Social media plays a major role during and after major natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes, large-scale fires, etc.), as people ``on the ground'' post useful information on what is actually happening. Given the large amounts of posts, a major challenge is identifying the information that is useful and actionable. Emergency responders are largely interested in finding out what events are taking place so they can properly plan and deploy resources. In this paper we address the problem of automatically identifying important sub-events (within a large-scale emergency ``event'', such as a hurricane). In particular, we present a novel, unsupervised learning framework to detect sub-events in Tweets for retrospective crisis analysis. We first extract noun-verb pairs and phrases from raw tweets as sub-event candidates. Then, we learn a semantic embedding of extracted noun-verb pairs and phrases, and rank them against a crisis-specific ontology. We filter out noisy and irrelevant information then cluster the noun-verb pairs and phrases so that the top-ranked ones describe the most important sub-events. Through quantitative experiments on two large crisis data sets (Hurricane Harvey and the 2015 Nepal Earthquake), we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach over the state-of-the-art. Our qualitative evaluation shows better performance compared to our baseline.

In both mobile and web applications, speeding up user interface response times can often lead to significant improvements in user engagement. A common technique to improve responsiveness is to precompute data ahead of time for specific features. However, simply precomputing data for all user and feature combinations is prohibitive at scale due to both network constraints and server-side computational costs. It is therefore important to accurately predict per-user feature usage in order to minimize wasted precomputation ("predictive precompute''). In this paper, we describe the novel application of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for predictive precompute. We compare their performance with traditional machine learning models, and share findings from their use in a billion-user scale production environment at Facebook. We demonstrate that RNN models improve prediction accuracy, eliminate most feature engineering steps, and reduce the computational cost of serving predictions by an order of magnitude.

Well begun is half done. In the crowdfunding market, the early fundraising performance of the project is a concerned issue for both creators and platforms. However, estimating the early fundraising performance before the project published is very challenging and still under-explored. To that end, in this paper, we present a focused study on this important problem in a market modeling view. Specifically, we propose a Graph-based Market Environment model (GME) for estimating the early fundraising performance of the target project by exploiting the market environment. In addition, we discriminatively model the market competition and market evolution by designing two graph-based neural network architectures and incorporating them into the joint optimization stage. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on the real-world crowdfunding data collected from Indiegogo.com. The experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model for modeling and estimating the early fundraising performance of the target project.

Deep neural networks and the ENO procedure are both efficient frameworks for approximating rough functions. We prove that at any order, the ENO interpolation procedure can be cast as a deep ReLU neural network. This surprising fact enables the transfer of several desirable properties of the ENO procedure to deep neural networks, including its high-order accuracy at approximating Lipschitz functions. Numerical tests for the resulting neural networks show excellent performance for approximating solutions of nonlinear conservation laws and at data compression.

Various neural network based methods are capable of anticipating human body motions from data for a short period of time. What these methods lack are the interpretability and explainability of the network and its results. We propose to use Dynamic Mode Decomposition with delays to represent and anticipate human body motions. Exploring the influence of the number of delays on the reconstruction and prediction of various motion classes, we show that the anticipation errors in our results are comparable or even better for very short anticipation times ($<0.4$ sec) to a recurrent neural network based method. We perceive our method as a first step towards the interpretability of the results by representing human body motions as linear combinations of ``factors''. In addition, compared to the neural network based methods large training times are not needed. Actually, our methods do not even regress to any other motions than the one to be anticipated and hence is of a generic nature.

On April 13th, 2019, OpenAI Five became the first AI system to defeat the world champions at an esports game. The game of Dota 2 presents novel challenges for AI systems such as long time horizons, imperfect information, and complex, continuous state-action spaces, all challenges which will become increasingly central to more capable AI systems. OpenAI Five leveraged existing reinforcement learning techniques, scaled to learn from batches of approximately 2 million frames every 2 seconds. We developed a distributed training system and tools for continual training which allowed us to train OpenAI Five for 10 months. By defeating the Dota 2 world champion (Team OG), OpenAI Five demonstrates that self-play reinforcement learning can achieve superhuman performance on a difficult task.

