Over the last two decades, around 300 quasars have been discovered at $z\gtrsim6$, yet only one has identified as being strongly gravitationally lensed. We explore a new approach -- enlarging the permitted spectral parameter space, while introducing a new spatial geometry veto criterion -- which is implemented via image-based deep learning. We first apply this approach to a systematic search for reionization-era lensed quasars, using data from the Dark Energy Survey, the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy Hemisphere Survey, and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer.Our search method consists of two main parts: (i) the preselection of the candidates based on their spectral energy distributions (SEDs) using catalog-level photometry and (ii) relative probabilities calculation of the candidates being a lens or some contaminant, utilizing a convolutional neural network (CNN) classification. The training data sets are constructed by painting deflected point-source lights over actual galaxy images, to generate realistic galaxy-quasar lens models, optimized to find systems with small image separations, i.e., Einstein radii of $\theta_\mathrm{E} \leq 1$ arcsec. Visual inspection is then performed for sources with CNN scores of $P_\mathrm{lens} > 0.1$, which leads us to obtain 36 newly selected lens candidates, which are awaiting spectroscopic confirmation. These findings show that automated SED modeling and deep learning pipelines, supported by modest human input, are a promising route for detecting strong lenses from large catalogs that can overcome the veto limitations of primarily dropout-based SED selection approaches.

The Coronavirus, known as COVID-19, which appeared in 2019 in China, has significantly affected global health and become a huge burden on health institutions all over the world. These effects are continuing today. One strategy for limiting the virus's transmission is to have an early diagnosis of suspected cases and take appropriate measures before the disease spreads further. This work aims to diagnose and show the probability of getting infected by the disease according to textual clinical data. In this work, we used five machine learning techniques (GWO_MLP, GWO_CMLP, MGWO_MLP, FDO_MLP, FDO_CMLP) all of which aim to classify Covid-19 patients into two categories (Positive and Negative). Experiments showed promising results for all used models. The applied methods showed very similar performance, typically in terms of accuracy. However, in each tested dataset, FDO_MLP and FDO_CMLP produced the best results with 100% accuracy. The other models' results varied from one experiment to the other. It is concluded that the models on which the FDO algorithm was used as a learning algorithm had the possibility of obtaining higher accuracy. However, it is found that FDO has the longest runtime compared to the other algorithms. The link to the covid 19 models is found here: https://github.com/Tarik4Rashid4/covid19models

Human intelligence and intuition are vital to training artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models to provide enterprises with hybrid cybersecurity at scale. Combining human intelligence and intuition with AI and ML models helps catch the nuances of attack patterns that elude numerical analysis alone. Experienced threat hunters, security analysts and data scientists help ensure that the data used to train AI and ML models enables a model to accurately identify threats and reduce false positives. Combining human expertise and AI and ML models with a real-time stream of telemetry data from enterprises' many systems and apps defines the future of hybrid cybersecurity. "Based on behaviors and insights, AI and ML allow us to predict [that] something will happen before it does," says Monique Shivanandan, CISO at HSBC, a global bank.

In molecular and biological sciences, experiments are expensive, time-consuming, and often subject to ethical constraints. Consequently, one often faces the challenging task of predicting desirable properties from small data sets or scarcely-labeled data sets. Although transfer learning can be advantageous, it requires the existence of a related large data set. This work introduces three graph-based models incorporating Merriman-Bence-Osher (MBO) techniques to tackle this challenge. Specifically, graph-based modifications of the MBO scheme are integrated with state-of-the-art techniques, including a home-made transformer and an autoencoder, in order to deal with scarcely-labeled data sets. In addition, a consensus technique is detailed. The proposed models are validated using five benchmark data sets. We also provide a thorough comparison to other competing methods, such as support vector machines, random forests, and gradient boosting decision trees, which are known for their good performance on small data sets. The performances of various methods are analyzed using residue-similarity (R-S) scores and R-S indices. Extensive computational experiments and theoretical analysis show that the new models perform very well even when as little as 1% of the data set is used as labeled data.

