A major challenge in stroke research and stroke recovery predictions is the determination of a stroke lesion's extent and its impact on relevant brain systems. Manual segmentation of stroke lesions from 3D magnetic resonance (MR) imaging volumes, the current gold standard, is not only very time-consuming, but its accuracy highly depends on the operator's experience. As a result, there is a need for a fully automated segmentation method that can efficiently and objectively measure lesion extent and the impact of each lesion to predict impairment and recovery potential which might be beneficial for clinical, translational, and research settings. We have implemented and tested a fully automatic method for stroke lesion segmentation which was developed using eight different 2D-model architectures trained via transfer learning (TL) and mixed data approaches. Additionally, the final prediction was made using a novel ensemble method involving stacking and agreement window. Our novel method was evaluated in a novel in-house dataset containing 22 T1w brain MR images, which were challenging in various perspectives, but mostly because they included T1w MR images from the subacute (which typically less well defined T1 lesions) and chronic stroke phase (which typically means well defined T1-lesions). Cross-validation results indicate that our new method can efficiently and automatically segment lesions fast and with high accuracy compared to ground truth. In addition to segmentation, we provide lesion volume and weighted lesion load of relevant brain systems based on the lesions' overlap with a canonical structural motor system that stretches from the cortical motor region to the lowest end of the brain stem.

This paper proposes a statistical framework with which artificial intelligence can improve human decision making. The performance of each human decision maker is first benchmarked against machine predictions; we then replace the decisions made by a subset of the decision makers with the recommendation from the proposed artificial intelligence algorithm. Using a large nationwide dataset of pregnancy outcomes and doctor diagnoses from prepregnancy checkups of reproductive age couples, we experimented with both a heuristic frequentist approach and a Bayesian posterior loss function approach with an application to abnormal birth detection. We find that our algorithm on a test dataset results in a higher overall true positive rate and a lower false positive rate than the diagnoses made by doctors only. We also find that the diagnoses of doctors from rural areas are more frequently replaceable, suggesting that artificial intelligence assisted decision making tends to improve precision more in less developed regions.

Automatic blood vessel segmentation from retinal images plays an important role in the diagnosis of many systemic and eye diseases, including retinopathy of prematurity. Current state-of-the-art research in blood vessel segmentation from retinal images is based on convolutional neural networks. The solutions proposed so far are trained and tested on images from a few available retinal blood vessel segmentation datasets, which might limit their performance when given an image with retinopathy of prematurity signs. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of three high-performing convolutional neural networks for retinal blood vessel segmentation in the context of blood vessel segmentation on retinopathy of prematurity retinal images. The main motive behind the study is to test if existing public datasets suffice to develop a high-performing predictor that could assist an ophthalmologist in retinopathy of prematurity diagnosis. To do so, we create a dataset consisting solely of retinopathy of prematurity images with retinal blood vessel annotations manually labeled by two observers, where one is the ophthalmologist experienced in retinopathy of prematurity treatment. Experimental results show that all three solutions have difficulties in detecting the retinal blood vessels of infants due to a lower contrast compared to images from public datasets as demonstrated by a significant drop in classification sensitivity. All three solutions segment alongside retinal also choroidal blood vessels which are not used to diagnose retinopathy of prematurity, but instead represent noise and are confused with retinal blood vessels. By visual and numerical observations, we observe that existing solutions for retinal blood vessel segmentation need improvement toward more detailed datasets or deeper models in order to assist the ophthalmologist in retinopathy of prematurity diagnosis.

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) attracts more research interest recently. While models achieve consistent performance gains in DocRE, their underlying decision rules are still understudied: Do they make the right predictions according to rationales? In this paper, we take the first step toward answering this question and then introduce a new perspective on comprehensively evaluating a model. Specifically, we first conduct annotations to provide the rationales considered by humans in DocRE. Then, we conduct investigations and reveal the fact that: In contrast to humans, the representative state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in DocRE exhibit different decision rules. Through our proposed RE-specific attacks, we next demonstrate that the significant discrepancy in decision rules between models and humans severely damages the robustness of models and renders them inapplicable to real-world RE scenarios. After that, we introduce mean average precision (MAP) to evaluate the understanding and reasoning capabilities of models. According to the extensive experimental results, we finally appeal to future work to consider evaluating both performance and the understanding ability of models for the development of their applications. We make our annotations and code publicly available.

In this study, we partition users by rating disposition - looking first at their percentage of negative ratings, and then at the general use of the rating scale. We hypothesize that users with different rating dispositions may use the recommender system differently and therefore the agreement with their past ratings may be less predictive of the future agreement. We use data from a large movie rating website to explore whether users should be grouped by disposition, focusing on identifying their various rating distributions that may hurt recommender effectiveness. We find that such partitioning not only improves computational efficiency but also improves top-k performance and predictive accuracy. Though such effects are largest for the user-based KNN CF, smaller for item-based KNN CF, and smallest for latent factor algorithms such as SVD.

