Perception, localization, planning, and control, high-level functions often organized in a so-called pipeline, are amongst the core building blocks of modern autonomous (ground, air, and underwater) vehicle architectures. These functions are increasingly being implemented using learning-enabled components (LECs), i.e., (software) components leveraging knowledge acquisition and learning processes such as deep learning. Providing quantified component-level assurance as part of a wider (dynamic) assurance case can be useful in supporting both pre-operational approval of LECs (e.g., by regulators), and runtime hazard mitigation, e.g., using assurance-based failover configurations. This paper develops a notion of assurance for LECs based on i) identifying the relevant dependability attributes, and ii) quantifying those attributes and the associated uncertainty, using probabilistic techniques. We give a practical grounding for our work using an example from the aviation domain: an autonomous taxiing capability for an unmanned aircraft system (UAS), focusing on the application of LECs as sensors in the perception function. We identify the applicable quantitative measures of assurance, and characterize the associated uncertainty using a non-parametric Bayesian approach, namely Gaussian process regression. We additionally discuss the relevance and contribution of LEC assurance to system-level assurance, the generalizability of our approach, and the associated challenges.

Controllers for dynamical systems that operate in safety-critical settings must account for stochastic disturbances. Such disturbances are often modeled as process noise in a dynamical system, and common assumptions are that the underlying distributions are known and/or Gaussian. In practice, however, these assumptions may be unrealistic and can lead to poor approximations of the true noise distribution. We present a novel controller synthesis method that does not rely on any explicit representation of the noise distributions. In particular, we address the problem of computing a controller that provides probabilistic guarantees on safely reaching a target, while also avoiding unsafe regions of the state space. First, we abstract the continuous control system into a finite-state model that captures noise by probabilistic transitions between discrete states. As a key contribution, we adapt tools from the scenario approach to compute probably approximately correct (PAC) bounds on these transition probabilities, based on a finite number of samples of the noise. We capture these bounds in the transition probability intervals of a so-called interval Markov decision process (iMDP). This iMDP is, with a user-specified confidence probability, robust against uncertainty in the transition probabilities, and the tightness of the probability intervals can be controlled through the number of samples. We use state-of-the-art verification techniques to provide guarantees on the iMDP and compute a controller for which these guarantees carry over to the original control system. In addition, we develop a tailored computational scheme that reduces the complexity of the synthesis of these guarantees on the iMDP. Benchmarks on realistic control systems show the practical applicability of our method, even when the iMDP has hundreds of millions of transitions.

Abstract: Understanding the dynamics of a system is important in many scientific and engineering domains. This problem can be approached by learning state transition rules from observations using machine learning techniques. Such observed time-series data often consist of sequences of many continuous variables with noise and ambiguity, but we often need rules of dynamics that can be modeled with a few essential variables. In this work, we propose a method for extracting a small number of essential hidden variables from high-dimensional time-series data and for learning state transition rules between these hidden variables. The proposed method is based on the Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM), which treats observable data in the visible layer and latent features in the hidden layer.

Many algorithms are capable of underpinning decision systems. They vary in efficacy regarding properties such as accuracy, speed, and interpretability. In order to fulfill business requirements and objectives, companies are often torn about which algorithms to use. One of the most common yet thorniest issues is the tradeoff between accuracy and interpretability, especially when business goals require the algorithm to be both, but available methods outperform in one area while underperforming in the other. Logistic regression models, for one, are highly interpretable, but not necessarily accurate.

Industries and processes across the globe are embracing new technologies to increase efficiency and deliver faster and accurate outcomes. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have recently taken the world by storm with their advancements in delivering impactful and insightful results. Today, the recruitment sites are swarmed with AI-based jobs. Organizations across the world are looking for skilled resources in AI to help them to accelerate data analytics, research, and intelligence in operations. From robots serving food to self-driving cars to home listening devices, AI can be witnessed in our day-to-day lives.

