Light curves afford the exploration of Space Domain Awareness (SDA) objectives such as object identification or pose estimation as latent variable inference problems. Ground-based observations from commercial off the shelf (COTS) cameras remain inexpensive compared to higher precision instruments, however, limited sensor availability combined with noisier observations can produce gappy time-series data that can be difficult to model. These external factors confound the automated exploitation of light curves, which makes light curve prediction and extrapolation a crucial problem for applications. Traditionally, image or time-series completion problems have been approached with diffusion-based or exemplar-based methods. More recently, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have become the tool of choice due to their empirical success at learning complex nonlinear embeddings. However, DNNs often require large training data that are not necessarily available when looking at unique features of a light curve of a single satellite. In this paper, we present a novel approach to predicting missing and future data points of light curves using Gaussian Processes (GPs). GPs are non-linear probabilistic models that infer posterior distributions over functions and naturally quantify uncertainty. However, the cubic scaling of GP inference and training is a major barrier to their adoption in applications. In particular, a single light curve can feature hundreds of thousands of observations, which is well beyond the practical realization limits of a conventional GP on a single machine. Consequently, we employ MuyGPs, a scalable framework for hyperparameter estimation of GP models that uses nearest neighbors sparsification and local cross-validation. MuyGPs...

Structure-based drug design is drawing growing attentions in computer-aided drug discovery. Compared with the virtual screening approach where a pre-defined library of compounds are computationally screened, de novo drug design based on the structure of a target protein can provide novel drug candidates. In this paper, we present a generative solution named TamGent (Target-aware molecule generator with Transformer) that can directly generate candidate drugs from scratch for a given target, overcoming the limits imposed by existing compound libraries. Following the Transformer framework (a state-of-the-art framework in deep learning), we design a variant of Transformer encoder to process 3D geometric information of targets and pre-train the Transformer decoder on 10 million compounds from PubChem for candidate drug generation. Systematical evaluation on candidate compounds generated for targets from DrugBank shows that both binding affinity and drugability are largely improved. TamGent outperforms previous baselines in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. The method is further verified by generating candidate compounds for the SARS-CoV-2 main protease and the oncogenic mutant KRAS G12C. The results show that our method not only re-discovers previously verified drug molecules , but also generates novel molecules with better docking scores, expanding the compound pool and potentially leading to the discovery of novel drugs.

Perception of obstacles remains a critical safety concern for autonomous vehicles. Real-world collisions have shown that the autonomy faults leading to fatal collisions originate from obstacle existence detection. Open source autonomous driving implementations show a perception pipeline with complex interdependent Deep Neural Networks. These networks are not fully verifiable, making them unsuitable for safety-critical tasks. In this work, we present a safety verification of an existing LiDAR based classical obstacle detection algorithm. We establish strict bounds on the capabilities of this obstacle detection algorithm. Given safety standards, such bounds allow for determining LiDAR sensor properties that would reliably satisfy the standards. Such analysis has as yet been unattainable for neural network based perception systems. We provide a rigorous analysis of the obstacle detection system with empirical results based on real-world sensor data.

While machine learning and ranking-based systems are in widespread use for sensitive decision-making processes (e.g., determining job candidates, assigning credit scores), they are rife with concerns over unintended biases in their outcomes, which makes algorithmic fairness (e.g., demographic parity, equal opportunity) an objective of interest. 'Algorithmic recourse' offers feasible recovery actions to change unwanted outcomes through the modification of attributes. We introduce the notion of ranked group-level recourse fairness, and develop a 'recourse-aware ranking' solution that satisfies ranked recourse fairness constraints while minimizing the cost of suggested modifications. Our solution suggests interventions that can reorder the ranked list of database records and mitigate group-level unfairness; specifically, disproportionate representation of sub-groups and recourse cost imbalance. This re-ranking identifies the minimum modifications to data points, with these attribute modifications weighted according to their ease of recourse. We then present an efficient block-based extension that enables re-ranking at any granularity (e.g., multiple brackets of bank loan interest rates, multiple pages of search engine results). Evaluation on real datasets shows that, while existing methods may even exacerbate recourse unfairness, our solution -- RAGUEL -- significantly improves recourse-aware fairness. RAGUEL outperforms alternatives at improving recourse fairness, through a combined process of counterfactual generation and re-ranking, whilst remaining efficient for large-scale datasets.

Adversarial machine learning is an emerging area showing the vulnerability of deep learning models. Exploring attack methods to challenge state of the art artificial intelligence (A.I.) models is an area of critical concern. The reliability and robustness of such A.I. models are one of the major concerns with an increasing number of effective adversarial attack methods. Classification tasks are a major vulnerable area for adversarial attacks. The majority of attack strategies are developed for colored or gray-scaled images. Consequently, adversarial attacks on binary image recognition systems have not been sufficiently studied. Binary images are simple two possible pixel-valued signals with a single channel. The simplicity of binary images has a significant advantage compared to colored and gray scaled images, namely computation efficiency. Moreover, most optical character recognition systems (O.C.R.s), such as handwritten character recognition, plate number identification, and bank check recognition systems, use binary images or binarization in their processing steps. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient attack method, Efficient Combinatorial Black-box Adversarial Attack, on binary image classifiers. We validate the efficiency of the attack technique on two different data sets and three classification networks, demonstrating its performance. Furthermore, we compare our proposed method with state-of-the-art methods regarding advantages and disadvantages as well as applicability.

With the rapid development of automatic fake news detection technology, fact extraction and verification (FEVER) has been attracting more attention. The task aims to extract the most related fact evidences from millions of open-domain Wikipedia documents and then verify the credibility of corresponding claims. Although several strong models have been proposed for the task and they have made great progress, we argue that they fail to utilize multi-view contextual information and thus cannot obtain better performance. In this paper, we propose to integrate multi-view contextual information (IMCI) for fact extraction and verification. For each evidence sentence, we define two kinds of context, i.e. intra-document context and inter-document context}. Intra-document context consists of the document title and all the other sentences from the same document. Inter-document context consists of all other evidences which may come from different documents. Then we integrate the multi-view contextual information to encode the evidence sentences to handle the task. Our experimental results on FEVER 1.0 shared task show that our IMCI framework makes great progress on both fact extraction and verification, and achieves state-of-the-art performance with a winning FEVER score of 72.97% and label accuracy of 75.84% on the online blind test set. We also conduct ablation study to detect the impact of multi-view contextual information. Our codes will be released at https://github.com/phoenixsecularbird/IMCI.

Fox News senior foreign affairs correspondent Greg Palkot provides details on the August 2021 U.S. drone strike that mistakenly killed 10 civilians. There is a lot of unfinished business following last year's messy U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan as the Taliban were taking over, including the fallout from a drone strike there that went horribly wrong. Three days after the Islamic State suicide bomb attack at Kabul Airport, which left 13 U.S. service members and many more Afghan civilians killed, the military thought they were on to another ISIS terrorist. All day on Aug. 29, 2021, they tracked a car making what appeared to be suspicious stops across Kabul. Late in the day, they let loose a Hellfire missile from a Reaper drone, obliterating the car, its surroundings and those at scene.