Almost 80 million Americans suffer from hair loss due to aging, stress, medication, or genetic makeup. Hair and scalp-related diseases often go unnoticed in the beginning. Sometimes, a patient cannot differentiate between hair loss and regular hair fall. Diagnosing hair-related diseases is time-consuming as it requires professional dermatologists to perform visual and medical tests. Because of that, the overall diagnosis gets delayed, which worsens the severity of the illness. Due to the image-processing ability, neural network-based applications are used in various sectors, especially healthcare and health informatics, to predict deadly diseases like cancers and tumors. These applications assist clinicians and patients and provide an initial insight into early-stage symptoms. In this study, we used a deep learning approach that successfully predicts three main types of hair loss and scalp-related diseases: alopecia, psoriasis, and folliculitis. However, limited study in this area, unavailability of a proper dataset, and degree of variety among the images scattered over the internet made the task challenging. 150 images were obtained from various sources and then preprocessed by denoising, image equalization, enhancement, and data balancing, thereby minimizing the error rate. After feeding the processed data into the 2D convolutional neural network (CNN) model, we obtained overall training accuracy of 96.2%, with a validation accuracy of 91.1%. The precision and recall score of alopecia, psoriasis, and folliculitis are 0.895, 0.846, and 1.0, respectively. We also created a dataset of the scalp images for future prospective researchers.

With the rise of deep learning in various applications, privacy concerns around the protection of training data has become a critical area of research. Whereas prior studies have focused on privacy risks in single-modal models, we introduce a novel method to assess privacy for multi-modal models, specifically vision-language models like CLIP. The proposed Identity Inference Attack (IDIA) reveals whether an individual was included in the training data by querying the model with images of the same person. Letting the model choose from a wide variety of possible text labels, the model reveals whether it recognizes the person and, therefore, was used for training. Our large-scale experiments on CLIP demonstrate that individuals used for training can be identified with very high accuracy. We confirm that the model has learned to associate names with depicted individuals, implying the existence of sensitive information that can be extracted by adversaries. Our results highlight the need for stronger privacy protection in large-scale models and suggest that IDIAs can be used to prove the unauthorized use of data for training and to enforce privacy laws.

Estimating the traversability of terrain should be reliable and accurate in diverse conditions for autonomous driving in off-road environments. However, learning-based approaches often yield unreliable results when confronted with unfamiliar contexts, and it is challenging to obtain manual annotations frequently for new circumstances. In this paper, we introduce a method for learning traversability from images that utilizes only self-supervision and no manual labels, enabling it to easily learn traversability in new circumstances. To this end, we first generate self-supervised traversability labels from past driving trajectories by labeling regions traversed by the vehicle as highly traversable. Using the self-supervised labels, we then train a neural network that identifies terrains that are safe to traverse from an image using a one-class classification algorithm. Additionally, we supplement the limitations of self-supervised labels by incorporating methods of self-supervised learning of visual representations. To conduct a comprehensive evaluation, we collect data in a variety of driving environments and perceptual conditions and show that our method produces reliable estimations in various environments. In addition, the experimental results validate that our method outperforms other self-supervised traversability estimation methods and achieves comparable performances with supervised learning methods trained on manually labeled data.

This work presents a novel and promising approach to the clinical management of acute stroke. Using machine learning techniques, our research has succeeded in developing accurate diagnosis and prediction real-time models from hemodynamic data. These models are able to diagnose stroke subtype with 30 minutes of monitoring, to predict the exitus during the first 3 hours of monitoring, and to predict the stroke recurrence in just 15 minutes of monitoring. Patients with difficult access to a \acrshort{CT} scan, and all patients that arrive at the stroke unit of a specialized hospital will benefit from these positive results. The results obtained from the real-time developed models are the following: stroke diagnosis around $98\%$ precision ($97.8\%$ Sensitivity, $99.5\%$ Specificity), exitus prediction with $99.8\%$ precision ($99.8\%$ Sens., $99.9\%$ Spec.) and $98\%$ precision predicting stroke recurrence ($98\%$ Sens., $99\%$ Spec.).

There have been remarkable breakthroughs in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, notably in the areas of Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning. Additionally, hate speech detection in dialogues has been gaining popularity among Natural Language Processing researchers with the increased use of social media. However, as evidenced by the recent trends, the need for the dimensions of explainability and interpretability in AI models has been deeply realised. Taking note of the factors above, the research goal of this paper is to bridge the gap between hate speech prediction and the explanations generated by the system to support its decision. This has been achieved by first predicting the classification of a text and then providing a posthoc, model agnostic and surrogate interpretability approach for explainability and to prevent model bias. The bidirectional transformer model BERT has been used for prediction because of its state of the art efficiency over other Machine Learning models. The model agnostic algorithm LIME generates explanations for the output of a trained classifier and predicts the features that influence the model decision. The predictions generated from the model were evaluated manually, and after thorough evaluation, we observed that the model performs efficiently in predicting and explaining its prediction. Lastly, we suggest further directions for the expansion of the provided research work.