Correlated time series analysis plays an important role in many real-world industries. Learning an efficient representation of this large-scale data for further downstream tasks is necessary but challenging. In this paper, we propose a time-step-level representation learning framework for individual instances via bootstrapped spatiotemporal representation prediction. We evaluated the effectiveness and flexibility of our representation learning framework on correlated time series forecasting and cold-start transferring the forecasting model to new instances with limited data. A linear regression model trained on top of the learned representations demonstrates our model performs best in most cases. Especially compared to representation learning models, we reduce the RMSE, MAE, and MAPE by 37%, 49%, and 48% on the PeMS-BAY dataset, respectively. Furthermore, in real-world metro passenger flow data, our framework demonstrates the ability to transfer to infer future information of new cold-start instances, with gains of 15%, 19%, and 18%. The source code will be released under the GitHub https://github.com/bonaldli/Spatiotemporal-TS-Representation-Learning

Condition-based maintenance is becoming increasingly important in hydraulic systems. However, anomaly detection for these systems remains challenging, especially since that anomalous data is scarce and labeling such data is tedious and even dangerous. Therefore, it is advisable to make use of unsupervised or semi-supervised methods, especially for semi-supervised learning which utilizes unsupervised learning as a feature extraction mechanism to aid the supervised part when only a small number of labels are available. This study systematically compares semi-supervised learning methods applied for anomaly detection in hydraulic condition monitoring systems. Firstly, thorough data analysis and feature learning were carried out to understand the open-sourced hydraulic condition monitoring dataset. Then, various methods were implemented and evaluated including traditional stand-alone semi-supervised learning models (e.g., one-class SVM, Robust Covariance), ensemble models (e.g., Isolation Forest), and deep neural network based models (e.g., autoencoder, Hierarchical Extreme Learning Machine (HELM)). Typically, this study customized and implemented an extreme learning machine based semi-supervised HELM model and verified its superiority over other semi-supervised methods. Extensive experiments show that the customized HELM model obtained state-of-the-art performance with the highest accuracy (99.5%), the lowest false positive rate (0.015), and the best F1-score (0.985) beating other semi-supervised methods.

We study estimation of piecewise smooth signals over a graph. We propose a $\ell_{2,0}$-norm penalized Graph Trend Filtering (GTF) model to estimate piecewise smooth graph signals that exhibit inhomogeneous levels of smoothness across the nodes. We prove that the proposed GTF model is simultaneously a k-means clustering on the signal over the nodes and a minimum graph cut on the edges of the graph, where the clustering and the cut share the same assignment matrix. We propose two methods to solve the proposed GTF model: a spectral decomposition method and a method based on simulated annealing. In the experiment on synthetic and real-world datasets, we show that the proposed GTF model has a better performances compared with existing approaches on the tasks of denoising, support recovery and semi-supervised classification. We also show that the proposed GTF model can be solved more efficiently than existing models for the dataset with a large edge set.

The thesis advances the field of software security by providing knowledge and automation support for software vulnerability assessment using data-driven approaches. Software vulnerability assessment provides important and multifaceted information to prevent and mitigate dangerous cyber-attacks in the wild. The key contributions include a systematisation of knowledge, along with a suite of novel data-driven techniques and practical recommendations for researchers and practitioners in the area. The thesis results help improve the understanding and inform the practice of assessing ever-increasing vulnerabilities in real-world software systems. This in turn enables more thorough and timely fixing prioritisation and planning of these critical security issues.

The book attempts to introduce a gentle introduction to the field of Facial Micro Expressions Recognition (FMER) using Color and Depth images, with the aid of MATLAB programming environment. FMER is a subset of image processing and it is a multidisciplinary topic to analysis. So, it requires familiarity with other topics of Artifactual Intelligence (AI) such as machine learning, digital image processing, psychology and more. So, it is a great opportunity to write a book which covers all of these topics for beginner to professional readers in the field of AI and even without having background of AI. Our goal is to provide a standalone introduction in the field of MFER analysis in the form of theorical descriptions for readers with no background in image processing with reproducible Matlab practical examples. Also, we describe any basic definitions for FMER analysis and MATLAB library which is used in the text, that helps final reader to apply the experiments in the real-world applications. We believe that this book is suitable for students, researchers, and professionals alike, who need to develop practical skills, along with a basic understanding of the field. We expect that, after reading this book, the reader feels comfortable with different key stages such as color and depth image processing, color and depth image representation, classification, machine learning, facial micro-expressions recognition, feature extraction and dimensionality reduction. The book attempts to introduce a gentle introduction to the field of Facial Micro Expressions Recognition (FMER) using Color and Depth images, with the aid of MATLAB programming environment.