Automatic segmentation of multi-sequence (multi-modal) cardiac MR (CMR) images plays a significant role in diagnosis and management for a variety of cardiac diseases. However, the performance of relevant algorithms is significantly affected by the proper fusion of the multi-modal information. Furthermore, particular diseases, such as myocardial infarction, display irregular shapes on images and occupy small regions at random locations. These facts make pathology segmentation of multi-modal CMR images a challenging task. In this paper, we present the Max-Fusion U-Net that achieves improved pathology segmentation performance given aligned multi-modal images of LGE, T2-weighted, and bSSFP modalities. Specifically, modality-specific features are extracted by dedicated encoders. Then they are fused with the pixel-wise maximum operator. Together with the corresponding encoding features, these representations are propagated to decoding layers with U-Net skip-connections. Furthermore, a spatial-attention module is applied in the last decoding layer to encourage the network to focus on those small semantically meaningful pathological regions that trigger relatively high responses by the network neurons. We also use a simple image patch extraction strategy to dynamically resample training examples with varying spacial and batch sizes. With limited GPU memory, this strategy reduces the imbalance of classes and forces the model to focus on regions around the interested pathology. It further improves segmentation accuracy and reduces the mis-classification of pathology. We evaluate our methods using the Myocardial pathology segmentation (MyoPS) combining the multi-sequence CMR dataset which involves three modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model which outperforms the related baselines.

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Among different attack settings, the most challenging yet the most practical one is the hard-label setting where the attacker only has access to the hard-label output (prediction label) of the target model. Previous attempts are neither effective enough in terms of attack success rate nor efficient enough in terms of query complexity under the widely used $L_\infty$ norm threat model. In this paper, we present the Ray Searching attack (RayS), which greatly improves the hard-label attack effectiveness as well as efficiency. Unlike previous works, we reformulate the continuous problem of finding the closest decision boundary into a discrete problem that does not require any zeroth-order gradient estimation. In the meantime, all unnecessary searches are eliminated via a fast check step. This significantly reduces the number of queries needed for our hard-label attack. Moreover, interestingly, we found that the proposed RayS attack can also be used as a sanity check for possible "falsely robust" models. On several recently proposed defenses that claim to achieve the state-of-the-art robust accuracy, our attack method demonstrates that the current white-box/black-box attacks could still give a false sense of security and the robust accuracy drop between the most popular PGD attack and RayS attack could be as large as $28\%$. We believe that our proposed RayS attack could help identify falsely robust models that beat most white-box/black-box attacks.

This thesis develops a conceptual framework considering social data as representing the surface layer of a hierarchy of human social behaviours, needs and cognition which is employed to transform social data into representations that preserve social behaviours and their causalities. Based on this framework two platforms were built to capture insights from fast-paced and slow-paced social data. For fast-paced, a self-structuring and incremental learning technique was developed to automatically capture salient topics and corresponding dynamics over time. An event detection technique was developed to automatically monitor those identified topic pathways for significant fluctuations in social behaviours using multiple indicators such as volume and sentiment. This platform is demonstrated using two large datasets with over 1 million tweets. The separated topic pathways were representative of the key topics of each entity and coherent against topic coherence measures. Identified events were validated against contemporary events reported in news. Secondly for the slow-paced social data, a suite of new machine learning and natural language processing techniques were developed to automatically capture self-disclosed information of the individuals such as demographics, emotions and timeline of personal events. This platform was trialled on a large text corpus of over 4 million posts collected from online support groups. This was further extended to transform prostate cancer related online support group discussions into a multidimensional representation and investigated the self-disclosed quality of life of patients (and partners) against time, demographics and clinical factors. The capabilities of this extended platform have been demonstrated using a text corpus collected from 10 prostate cancer online support groups comprising of 609,960 prostate cancer discussions and 22,233 patients.

Modern neural networks, although achieving state-of-the-art results on many tasks, tend to have a large number of parameters, which increases training time and resource usage. This problem can be alleviated by pruning. Existing methods, however, often require extensive parameter tuning or multiple cycles of pruning and retraining to convergence in order to obtain a favorable accuracy-sparsity trade-off. To address these issues, we propose a novel pruning method which uses the oscillations around $0$ (i.e. sign flips) that a weight has undergone during training in order to determine its saliency. Our method can perform pruning before the network has converged, requires little tuning effort due to having good default values for its hyperparameters, and can directly target the level of sparsity desired by the user. Our experiments, performed on a variety of object classification architectures, show that it is competitive with existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance for levels of sparsity of $99.6\%$ and above for most of the architectures tested. For reproducibility, we release our code publicly at https://github.com/AndreiXYZ/flipout.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are emerging machine learning models on graphs. One key property behind the expressiveness of existing GNNs is that the learned node representations are permutation-equivariant. Though being a desirable property for certain tasks, however, permutation-equivariance prevents GNNs from being proximity-aware, i.e., preserving the walk-based proximities between pairs of nodes, which is another critical property for graph analytical tasks. On the other hand, some variants of GNNs are proposed to preserve node proximities, but they fail to maintain permutation-equivariance. How to empower GNNs to be proximity-aware while maintaining permutation-equivariance remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose Stochastic Message Passing (SMP), a general and simple GNN to maintain both proximity-awareness and permutation-equivariance properties. Specifically, we augment the existing GNNs with stochastic node representations learned to preserve node proximities. Though seemingly simple, we prove that such a mechanism can enable GNNs to preserve node proximities in theory while maintaining permutation-equivariance with certain parametrization. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of SMP for tasks including node classification and link prediction. Graph neural networks (GNNs), as generalizations of neural networks in analyzing graphs, have attracted considerable research attention.