Urban metabolism is an active field of research that deals with the estimation of emissions and resource consumption from urban regions. The analysis could be carried out through a manual surveyor by the implementation of elegant machine learning algorithms. In this exploratory work, we estimate the water consumption by the buildings in the region captured by satellite imagery. To this end, we break our analysis into three parts: i) Identification of building pixels, given a satellite image, followed by ii) identification of the building type (residential/non-residential) from the building pixels, and finally iii) using the building pixels along with their type to estimate the water consumption using the average per unit area consumption for different building types as obtained from municipal surveys.

The diversity of terrestrial vascular plants plays a key role in maintaining the stability and productivity of ecosystems. Monitoring species compositional diversity across large spatial scales is challenging and time consuming. The advanced spectral and spatial specification of the recently launched DESIS (the DLR Earth Sensing Imaging Spectrometer) instrument provides a unique opportunity to test the potential for monitoring plant species diversity with spaceborne hyperspectral data. This study provides a quantitative assessment on the ability of DESIS hyperspectral data for predicting plant species richness in two different habitat types in southeast Australia. Spectral features were first extracted from the DESIS spectra, then regressed against on-ground estimates of plant species richness, with a two-fold cross validation scheme to assess the predictive performance. We tested and compared the effectiveness of Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA), and Partial Least Squares analysis (PLS) for feature extraction, and Kernel Ridge Regression (KRR), Gaussian Process Regression (GPR), Random Forest Regression (RFR) for species richness prediction. The best prediction results were r=0.76 and RMSE=5.89 for the Southern Tablelands region, and r=0.68 and RMSE=5.95 for the Snowy Mountains region. Relative importance analysis for the DESIS spectral bands showed that the red-edge, red, and blue spectral regions were more important for predicting plant species richness than the green bands and the near-infrared bands beyond red-edge. We also found that the DESIS hyperspectral data performed better than Sentinel-2 multispectral data in the prediction of plant species richness. Our results provide a quantitative reference for future studies exploring the potential of spaceborne hyperspectral data for plant biodiversity mapping.

The F1 score (aka F-measure) is a popular metric for evaluating the performance of a classification model. In the case of multi-class classification, we adopt averaging methods for F1 score calculation, resulting in a set of different average scores (macro, weighted, micro) in the classification report. This article looks at the meaning of these averages, how to calculate them, and which one to choose for reporting. Note: Skip this section if you are already familiar with the concepts of precision, recall, and F1 score. Layman definition: Of all the positive predictions I made, how many of them are truly positive?

Sytora is a multilingual symptom-disease classification app. Translation is managed through the UMLS coding standard. A multinomial Naive Bayes classifier is trained on a handpicked dataset, which is freely available under CC4.0. Check out sytora.com for a demo. Finding the right diagnosis cannot be achieved by extracting symptoms and running a classification algorithm.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says its Science and Technology Directorate division has created a portable gunshot detection system with the help of a company called Shooter Detection Systems (SDS). The agency notes that whereas other systems only detect audio, SDS Outdoor can pinpoint flashes of gunshots as well. DHS claims this approach can reduce false positive rates. DHS has not disclosed details about the accuracy of the system. SDS, which is owned by Alarm.com, says its indoor gunshot detection system has a near-100 percent detection rate with fewer than one false alert per 5 million hours of use.

Let's illustrate Type I and Type II errors using a binary classification machine learning spam filter. We will assume that we have a labelled dataset of N 315 emails, 244 of which are labelled as spam, and 71 are not-spam. Supposed that we've built a machine learning classification algorithm to learn from this data. Now we would like to evaluate the performance of the machine learning model. How good was the model in correctly detecting the spam vs not-spam emails? We will assume that whenever the model predicts an email to be a spam email, the email will be deleted and saved in the spam folder.