The COVID-19 pandemic has profound global consequences on health, economic, social, political, and almost every major aspect of human life. Therefore, it is of great importance to model COVID-19 and other pandemics in terms of the broader social contexts in which they take place. We present the architecture of AICov, which provides an integrative deep learning framework for COVID-19 forecasting with population covariates, some of which may serve as putative risk factors. We have integrated multiple different strategies into AICov, including the ability to use deep learning strategies based on LSTM and even modeling. To demonstrate our approach, we have conducted a pilot that integrates population covariates from multiple sources. Thus, AICov not only includes data on COVID-19 cases and deaths but, more importantly, the population's socioeconomic, health and behavioral risk factors at a local level. The compiled data are fed into AICov, and thus we obtain improved prediction by integration of the data to our model as compared to one that only uses case and death data.

Machine learning is increasingly used to inform decision-making in sensitive situations where decisions have consequential effects on individuals' lives. In these settings, in addition to requiring models to be accurate and robust, socially relevant values such as fairness, privacy, accountability, and explainability play an important role for the adoption and impact of said technologies. In this work, we focus on algorithmic recourse, which is concerned with providing explanations and recommendations to individuals who are unfavourably treated by automated decision-making systems. We first perform an extensive literature review, and align the efforts of many authors by presenting unified definitions, formulations, and solutions to recourse. Then, we provide an overview of the prospective research directions towards which the community may engage, challenging existing assumptions and making explicit connections to other ethical challenges such as security, privacy, and fairness.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly emerged as a key disruptive technology in the 21st century. At the heart of modern AI lies Deep Learning (DL), an emerging class of algorithms that has enabled today's platforms and organizations to operate at unprecedented efficiency, effectiveness, and scale. Despite significant interest, IS contributions in DL have been limited, which we argue is in part due to issues with defining, positioning, and conducting DL research. Recognizing the tremendous opportunity here for the IS community, this work clarifies, streamlines, and presents approaches for IS scholars to make timely and high-impact contributions. Related to this broader goal, this paper makes five timely contributions. First, we systematically summarize the major components of DL in a novel Deep Learning for Information Systems Research (DL-ISR) schematic that illustrates how technical DL processes are driven by key factors from an application environment. Second, we present a novel Knowledge Contribution Framework (KCF) to help IS scholars position their DL contributions for maximum impact. Third, we provide ten guidelines to help IS scholars generate rigorous and relevant DL-ISR in a systematic, high-quality fashion. Fourth, we present a review of prevailing journal and conference venues to examine how IS scholars have leveraged DL for various research inquiries. Finally, we provide a unique perspective on how IS scholars can formulate DL-ISR inquiries by carefully considering the interplay of business function(s), application areas(s), and the KCF. This perspective intentionally emphasizes inter-disciplinary, intra-disciplinary, and cross-IS tradition perspectives. Taken together, these contributions provide IS scholars a timely framework to advance the scale, scope, and impact of deep learning research.

Over the next few years, society as a whole will need to address what core values it wishes to protect when dealing with technology. Anthropology, a field dedicated to the very notion of what it means to be human, can provide some interesting insights into how to cope and tackle these changes in our Western society and other areas of the world. It can be challenging for social science practitioners to grasp and keep up with the pace of technological innovation, with many being unfamiliar with the jargon of AI. This short guide serves as both an introduction to AI ethics and social science and anthropological perspectives on the development of AI. It intends to provide those unfamiliar with the field with an insight into the societal impact of AI systems and how, in turn, these systems can lead us to rethink how our world operates.

By extending Cyc's ontology and KB approximately 2%, Cycorp and Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF) have built a system to answer clinical researchers' ad hoc queries. The query may be long and complex, hence only partially understood at first, parsed into a set of CycL (higher-order logic) fragments with open variables. But, surprisingly often, after applying various constraints (medical domain knowledge, common sense, discourse pragmatics, syntax), there is only one single way to fit those fragments together, one semantically meaningful formal query P. The system, SRA (for Semantic Research Assistant), dispatches a series of database calls and then combines, logically and arithmetically, their results into answers to P. Seeing the first few answers stream back, the user may realize that they need to abort, modify, and re-ask their query. Even before they push ASK, just knowing approximately how many answers would be returned can spark such editing. Besides real-time ad hoc query-answering, queries can be bundled and persist over time. One bundle of 275 queries is rerun quarterly by CCF to produce the procedures and outcomes data it needs to report to STS (Society of Thoracic Surgeons, an external hospital accreditation and ranking body); another bundle covers ACC (American College of Cardiology) reporting.

