Patients with Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) have impaired cognitive abilities, executive and behavioral traits, loss of language ability, and decreased memory capabilities. Based on the distinct patterns of cortical atrophy and symptoms, the FTD spectrum primarily includes three variants: behavioral variant FTD (bvFTD), non-fluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA), and semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA). The purpose of this study is to classify MRI images of every single subject into one of the spectrums of the FTD in a hierarchical order by applying data-driven techniques of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on cortical thickness data. This data is computed by FreeSurfer software. We used the Smallest Univalue Segment Assimilating Nucleus (SUSAN) technique to minimize the noise in cortical thickness data. Specifically, we took 204 subjects from the frontotemporal lobar degeneration neuroimaging initiative (NIFTD) database to validate this approach, and each subject was diagnosed in one of the diagnostic categories (bvFTD, svPPA, nfvPPA and cognitively normal). Our proposed automated classification model yielded classification accuracy of 86.5, 76, and 72.7 with support vector machine (SVM), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), and Naive Bayes methods, respectively, in 10-fold cross-validation analysis, which is a significant improvement on a traditional single multi-class model with an accuracy of 82.7, 73.4, and 69.2.

Multi-task learning is increasingly used to investigate the association structure between multiple responses and a single set of predictor variables in many applications. In the era of big data, the coexistence of incomplete outcomes, large number of responses, and high dimensionality in predictors poses unprecedented challenges in estimation, prediction, and computation. In this paper, we propose a scalable and computationally efficient procedure, called PEER, for large-scale multi-response regression with incomplete outcomes, where both the numbers of responses and predictors can be high-dimensional. Motivated by sparse factor regression, we convert the multi-response regression into a set of univariate-response regressions, which can be efficiently implemented in parallel. Under some mild regularity conditions, we show that PEER enjoys nice sampling properties including consistency in estimation, prediction, and variable selection. Extensive simulation studies show that our proposal compares favorably with several existing methods in estimation accuracy, variable selection, and computation efficiency.

The world celebrated Women's History Month in March, and it is a timely moment for us to look at the forces that will shape gender parity in the future. Even as the pandemic accelerates digitization and the future of work, artificial intelligence (AI) stands out as a potentially helpful--or hurtful--tool in the equity agenda. McKinsey recorded a podcast in collaboration with Citi that dives into how gender bias is reflected in AI, why we must consciously debias our machine-human interfaces, and how AI can be a positive force for gender parity. Ioana Niculcea: Before we start the conversation, I think it's important for us to spend a moment assessing the amount of change that has taken place with regard to AI, and how the pace of that change has accelerated over the past few years. And many people argue that in light of the current COVID-19 circumstance, we'll feel further acceleration as people move toward digitization. I spent the past eight years in financial services, and it all started with data. Datafication of the industry was sort of the point of origin. And we hear often that over 90 percent of the data that we have today was created over the past two years. You hear things like every minute, there's over one million Facebook logins and 4.5 million YouTube videos being streamed, or 17,000 different Uber rides. There's a lot of data, and only 1 percent of that is being analyzed, as said today.

Register for a free or VIP pass today. The past several years have made it clear that AI and machine learning are not a panacea when it comes to fair outcomes. Applying algorithmic solutions to social problems can magnify biases against marginalized peoples; undersampling populations always results in worse predictive accuracy. But bias in AI doesn't arise from the datasets alone. Problem formulation, or the way researchers fit tasks to AI techniques, can contribute.

Climate change poses a major challenge to humanity, especially in its impact on agriculture, a challenge that a responsible AI should meet. In this paper, we examine a CBR system (PBI-CBR) designed to aid sustainable dairy farming by supporting grassland management, through accurate crop growth prediction. As climate changes, PBI-CBR's historical cases become less useful in predicting future grass growth. Hence, we extend PBI-CBR using data augmentation, to specifically handle disruptive climate events, using a counterfactual method (from XAI). Study 1 shows that historical, extreme climate-events (climate outlier cases) tend to be used by PBI-CBR to predict grass growth during climate disrupted periods. Study 2 shows that synthetic outliers, generated as counterfactuals on a outlier-boundary, improve the predictive accuracy of PBI-CBR, during the drought of 2018. This study also shows that an instance-based counterfactual method does better than a benchmark, constraint-guided method.

