With the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak, we characterize the nature of the growth trajectories of counties in the United States using a novel combination of spectral clustering and the correlation matrix. As the U.S. and the rest of the world are experiencing a severe second wave of infections, the importance of assigning growth membership to counties and understanding the determinants of the growth are increasingly evident. Subsequently, we select the demographic features that are most statistically significant in distinguishing the communities. Lastly, we effectively predict the future growth of a given county with an LSTM using three social distancing scores. This comprehensive study captures the nature of counties' growth in cases at a very micro-level using growth communities, demographic factors, and social distancing performance to help government agencies utilize known information to make appropriate decisions regarding which potential counties to target resources and funding to.

In this paper, we describe our system for the AAAI 2021 shared task of COVID-19 Fake News Detection in English, where we achieved the 3rd position with the weighted F1 score of 0.9859 on the test set. Specifically, we proposed an ensemble method of different pre-trained language models such as BERT, Roberta, Ernie, etc. with various training strategies including warm-up,learning rate schedule and k-fold cross-validation. We also conduct an extensive analysis of the samples that are not correctly classified. The code is available at:https://github.com/archersama/3rd-solution-COVID19-Fake-News-Detection-in-English.

Although deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have achieved significant accuracy in skin lesion classification comparable or even superior to those of dermatologists, practical implementation of these models for skin cancer screening in low resource settings is hindered by their limitations in computational cost and training dataset. To overcome these limitations, we propose a low-cost and high-performance data augmentation strategy that includes two consecutive stages of augmentation search and network search. At the augmentation search stage, the augmentation strategy is optimized in the search space of Low-Cost-Augment (LCA) under the criteria of balanced accuracy (BACC) with 5-fold cross validation. At the network search stage, the DCNNs are fine-tuned with the full training set in order to select the model with the highest BACC. The efficiency of the proposed data augmentation strategy is verified on the HAM10000 dataset using EfficientNets as a baseline. With the proposed strategy, we are able to reduce the search space to 60 and achieve a high BACC of 0.853 by using a single DCNN model without external database, suitable to be implemented in mobile devices for DCNN-based skin lesion detection in low resource settings.

We present deep significance clustering (DICE), a framework for jointly performing representation learning and clustering for "outcome-aware" stratification. DICE is intended to generate cluster membership that may be used to categorize a population by individual risk level for a targeted outcome. Following the representation learning and clustering steps, we embed the objective function in DICE with a constraint which requires a statistically significant association between the outcome and cluster membership of learned representations. DICE further includes a neural architecture search step to maximize both the likelihood of representation learning and outcome classification accuracy with cluster membership as the predictor. To demonstrate its utility in medicine for patient risk-stratification, the performance of DICE was evaluated using two datasets with different outcome ratios extracted from real-world electronic health records. Outcomes are defined as acute kidney injury (30.4\%) among a cohort of COVID-19 patients, and discharge disposition (36.8\%) among a cohort of heart failure patients, respectively. Extensive results demonstrate that DICE has superior performance as measured by the difference in outcome distribution across clusters, Silhouette score, Calinski-Harabasz index, and Davies-Bouldin index for clustering, and Area under the ROC Curve (AUC) for outcome classification compared to several baseline approaches.

In this paper, we study the importance of pruning in Deep Networks (DNs) and motivate it based on the current absence of data aware weight initialization. Current DN initializations, focusing primarily at maintaining first order statistics of the feature maps through depth, force practitioners to overparametrize a model in order to reach high performances. This overparametrization can then be pruned a posteriori, leading to a phenomenon known as "winning tickets". However, the pruning literature still relies on empirical investigations, lacking a theoretical understanding of (1) how pruning affects the decision boundary, (2) how to interpret pruning, (3) how to design principled pruning techniques, and (4) how to theoretically study pruning. To tackle those questions, we propose to employ recent advances in the theoretical analysis of Continuous Piecewise Affine (CPA) DNs. From this viewpoint, we can study the DNs' input space partitioning and detect the early-bird (EB) phenomenon, guide practitioners by identifying when to stop the first training step, provide interpretability into current pruning techniques, and develop a principled pruning criteria towards efficient DN training. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to show the effectiveness of the proposed spline pruning criteria in terms of both layerwise and global pruning over state-of-the-art pruning methods.