Most of the research on Federated Learning (FL) has focused on analyzing global optimization, privacy, and communication, with limited attention focusing on analyzing the critical matter of performing efficient local training and inference at the edge devices. One of the main challenges for successful and efficient training and inference on edge devices is the careful selection of parameters to build local Machine Learning (ML) models. To this aim, we propose a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)-based technique to optimize the hyperparameter settings for the local ML models in an FL environment. We evaluate the performance of our proposed technique using two case studies. First, we consider smart city services and use an experimental transportation dataset for traffic prediction as a proxy for this setting. Second, we consider Industrial IoT (IIoT) services and use the real-time telemetry dataset to predict the probability that a machine will fail shortly due to component failures. Our experiments indicate that PSO provides an efficient approach for tuning the hyperparameters of deep Long short-term memory (LSTM) models when compared to the grid search method. Our experiments illustrate that the number of clients-server communication rounds to explore the landscape of configurations to find the near-optimal parameters are greatly reduced (roughly by two orders of magnitude needing only 2%--4% of the rounds compared to state of the art non-PSO-based approaches). We also demonstrate that utilizing the proposed PSO-based technique to find the near-optimal configurations for FL and centralized learning models does not adversely affect the accuracy of the models.

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is most widely used for deep neural network (DNN) training. However, the method does not always converge to a flat minimum of the loss surface that can demonstrate high generalization capability. Weight noise injection has been extensively studied for finding flat minima using the SGD method. We devise a new weight-noise injection-based SGD method that adds symmetrical noises to the DNN weights. The training with symmetrical noise evaluates the loss surface at two adjacent points, by which convergence to sharp minima can be avoided. Fixed-magnitude symmetric noises are added to minimize training instability. The proposed method is compared with the conventional SGD method and previous weight-noise injection algorithms using convolutional neural networks for image classification. Particularly, performance improvements in large batch training are demonstrated. This method shows superior performance compared with conventional SGD and weight-noise injection methods regardless of the batch-size and learning rate scheduling algorithms.

Graph neural networks (GNN), as a popular methodology for node representation learning on graphs, currently mainly focus on preserving the smoothness and identifiability of node representations. A robust node representation on graphs should further hold the stability property which means a node representation is resistant to slight perturbations on the input. In this paper, we introduce the stability of node representations in addition to the smoothness and identifiability, and develop a novel method called contrastive graph neural networks (CGNN) that learns robust node representations in an unsupervised manner. Specifically, CGNN maintains the stability and identifiability by a contrastive learning objective, while preserving the smoothness with existing GNN models. Furthermore, the proposed method is a generic framework that can be equipped with many other backbone models (e.g. GCN, GraphSage and GAT). Extensive experiments on four benchmarks under both transductive and inductive learning setups demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in comparison with recent supervised and unsupervised models.

Attributed networks nowadays are ubiquitous in a myriad of high-impact applications, such as social network analysis, financial fraud detection, and drug discovery. As a central analytical task on attributed networks, node classification has received much attention in the research community. In real-world attributed networks, a large portion of node classes only contain limited labeled instances, rendering a long-tail node class distribution. Existing node classification algorithms are unequipped to handle the \textit{few-shot} node classes. As a remedy, few-shot learning has attracted a surge of attention in the research community. Yet, few-shot node classification remains a challenging problem as we need to address the following questions: (i) How to extract meta-knowledge from an attributed network for few-shot node classification? (ii) How to identify the informativeness of each labeled instance for building a robust and effective model? To answer these questions, in this paper, we propose a graph meta-learning framework -- Graph Prototypical Networks (GPN). By constructing a pool of semi-supervised node classification tasks to mimic the real test environment, GPN is able to perform \textit{meta-learning} on an attributed network and derive a highly generalizable model for handling the target classification task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior capability of GPN in few-shot node classification.

An artificial intelligence (AI) processing chip developed in Ireland has been included on board a satellite that blasted off into space from French Guiana early this morning. The PhiSat-1 is the first European satellite carrying out an experiment to demonstrate how on-board deep-learning technology can speed up the rate at which observation data is processed and transmitted to Earth. The AI chip, developed by Dublin-headquartered robotics start-up Ubotica Technologies, has been installed on the satellite so decisions can be made on board more quickly than on the ground. It also helps reduce the data load sent back to Earth. Ubotica's Myriad 2 AI chip uses architecture originally developed by another Irish technology company, Movidius, acquired by Intel in a multimillion euro deal in 2016.