The recent availability of low-power neural accelerator hardware, combined with improvements in end-to-end neural facial recognition algorithms provides, enabling technology for on-device facial authentication. The present research work examines the effects of directional lighting on a State-of-Art(SoA) neural face recognizer. A synthetic re-lighting technique is used to augment data samples due to the lack of public data-sets with sufficient directional lighting variations. Top lighting and its variants (top-left, top-right) are found to have minimal effect on accuracy, while bottom-left or bottom-right directional lighting has the most pronounced effects. Following the fine-tuning of network weights, the face recognition model is shown to achieve close to the original Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (ROC)performance across all lighting conditions and demonstrates an ability to generalize beyond the lighting augmentations used in the fine-tuning data-set. This work shows that an SoA neural face recognition model can be tuned to compensate for directional lighting effects, removing the need for a pre-processing step before applying facial recognition.

I recently completed the Artificial Intelligence Product Manager Nanodegree Program on Udacity and I'd like to share a summary of everything I learned with you. This also includes bits from my experience as a technical product manager. This all a huge dump from my mind, written from the first stroke to last on my keyboard so kindly excuse any details I may miss or depths I didn't hit. It would be great to start with "why" and what motivated me to complete this program. In the past year, I've been working as a full-time product manager, sitting at the intersection of engineering and business and it's been fun. However, I'd recently been thinking deeply about the future of technology and what turns it could take.

The ROC curve is the gold standard for measuring the performance of a test/scoring statistic regarding its capacity to discriminate between two statistical populations in a wide variety of applications, ranging from anomaly detection in signal processing to information retrieval, through medical diagnosis. Most practical performance measures used in scoring/ranking applications such as the AUC, the local AUC, the p-norm push, the DCG and others, can be viewed as summaries of the ROC curve. In this paper, the fact that most of these empirical criteria can be expressed as two-sample linear rank statistics is highlighted and concentration inequalities for collections of such random variables, referred to as two-sample rank processes here, are proved, when indexed by VC classes of scoring functions. Based on these nonasymptotic bounds, the generalization capacity of empirical maximizers of a wide class of ranking performance criteria is next investigated from a theoretical perspective. It is also supported by empirical evidence through convincing numerical experiments.

We create an artificial system of agents (attention-based neural networks) which selectively exchange messages with each-other in order to study the emergence of memetic evolution and how memetic evolutionary pressures interact with genetic evolution of the network weights. We observe that the ability of agents to exert selection pressures on each-other is essential for memetic evolution to bootstrap itself into a state which has both high-fidelity replication of memes, as well as continuing production of new memes over time. However, in this system there is very little interaction between this memetic 'ecology' and underlying tasks driving individual fitness - the emergent meme layer appears to be neither helpful nor harmful to agents' ability to learn to solve tasks. Sourcecode for these experiments is available at https://github.com/GoodAI/memes

Because manufacturing processes evolve fast, and since production visual aspect can vary significantly on a daily basis, the ability to rapidly update machine vision based inspection systems is paramount. Unfortunately, supervised learning of convolutional neural networks requires a significant amount of annotated images for being able to learn effectively from new data. Acknowledging the abundance of continuously generated images coming from the production line and the cost of their annotation, we demonstrate it is possible to prioritize and accelerate the annotation process. In this work, we develop a methodology for learning actively, from rapidly mined, weakly (i.e. partially) annotated data, enabling a fast, direct feedback from the operators on the production line and tackling a big machine vision weakness: false positives. We also consider the problem of covariate shift, which arises inevitably due to changing conditions during data acquisition. In that regard, we show domain-adversarial training to be an efficient way to address this issue.