As interest in autonomous driving increases, efforts are being made to meet requirements for the high-level automation of vehicles. In this context, the functionality inside the vehicle cabin plays a key role in ensuring a safe and pleasant journey for driver and passenger alike. At the same time, recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) have enabled a whole range of new applications and assistance systems to solve automated problems in the vehicle cabin. This paper presents a thorough survey on existing work that utilizes AI methods for use-cases inside the driving cabin, focusing, in particular, on application scenarios related to (1) driving safety and (2) driving comfort. Results from the surveyed works show that AI technology has a promising future in tackling in-cabin tasks within the autonomous driving aspect.

Objectives: Functional connectivity triggered by naturalistic stimulus (e.g., movies) and machine learning techniques provide a great insight in exploring the brain functions such as fluid intelligence. However, functional connectivity are considered to be multi-layered, while traditional machine learning based on individual models not only are limited in performance, but also fail to extract multi-dimensional and multi-layered information from brain network. Methods: In this study, inspired by multi-layer brain network structure, we propose a new method namely Weighted Ensemble-model and Network Analysis, which combines the machine learning and graph theory for improved fluid intelligence prediction. Firstly, functional connectivity analysis and graphical theory were jointly employed. The functional connectivity and graphical indices computed using the preprocessed fMRI data were then all fed into auto-encoder parallelly for feature extraction to predict the fluid intelligence. In order to improve the performance, tree regression and ridge regression model were automatically stacked and fused with weighted values. Finally, layers of auto-encoder were visualized to better illustrate the connectome patterns, followed by the evaluation of the performance to justify the mechanism of brain functions. Results: Our proposed methods achieved best performance with 3.85 mean absolute deviation, 0.66 correlation coefficient and 0.42 R-squared coefficient, outperformed other state-of-the-art methods. It is also worth noting that, the optimization of the biological pattern extraction was automated though the auto-encoder algorithm. Conclusion: The proposed method not only outperforming the state-of-the-art reports, but also able to effectively capturing the biological patterns from functional connectivity during naturalistic movies state for potential clinical explorations.

Knowledge is a formal way of understanding the world, providing a human-level cognition and intelligence for the next-generation artificial intelligence (AI). One of the representations of knowledge is the structural relations between entities. An effective way to automatically acquire this important knowledge, called Relation Extraction (RE), a sub-task of information extraction, plays a vital role in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Its purpose is to identify semantic relations between entities from natural language text. To date, there are several studies for RE in previous works, which have documented these techniques based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) become a prevailing technique in this research. Especially, the supervised and distant supervision methods based on DNNs are the most popular and reliable solutions for RE. This article 1)introduces some general concepts, and further 2)gives a comprehensive overview of DNNs in RE from two points of view: supervised RE, which attempts to improve the standard RE systems, and distant supervision RE, which adopts DNNs to design the sentence encoder and the de-noise method. We further 3)cover some novel methods and describe some recent trends and discuss possible future research directions for this task.

Developing human-like conversational agents is a prime area in HCI research and subsumes many tasks. Predicting listener backchannels is one such actively-researched task. While many studies have used different approaches for backchannel prediction, they all have depended on manual annotations for a large dataset. This is a bottleneck impacting the scalability of development. To this end, we propose using semi-supervised techniques to automate the process of identifying backchannels, thereby easing the annotation process. To analyze our identification module's feasibility, we compared the backchannel prediction models trained on (a) manually-annotated and (b) semi-supervised labels. Quantitative analysis revealed that the proposed semi-supervised approach could attain 95% of the former's performance. Our user-study findings revealed that almost 60% of the participants found the backchannel responses predicted by the proposed model more natural. Finally, we also analyzed the impact of personality on the type of backchannel signals and validated our findings in the user-study.

In this paper, we present a model for semantic memory that allows machines to collect information and experiences to become more proficient with time. After a semantic analysis of the data, information is stored in a knowledge graph which is used to comprehend instructions, expressed in natural language, and execute the required tasks in a deterministic manner. This imparts industrial robots cognitive behavior and an intuitive user interface, which is most appreciated in an era, when collaborative robots are to work alongside humans. The paper outlines the architecture of the system together with a practical implementation of the proposal.