Recent developments in hardware and information technology have enabled the emergence of billions of connected, intelligent devices around the world exchanging information with minimal human involvement. This paradigm, known as the Internet of Things (IoT), is progressing quickly, with an estimated 27 billion devices by 2025 (almost four devices per person) [1, 2]. These smart devices help improve our quality of life, with wearables to monitor health, vehicles that interact with traffic centers and other vehicles to ensure safety, and various home appliances offering comfort. This increase in the number of IoT devices and successful IoT services has generated tremendous data. The International Data Corporation report estimates that by 2025 this data will grow from 4 to 140 zettabytes [3].

Sparse training has emerged as a promising method for resource-efficient deep neural networks (DNNs) in real-world applications. However, the reliability of sparse models remains a crucial concern, particularly in detecting unknown out-of-distribution (OOD) data. This study addresses the knowledge gap by investigating the reliability of sparse training from an OOD perspective and reveals that sparse training exacerbates OOD unreliability. The lack of unknown information and the sparse constraints hinder the effective exploration of weight space and accurate differentiation between known and unknown knowledge. To tackle these challenges, we propose a new unknown-aware sparse training method, which incorporates a loss modification, auto-tuning strategy, and a voting scheme to guide weight space exploration and mitigate confusion between known and unknown information without incurring significant additional costs or requiring access to additional OOD data. Theoretical insights demonstrate how our method reduces model confidence when faced with OOD samples. Empirical experiments across multiple datasets, model architectures, and sparsity levels validate the effectiveness of our method, with improvements of up to \textbf{8.4\%} in AUROC while maintaining comparable or higher accuracy and calibration. This research enhances the understanding and readiness of sparse DNNs for deployment in resource-limited applications. Our code is available on: \url{https://github.com/StevenBoys/MOON}.

Problem definition: Professional sports leagues may be suspended due to various reasons such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. A critical question the league must address when re-opening is how to appropriately select a subset of the remaining games to conclude the season in a shortened time frame. Academic/practical relevance: Despite the rich literature on scheduling an entire season starting from a blank slate, concluding an existing season is quite different. Our approach attempts to achieve team rankings similar to that which would have resulted had the season been played out in full. Methodology: We propose a data-driven model which exploits predictive and prescriptive analytics to produce a schedule for the remainder of the season comprised of a subset of originally-scheduled games. Our model introduces novel rankings-based objectives within a stochastic optimization model, whose parameters are first estimated using a predictive model. We introduce a deterministic equivalent reformulation along with a tailored Frank-Wolfe algorithm to efficiently solve our problem, as well as a robust counterpart based on min-max regret. Results: We present simulation-based numerical experiments from previous National Basketball Association (NBA) seasons 2004--2019, and show that our models are computationally efficient, outperform a greedy benchmark that approximates a non-rankings-based scheduling policy, and produce interpretable results. Managerial implications: Our data-driven decision-making framework may be used to produce a shortened season with 25-50\% fewer games while still producing an end-of-season ranking similar to that of the full season, had it been played.

Data accuracy is essential for scientific research and policy development. The National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) data is widely used for discovering the patterns and causes of death. Recent studies suggested the annotation inconsistencies within the NVDRS and the potential impact on erroneous suicide-cause attributions. We present an empirical Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach to detect annotation inconsistencies and adopt a cross-validation-like paradigm to identify problematic instances. We analyzed 267,804 suicide death incidents between 2003 and 2020 from the NVDRS. Our results showed that incorporating the target state's data into training the suicide-crisis classifier brought an increase of 5.4% to the F-1 score on the target state's test set and a decrease of 1.1% on other states' test set. To conclude, we demonstrated the annotation inconsistencies in NVDRS's death investigation notes, identified problematic instances, evaluated the effectiveness of correcting problematic instances, and eventually proposed an NLP improvement solution.

High-dimensional linear regression has been thoroughly studied in the context of independent and identically distributed data. We propose to investigate high-dimensional regression models for independent but non-identically distributed data. To this end, we suppose that the set of observed predictors (or features) is a random matrix with a variance profile and with dimensions growing at a proportional rate. Assuming a random effect model, we study the predictive risk of the ridge estimator for linear regression with such a variance profile. In this setting, we provide deterministic equivalents of this risk and of the degree of freedom of the ridge estimator. For certain class of variance profile, our work highlights the emergence of the well-known double descent phenomenon in high-dimensional regression for the minimum norm least-squares estimator when the ridge regularization parameter goes to zero. We also exhibit variance profiles for which the shape of this predictive risk differs from double descent. The proofs of our results are based on tools from random matrix theory in the presence of a variance profile that have not been considered so far to study regression models. Numerical experiments are provided to show the accuracy of the aforementioned deterministic equivalents on the computation of the predictive risk of ridge regression. We also investigate the similarities and differences that exist with the standard setting of independent and identically distributed data.

