This paper introduces a compound vision system that enables robots to localize people up to 15m away using a cheap camera. And, it proposes a robust navigation stack that combines Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and a probabilistic localization method. To test the efficacy of these systems, we prototyped a low-cost mobile robot that we call Covy. Covy can be used for applications such as promoting social distancing during pandemics or estimating the density of a crowd. We evaluated Covy's performance through extensive sets of experiments both in simulated and realistic environments. Our results show that Covy's compound vision algorithm doubles the range of the used depth camera, and its hybrid navigation stack is more robust than a pure DRL-based one.

Equal contribution *To whom correspondence should be addressed. Abstract Recent development in angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) technique involves spatially resolving samples while maintaining the high-resolution feature of momentum space. This development easily expands the data size and its complexity for data analysis, where one of it is to label similar dispersion cuts and map them spatially. In this work, we demonstrate that the recent development in representational learning (self-supervised learning) model combined with k-means clustering can help automate that part of data analysis and save precious time, albeit with low performance. Finally, we introduce a few-shot learning (k-nearest neighbour or kNN) in representational space where we selectively choose one (k=1) image reference for each known label and subsequently label the rest of the data with respect to the nearest reference image. This last approach demonstrates the strength of the selfsupervised learning to automate the image analysis in ARPES in particular and can be generalized into any science data analysis that heavily involves image data.

Protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks consist of the physical and/or functional interactions between the proteins of an organism. Since the biophysical and high-throughput methods used to form PPI networks are expensive, time-consuming, and often contain inaccuracies, the resulting networks are usually incomplete. In order to infer missing interactions in these networks, we propose a novel class of link prediction methods based on continuous-time classical and quantum random walks. In the case of quantum walks, we examine the usage of both the network adjacency and Laplacian matrices for controlling the walk dynamics. We define a score function based on the corresponding transition probabilities and perform tests on four real-world PPI datasets. Our results show that continuous-time classical random walks and quantum walks using the network adjacency matrix can successfully predict missing protein-protein interactions, with performance rivalling the state of the art.

This article was published as a part of the Data Science Blogathon. Companies are trying to disrupt the technological and business market by introducing new and smart products and techniques in society by adopting new age-technologies like Artificial intelligence and Machine learning. Each organization is searching for well-talented and experienced people who can serve them on their demands. Today data scientists, data analysts, machine learning engineers, and computer vision engineers are more in-demand organizational roles. If you wish to apply and grab a job in the tech domain, it's crucial to know common machine learning interview questions that recruiters ask. The article covers some popular machine learning interview questions that will force you to think one step ahead of your knowledge, and you will like to encounter and achieve your dream job.

Abstract: Likelihood ratio ordering has been identified as a reasonable assumption in the two-sample problem in many practical scenarios. With this assumption, statisticians have proposed various methods in the estimation of the distributions of subpopulations, which consequently benefit the downstream inferences, such as the ROC curve and the associated summary statistic estimation. In this paper, under the likelihood ratio ordering assumption, we first propose a Bernstein polynomial method to model the distributions of both samples; we then estimate the distributions by the maximum empirical likelihood principle. The ROC curve estimate and the associated summary statistics are obtained subsequently. We compare the performance of our method with existing methods by extensive simulation studies.

In this paper, we propose a novel subspace learning framework for one-class classification. The proposed framework presents the problem in the form of graph embedding. It includes the previously proposed subspace one-class techniques as its special cases and provides further insight on what these techniques actually optimize. The framework allows to incorporate other meaningful optimization goals via the graph preserving criterion and reveals a spectral solution and a spectral regression-based solution as alternatives to the previously used gradient-based technique. We combine the subspace learning framework iteratively with Support Vector Data Description applied in the subspace to formulate Graph-Embedded Subspace Support Vector Data Description. We experimentally analyzed the performance of newly proposed different variants. We demonstrate improved performance against the baselines and the recently proposed subspace learning methods for one-class classification.