The TriRhenaTech alliance presents a collection of accepted papers of the cancelled tri-national 'Upper-Rhine Artificial Inteeligence Symposium' planned for 13th May 2020 in Karlsruhe. The TriRhenaTech alliance is a network of universities in the Upper-Rhine Trinational Metropolitan Region comprising of the German universities of applied sciences in Furtwangen, Kaiserslautern, Karlsruhe, and Offenburg, the Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University Loerrach, the French university network Alsace Tech (comprised of 14 'grandes \'ecoles' in the fields of engineering, architecture and management) and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. The alliance's common goal is to reinforce the transfer of knowledge, research, and technology, as well as the cross-border mobility of students.

As Machine Learning technologies become increasingly used in contexts that affect citizens, companies as well as researchers need to be confident that their application of these methods will not have unexpected social implications, such as bias towards gender, ethnicity, and/or people with disabilities. There is significant literature on approaches to mitigate bias and promote fairness, yet the area is complex and hard to penetrate for newcomers to the domain. This article seeks to provide an overview of the different schools of thought and approaches to mitigating (social) biases and increase fairness in the Machine Learning literature. It organises approaches into the widely accepted framework of pre-processing, in-processing, and post-processing methods, subcategorizing into a further 11 method areas. Although much of the literature emphasizes binary classification, a discussion of fairness in regression, recommender systems, unsupervised learning, and natural language processing is also provided along with a selection of currently available open source libraries. The article concludes by summarising open challenges articulated as four dilemmas for fairness research.

An expanding field of substantive interest for the theory of the law and the practice-of-law entails Legal Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining (LSAOM), consisting of two often intertwined phenomena and actions underlying legal discussions and narratives: (1) Sentiment Analysis (SA) for the detection of expressed or implied sentiment about a legal matter within the context of a legal milieu, and (2) Opinion Mining (OM) for the identification and illumination of explicit or implicit opinion accompaniments immersed within legal discourse. Efforts to undertake LSAOM have historically been performed by human hand and cognition, and only thinly aided in more recent times by the use of computer-based approaches. Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) involving especially Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) are increasingly bolstering how automation can systematically perform either or both of Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining, all of which is being inexorably carried over into engagement within a legal context for improving LSAOM capabilities. This research paper examines the evolving infusion of AI into Legal Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining and proposes an alignment with the Levels of Autonomy (LoA) of AI Legal Reasoning (AILR), plus provides additional insights regarding AI LSAOM in its mechanizations and potential impact to the study of law and the practicing of law.

Currently employed neural network architectures have mostly been developed manually by human experts, which is a time-consuming and error-prone process. This is when Neural architecture search, a subset of AutoML, came to the rescue. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is the process of automating architecture engineering. Here we list top research works in Neural Architecture Search based on their popularity on Github. These works have set new baselines, resulted in new networks and more.

Time series analysis is a field of data science which is interested in analyzing sequences of numerical values ordered in time. Time series are particularly interesting because they allow us to visualize and understand the evolution of a process over time. Their analysis can reveal trends, relationships and similarities across the data. There exists numerous fields containing data in the form of time series: health care (electrocardiogram, blood sugar, etc.), activity recognition, remote sensing, finance (stock market price), industry (sensors), etc. Time series classification consists of constructing algorithms dedicated to automatically label time series data. The sequential aspect of time series data requires the development of algorithms that are able to harness this temporal property, thus making the existing off-the-shelf machine learning models for traditional tabular data suboptimal for solving the underlying task. In this context, deep learning has emerged in recent years as one of the most effective methods for tackling the supervised classification task, particularly in the field of computer vision. The main objective of this thesis was to study and develop deep neural networks specifically constructed for the classification of time series data. We thus carried out the first large scale experimental study allowing us to compare the existing deep methods and to position them compared other non-deep learning based state-of-the-art methods. Subsequently, we made numerous contributions in this area, notably in the context of transfer learning, data augmentation, ensembling and adversarial attacks. Finally, we have also proposed a novel architecture, based on the famous Inception network (Google), which ranks among the most efficient to date.