Foundational models benefit from pre-training on large amounts of unlabeled data and enable strong performance in a wide variety of applications with a small amount of labeled data. Such models can be particularly effective in analyzing brain signals, as this field encompasses numerous application scenarios, and it is costly to perform large-scale annotation. In this work, we present the largest foundation model in brain signals, Brant-2. Compared to Brant, a foundation model designed for intracranial neural signals, Brant-2 not only exhibits robustness towards data variations and modeling scales but also can be applied to a broader range of brain neural data. By experimenting on an extensive range of tasks, we demonstrate that Brant-2 is adaptive to various application scenarios in brain signals. Further analyses reveal the scalability of the Brant-2, validate each component's effectiveness, and showcase our model's ability to maintain performance in scenarios with scarce labels.

Decision-making pipelines are generally characterized by tradeoffs among various risk functions. It is often desirable to manage such tradeoffs in a data-adaptive manner. As we demonstrate, if this is done naively, state-of-the art uncertainty quantification methods can lead to significant violations of putative risk guarantees. To address this issue, we develop methods that permit valid control of risk when threshold and tradeoff parameters are chosen adaptively. Our methodology supports monotone and nearly-monotone risks, but otherwise makes no distributional assumptions. To illustrate the benefits of our approach, we carry out numerical experiments on synthetic data and the large-scale vision dataset MS-COCO.

Scene graphs have been recently introduced into 3D spatial understanding as a comprehensive representation of the scene. The alignment between 3D scene graphs is the first step of many downstream tasks such as scene graph aided point cloud registration, mosaicking, overlap checking, and robot navigation. In this work, we treat 3D scene graph alignment as a partial graph-matching problem and propose to solve it with a graph neural network. We reuse the geometric features learned by a point cloud registration method and associate the clustered point-level geometric features with the node-level semantic feature via our designed feature fusion module. Partial matching is enabled by using a learnable method to select the top-k similar node pairs. Subsequent downstream tasks such as point cloud registration are achieved by running a pre-trained registration network within the matched regions. We further propose a point-matching rescoring method, that uses the node-wise alignment of the 3D scene graph to reweight the matching candidates from a pre-trained point cloud registration method. It reduces the false point correspondences estimated especially in low-overlapping cases. Experiments show that our method improves the alignment accuracy by 10~20% in low-overlap and random transformation scenarios and outperforms the existing work in multiple downstream tasks.

Cyber risk refers to the risk of defacing reputation, monetary losses, or disruption of an organization or individuals, and this situation usually occurs by the unconscious use of cyber systems. The cyber risk is unhurriedly increasing day by day and it is right now a global threat. Developing countries like Bangladesh face major cyber risk challenges. The growing cyber threat worldwide focuses on the need for effective modeling to predict and manage the associated risk. This paper exhibits a Machine Learning(ML) based model for predicting individuals who may be victims of cyber attacks by analyzing socioeconomic factors. We collected the dataset from victims and non-victims of cyberattacks based on socio-demographic features. The study involved the development of a questionnaire to gather data, which was then used to measure the significance of features. Through data augmentation, the dataset was expanded to encompass 3286 entries, setting the stage for our investigation and modeling. Among several ML models with 19, 20, 21, and 26 features, we proposed a novel Pertinent Features Random Forest (RF) model, which achieved maximum accuracy with 20 features (95.95\%) and also demonstrated the association among the selected features using the Apriori algorithm with Confidence (above 80\%) according to the victim. We generated 10 important association rules and presented the framework that is rigorously evaluated on real-world datasets, demonstrating its potential to predict cyberattacks and associated risk factors effectively. Looking ahead, future efforts will be directed toward refining the predictive model's precision and delving into additional risk factors, to fortify the proposed framework's efficacy in navigating the complex terrain of cybersecurity threats.

Brain encoding with neuroimaging data is an established analysis aimed at predicting human brain activity directly from complex stimuli features such as movie frames. Typically, these features are the latent space representation from an artificial neural network, and the stimuli are image, audio, or text inputs. Ridge regression is a popular prediction model for brain encoding due to its good out-of-sample generalization performance. However, training a ridge regression model can be highly time-consuming when dealing with large-scale deep functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) datasets that include many space-time samples of brain activity. This paper evaluates different parallelization techniques to reduce the training time of brain encoding with ridge regression on the CNeuroMod Friends dataset, one of the largest deep fMRI resource currently available. With multi-threading, our results show that the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) significantly outperforms the OpenBLAS library, being 1.9 times faster using 32 threads on a single machine. We then evaluated the Dask multi-CPU implementation of ridge regression readily available in scikit-learn (MultiOutput), and we proposed a new "batch" version of Dask parallelization, motivated by a time complexity analysis. In line with our theoretical analysis, MultiOutput parallelization was found to be impractical, i.e., slower than multi-threading on a single machine. In contrast, the Batch-MultiOutput regression scaled well across compute nodes and threads, providing speed-ups of up to 33 times with 8 compute nodes and 32 threads compared to a single-threaded scikit-learn execution. Batch parallelization using Dask thus emerges as a scalable approach for brain encoding with ridge regression on high-performance computing systems using scikit-learn and large fMRI datasets.