Predicting students' academic performance is one of the key tasks of educational data mining (EDM). Traditionally, the high forecasting quality of such models was deemed critical. More recently, the issues of fairness and discrimination w.r.t. protected attributes, such as gender or race, have gained attention. Although there are several fairness-aware learning approaches in EDM, a comparative evaluation of these measures is still missing. In this paper, we evaluate different group fairness measures for student performance prediction problems on various educational datasets and fairness-aware learning models. Our study shows that the choice of the fairness measure is important, likewise for the choice of the grade threshold.

Automatic Identification System (AIS) messages are useful for tracking vessel activity across oceans worldwide using radio links and satellite transceivers. Such data plays a significant role in tracking vessel activity and mapping mobility patterns such as those found in fishing. Accordingly, this paper proposes a geometric-driven semi-supervised approach for fishing activity detection from AIS data. Through the proposed methodology we show how to explore the information included in the messages to extract features describing the geometry of the vessel route. To this end, we leverage the unsupervised nature of cluster analysis to label the trajectory geometry highlighting the changes in the vessel's moving pattern which tends to indicate fishing activity. The labels obtained by the proposed unsupervised approach are used to detect fishing activities, which we approach as a time-series classification task. In this context, we propose a solution using recurrent neural networks on AIS data streams with roughly 87% of the overall $F$-score on the whole trajectories of 50 different unseen fishing vessels. Such results are accompanied by a broad benchmark study assessing the performance of different Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architectures. In conclusion, this work contributes by proposing a thorough process that includes data preparation, labeling, data modeling, and model validation. Therefore, we present a novel solution for mobility pattern detection that relies upon unfolding the trajectory in time and observing their inherent geometry.

Introduction: 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) is recorded during atrial fibrillation (AF) catheter ablation procedure (CAP). It is not easy to determine if CAP was successful without a long follow-up assessing for AF recurrence (AFR). Therefore, an AFR risk prediction algorithm could enable a better management of CAP patients. In this research, we extracted features from 12-lead ECG recorded before and after CAP and train an AFR risk prediction machine learning model. Methods: Pre- and post-CAP segments were extracted from 112 patients. The analysis included a signal quality criterion, heart rate variability and morphological biomarkers engineered from the 12-lead ECG (804 features overall). 43 out of the 112 patients (n) had AFR clinical endpoint available. These were utilized to assess the feasibility of AFR risk prediction, using either pre or post CAP features. A random forest classifier was trained within a nested cross validation framework. Results: 36 features were found statistically significant for distinguishing between the pre and post surgery states (n=112). For the classification, an area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) curve was reported with AUROC_pre=0.64 and AUROC_post=0.74 (n=43). Discussion and conclusions: This preliminary analysis showed the feasibility of AFR risk prediction. Such a model could be used to improve CAP management.

Billions of people are sharing their daily life images on social media every day. However, their biometric information (e.g., fingerprint) could be easily stolen from these images. The threat of fingerprint leakage from social media raises a strong desire for anonymizing shared images while maintaining image qualities, since fingerprints act as a lifelong individual biometric password. To guard the fingerprint leakage, adversarial attack emerges as a solution by adding imperceptible perturbations on images. However, existing works are either weak in black-box transferability or appear unnatural. Motivated by visual perception hierarchy (i.e., high-level perception exploits model-shared semantics that transfer well across models while low-level perception extracts primitive stimulus and will cause high visual sensitivities given suspicious stimulus), we propose FingerSafe, a hierarchical perceptual protective noise injection framework to address the mentioned problems. For black-box transferability, we inject protective noises on fingerprint orientation field to perturb the model-shared high-level semantics (i.e., fingerprint ridges). Considering visual naturalness, we suppress the low-level local contrast stimulus by regularizing the response of Lateral Geniculate Nucleus. Our FingerSafe is the first to provide feasible fingerprint protection in both digital (up to 94.12%) and realistic scenarios (Twitter and Facebook, up to 68.75%). Our code can be found at https://github.com/nlsde-safety-team/FingerSafe.