The digitalization of news media become a good indicator of progress and signal to more threats. Media disinformation or fake news is one of these threats, and it is necessary to take any action in fighting disinformation. This paper utilizes ground truth-based annotations and TF-IDF as feature extraction for the news articles which is then used as a training data set for Multinomial Naive Bayes. The model has an accuracy of 99.46% in training and 88.98% in predicting unseen data. Tagging fake news as real news is a concerning point on the prediction that is indicated in the F1 score of 89.68%. This could lead to a negative impact. To prevent this to happen it is suggested to further improve the corpus collection, and use an ensemble machine learning to reinforce the prediction

Label errors have been found to be prevalent in popular text, vision, and audio datasets, which heavily influence the safe development and evaluation of machine learning algorithms. Despite increasing efforts towards improving the quality of generic data types, such as images and texts, the problem of mislabel detection in graph data remains underexplored. To bridge the gap, we explore mislabelling issues in popular real-world graph datasets and propose GraphCleaner, a post-hoc method to detect and correct these mislabelled nodes in graph datasets. GraphCleaner combines the novel ideas of 1) Synthetic Mislabel Dataset Generation, which seeks to generate realistic mislabels; and 2) Neighborhood-Aware Mislabel Detection, where neighborhood dependency is exploited in both labels and base classifier predictions. Empirical evaluations on 6 datasets and 6 experimental settings demonstrate that GraphCleaner outperforms the closest baseline, with an average improvement of 0.14 in F1 score, and 0.16 in MCC. On real-data case studies, GraphCleaner detects real and previously unknown mislabels in popular graph benchmarks: PubMed, Cora, CiteSeer and OGB-arxiv; we find that at least 6.91% of PubMed data is mislabelled or ambiguous, and simply removing these mislabelled data can boost evaluation performance from 86.71% to 89.11%.

Research in child development has shown that embodied experience handling physical objects contributes to many cognitive abilities, including visual learning. One characteristic of such experience is that the learner sees the same object from several different viewpoints. In this paper, we study how learning signals that equate different viewpoints -- e.g., assigning similar representations to different views of a single object -- can support robust visual learning. We use the Toybox dataset, which contains egocentric videos of humans manipulating different objects, and conduct experiments using a computer vision framework for self-supervised contrastive learning. We find that representations learned by equating different physical viewpoints of an object benefit downstream image classification accuracy. Further experiments show that this performance improvement is robust to variations in the gaps between viewpoints, and that the benefits transfer to several different image classification tasks.

Although much literature has established the presence of demographic bias in natural language processing (NLP) models, most work relies on curated bias metrics that may not be reflective of real-world applications. At the same time, practitioners are increasingly using algorithmic tools in high-stakes settings, with particular recent interest in NLP. In this work, we focus on one such setting: child protective services (CPS). CPS workers often write copious free-form text notes about families they are working with, and CPS agencies are actively seeking to deploy NLP models to leverage these data. Given well-established racial bias in this setting, we investigate possible ways deployed NLP is liable to increase racial disparities. We specifically examine word statistics within notes and algorithmic fairness in risk prediction, coreference resolution, and named entity recognition (NER). We document consistent algorithmic unfairness in NER models, possible algorithmic unfairness in coreference resolution models, and little evidence of exacerbated racial bias in risk prediction. While there is existing pronounced criticism of risk prediction, our results expose previously undocumented risks of racial bias in realistic information extraction systems, highlighting potential concerns in deploying them, even though they may appear more benign. Our work serves as a rare realistic examination of NLP algorithmic fairness in a potential deployed setting and a timely investigation of a specific risk associated with deploying NLP in CPS settings.

Heart failure is a syndrome which occurs when the heart is not able to pump blood and oxygen to support other organs in the body. Identifying the underlying themes in the diagnostic codes and procedure reports of patients admitted for heart failure could reveal the clinical phenotypes associated with heart failure and to group patients based on their similar characteristics which could also help in predicting patient outcomes like length of stay. These clinical phenotypes usually have a probabilistic latent structure and hence, as there has been no previous work on identifying phenotypes in clinical notes of heart failure patients using a probabilistic framework and to predict length of stay of these patients using data-driven artificial intelligence-based methods, we apply natural language processing technique, topic modeling, to identify the themes present in diagnostic codes and in procedure reports of 1,200 patients admitted for heart failure at the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System (UI Health). Topic modeling identified twelve themes each in diagnostic codes and procedure reports which revealed information about different phenotypes related to various perspectives about heart failure, to study patients' profiles and to discover new relationships among medical concepts. Each theme had a set of keywords and each clinical note was labeled with two themes - one corresponding to its diagnostic code and the other corresponding to its procedure reports along with their percentage contribution. We used these themes and their percentage contribution to predict length of stay. We found that the themes discovered in diagnostic codes and procedure reports using topic modeling together were able to predict length of stay of the patients with an accuracy of 61.1% and an Area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (ROC AUC) value of 0.828.