Deep convolutional neural networks can be highly vulnerable to small perturbations of their inputs, potentially a major issue or limitation on system robustness when using deep networks as classifiers. In this paper we propose a low-cost method to explore marginal sample data near trained classifier decision boundaries, thus identifying potential adversarial samples. By finding such adversarial samples it is possible to reduce the search space of adversarial attack algorithms while keeping a reasonable successful perturbation rate. In our developed strategy, the potential adversarial samples represent only 61% of the test data, but in fact cover more than 82% of the adversarial samples produced by iFGSM and 92% of the adversarial samples successfully perturbed by DeepFool on CIFAR10.

Approximately, 50 million people in the world are affected by epilepsy. For patients, the anti-epileptic drugs are not always useful and these drugs may have undesired side effects on a patient's health. If the seizure is predicted the patients will have enough time to take preventive measures. The purpose of this work is to investigate the application of bidirectional LSTM for seizure prediction. In this paper, we trained EEG data from canines on a double Bidirectional LSTM layer followed by a fully connected layer. The data was provided in the form of a Kaggle competition by American Epilepsy Society. The main task was to classify the interictal and preictal EEG clips. Using this model, we obtained an AUC of 0.84 on the test dataset. Which shows that our classifier's performance is above chance level on unseen data. The comparison with the previous work shows that the use of bidirectional LSTM networks can achieve significantly better results than SVM and GRU networks.

Assessing coronary artery plaque segments in coronary CT angiography scans is an important task to improve patient management and clinical outcomes, as it can help to decide whether invasive investigation and treatment are necessary. In this work, we present three machine learning approaches capable of performing this task. The first approach is based on radiomics, where a plaque segmentation is used to calculate various shape-, intensity- and texture-based features under different image transformations. A second approach is based on deep learning and relies on centerline extraction as sole prerequisite. In the third approach, we fuse the deep learning approach with radiomic features. On our data the methods reached similar scores as simulated fractional flow reserve (FFR) measurements, which - in contrast to our methods - requires an exact segmentation of the whole coronary tree and often time-consuming manual interaction. In literature, the performance of simulated FFR reaches an AUC between 0.79-0.93 predicting an abnormal invasive FFR that demands revascularization. The radiomics approach achieves an AUC of 0.86, the deep learning approach 0.84 and the combined method 0.88 for predicting the revascularization decision directly. While all three proposed methods can be determined within seconds, the FFR simulation typically takes several minutes. Provided representative training data in sufficient quantities, we believe that the presented methods can be used to create systems for fully automatic non-invasive risk assessment for a variety of adverse cardiac events.

A discrete system's heterogeneity is measured by the R\'enyi heterogeneity family of indices (also known as Hill numbers or Hannah-Kay indices), whose units are known as the numbers equivalent, and whose scaling properties are consistent and intuitive. Unfortunately, numbers equivalent heterogeneity measures for non-categorical data require a priori (A) categorical partitioning and (B) pairwise distance measurement on the space of observable data. This precludes their application to problems in disciplines where categories are ill-defined or where semantically relevant features must be learned as abstractions from some data. We thus introduce representational R\'enyi heterogeneity (RRH), which transforms an observable domain onto a latent space upon which the R\'enyi heterogeneity is both tractable and semantically relevant. This method does not require a priori binning nor definition of a distance function on the observable space. Compared with existing state-of-the-art indices on a beta-mixture distribution, we show that RRH more accurately detects the number of distinct mixture components. We also show that RRH can measure heterogeneity in natural images whose semantically relevant features must be abstracted using deep generative models. We further show that RRH can uniquely capture heterogeneity caused by distinct components in mixture distributions. Our novel approach will enable measurement of heterogeneity in disciplines where a priori categorical partitions of observable data are not possible, or where semantically relevant features must be inferred using latent variable models.