Spatial data are characterized by their spatial dependence, which is often complex, non-linear, and difficult to capture with a single model. Significant levels of model uncertainty -- arising from these characteristics -- cannot be resolved by model selection or simple ensemble methods. We address this issue by proposing a novel methodology that captures spatially varying model uncertainty, which we call Bayesian spatial predictive synthesis. Our proposal is derived by identifying the theoretically best approximate model under reasonable conditions, which is a latent factor spatially varying coefficient model in the Bayesian predictive synthesis framework. We then show that our proposed method produces exact minimax predictive distributions, providing finite sample guarantees. Two MCMC strategies are implemented for full uncertainty quantification, as well as a variational inference strategy for fast point inference. We also extend the estimation strategy for general responses. Through simulation examples and two real data applications, we demonstrate that our proposed spatial Bayesian predictive synthesis outperforms standard spatial models and advanced machine learning methods in terms of predictive accuracy.

Qualitative probabilistic networks (QPNs) combine the conditional independence assumptions of Bayesian networks with the qualitative properties of positive and negative dependence. They formalise various intuitive properties of positive dependence to allow inferences over a large network of variables. However, we will demonstrate in this paper that, due to an incorrect symmetry property, many inferences obtained in non-binary QPNs are not mathematically true. We will provide examples of such incorrect inferences and briefly discuss possible resolutions.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a fast-growing area of study that stretching its presence to many business and research domains. Machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP) are subsets of AI to tackle different areas of data processing and modelling. This review article presents an overview of AI impact on education outlining with current opportunities. In the education domain, student feedback data is crucial to uncover the merits and demerits of existing services provided to students. AI can assist in identifying the areas of improvement in educational infrastructure, learning management systems, teaching practices and study environment. NLP techniques play a vital role in analyzing student feedback in textual format. This research focuses on existing NLP methodologies and applications that could be adapted to educational domain applications like sentiment annotations, entity annotations, text summarization, and topic modelling. Trends and challenges in adopting NLP in education were reviewed and explored. Contextbased challenges in NLP like sarcasm, domain-specific language, ambiguity, and aspect-based sentiment analysis are explained with existing methodologies to overcome them. Research community approaches to extract the semantic meaning of emoticons and special characters in feedback which conveys user opinion and challenges in adopting NLP in education are explored.

This dissertation focuses on modern causal inference under uncertainty and data restrictions, with applications to neoadjuvant clinical trials, distributed data networks, and robust individualized decision making. In the first project, we propose a method under the principal stratification framework to identify and estimate the average treatment effects on a binary outcome, conditional on the counterfactual status of a post-treatment intermediate response. Under mild assumptions, the treatment effect of interest can be identified. We extend the approach to address censored outcome data. The proposed method is applied to a neoadjuvant clinical trial and its performance is evaluated via simulation studies. In the second project, we propose a tree-based model averaging approach to improve the estimation accuracy of conditional average treatment effects at a target site by leveraging models derived from other potentially heterogeneous sites, without them sharing subject-level data. The performance of this approach is demonstrated by a study of the causal effects of oxygen therapy on hospital survival rates and backed up by comprehensive simulations. In the third project, we propose a robust individualized decision learning framework with sensitive variables to improve the worst-case outcomes of individuals caused by sensitive variables that are unavailable at the time of decision. Unlike most existing work that uses mean-optimal objectives, we propose a robust learning framework by finding a newly defined quantile- or infimum-optimal decision rule. From a causal perspective, we also generalize the classic notion of (average) fairness to conditional fairness for individual subjects. The reliable performance of the proposed method is demonstrated through synthetic experiments and three real-data applications.

Counterfactual explanations utilize feature perturbations to analyze the outcome of an original decision and recommend an actionable recourse. We argue that it is beneficial to provide several alternative explanations rather than a single point solution and propose a probabilistic paradigm to estimate a diverse set of counterfactuals. Specifically, we treat the perturbations as random variables endowed with prior distribution functions. This allows sampling multiple counterfactuals from the posterior density, with the added benefit of incorporating inductive biases, preserving domain specific constraints and quantifying uncertainty in estimates. More importantly, we leverage Bayesian hierarchical modeling to share information across different subgroups of a population, which can both improve robustness and measure fairness. A gradient based sampler with superior convergence characteristics efficiently computes the posterior samples. Experiments across several datasets demonstrate that the counterfactuals estimated using our approach are valid, sparse, diverse and feasible.