Deep neural networks (DNNs) have proven to be powerful tools for processing unstructured data. However for high-dimensional data, like images, they are inherently vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Small almost invisible perturbations added to the input can be used to fool DNNs. Various attacks, hardening methods and detection methods have been introduced in recent years. Notoriously, Carlini-Wagner (CW) type attacks computed by iterative minimization belong to those that are most difficult to detect. In this work, we demonstrate that such iterative minimization attacks can by used as detectors themselves. Thus, in some sense we show that one can fight fire with fire. This work also outlines a mathematical proof that under certain assumptions this detector provides asymptotically optimal separation of original and attacked images. In numerical experiments, we obtain AUROC values up to 99.73% for our detection method. This distinctly surpasses state of the art detection rates for CW attacks from the literature. We also give numerical evidence that our method is robust against the attacker's choice of the method of attack.

Machine learning is rapidly becoming one of the most important technology for malware traffic detection, since the continuous evolution of malware requires a constant adaptation and the ability to generalize [22]. However, network traffic datasets are usually oversized and contain redundant and irrelevant information, and this may dramatically increase the computational cost and decrease the accuracy of most classifiers, with the risk to introduce further noise. We propose two novel dataset optimization strategies which exploit and combine several state-of-the-art approaches in order to achieve an effective optimization of the network traffic datasets used to train malware detectors. The first approach is a feature selection technique based on mutual information measures and sensibility enhancement. The second is a dimensional reduction technique based autoencoders. Both these approaches have been experimentally applied on the MTA-KDD'19 dataset, and the optimized results evaluated and compared using a Multi Layer Perceptron as machine learning model for malware detection.

Health insurance companies cover half of the United States population through commercial employer-sponsored health plans and pay 1.2 trillion US dollars every year to cover medical expenses for their members. The actuary and underwriter roles at a health insurance company serve to assess which risks to take on and how to price those risks to ensure profitability of the organization. While Bayesian hierarchical models are the current standard in the industry to estimate risk, interest in machine learning as a way to improve upon these existing methods is increasing. Lumiata, a healthcare analytics company, ran a study with a large health insurance company in the United States. We evaluated the ability of machine learning models to predict the per member per month cost of employer groups in their next renewal period, especially those groups who will cost less than 95\% of what an actuarial model predicts (groups with "concession opportunities"). We developed a sequence of two models, an individual patient-level and an employer-group-level model, to predict the annual per member per month allowed amount for employer groups, based on a population of 14 million patients. Our models performed 20\% better than the insurance carrier's existing pricing model, and identified 84\% of the concession opportunities. This study demonstrates the application of a machine learning system to compute an accurate and fair price for health insurance products and analyzes how explainable machine learning models can exceed actuarial models' predictive accuracy while maintaining interpretability.

The problem of extracting important and meaningful parts of a sensory data stream, without prior training, is studied for symbolic sequences, by using textual narrative as a test case. This is part of a larger study concerning the extraction of concepts from spacetime processes, and their knowledge representations within hybrid symbolic-learning `Artificial Intelligence'. Most approaches to text analysis make extensive use of the evolved human sense of language and semantics. In this work, streams are parsed without knowledge of semantics, using only measurable patterns (size and time) within the changing stream of symbols -- as an event `landscape'. This is a form of interferometry. Using lightweight procedures that can be run in just a few seconds on a single CPU, this work studies the validity of the Semantic Spacetime Hypothesis, for the extraction of concepts as process invariants. This `semantic preprocessor' may then act as a front-end for more sophisticated long-term graph-based learning techniques. The results suggest that what we consider important and interesting about sensory experience is not solely based on higher reasoning, but on simple spacetime process cues, and this may be how cognitive processing is bootstrapped in the beginning.

Latest research in expertise assessment of soccer players pronounced the importance of perceptual skills. Former research focused either on high experimental control or natural presentation mode. To assess perceptual skills of athletes, in an optimized manner, we captured omnidirectional in-field scenes, showed to 12 expert, 9 intermediate and 13 novice goalkeepers from soccer on virtual reality glasses. All scenes where shown from the same natural goalkeeper perspective and ended after the return pass to the goalkeeper. Based on their responses and gaze behavior we classified their expertise with common machine learning techniques. This pilot study shows promising results for objective classification of goalkeepers expertise based on their gaze behaviour.

The use of machine learning (ML) in health care raises numerous ethical concerns, especially as models can amplify existing health inequities. Here, we outline ethical considerations for equitable ML in the advancement of health care. Specifically, we frame ethics of ML in health care through the lens of social justice. We describe ongoing efforts and outline challenges in a proposed pipeline of ethical ML in health, ranging from problem selection to post-deployment considerations. We close by summarizing recommendations to address these challenges.

In this work, we present a neuromorphic system that combines for the first time a neural recording headstage with a signal-to-spike conversion circuit and a multi-core spiking neural network (SNN) architecture on the same die for recording, processing, and detecting High Frequency Oscillations (HFO), which are biomarkers for the epileptogenic zone. The device was fabricated using a standard 0.18$\mu$m CMOS technology node and has a total area of 99mm$^{2}$. We demonstrate its application to HFO detection in the iEEG recorded from 9 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy who subsequently underwent epilepsy surgery. The total average power consumption of the chip during the detection task was 614.3$\mu$W. We show how the neuromorphic system can reliably detect HFOs: the system predicts postsurgical seizure outcome with state-of-the-art accuracy, specificity and sensitivity (78%, 100%, and 33% respectively). This is the first feasibility study towards identifying relevant features in intracranial human data in real-time, on-chip, using event-based processors and spiking neural networks. By providing "neuromorphic intelligence" to neural recording circuits the approach proposed will pave the way for the development of systems that can detect HFO areas directly in the operation room and improve the seizure outcome of epilepsy surgery.

In machine learning when we build a model for classification tasks we do not build only a single model. We never rely on a single model since we have many different algorithms in machine learning that work differently on different datasets. We always have to build a model that best suits the respective data set so we try building different models and at last we choose the best performing model. For doing this comparison we cannot always rely on a metric like an accuracy score, the reason being for any imbalance data set the model will always predict the majority class. But it becomes important to check whether the positive class is predicted as the positive and negative class as negative by the model.

The Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) is a widely used performance measure for imbalanced classification arising from many application domains where high-dimensional sparse data is abundant. In such cases, each $d$ dimensional sample has only $k$ non-zero features with $k \ll d$, and data arrives sequentially in a streaming form. Current online AUC optimization algorithms have high per-iteration cost $\mathcal{O}(d)$ and usually produce non-sparse solutions in general, and hence are not suitable for handling the data challenge mentioned above. In this paper, we aim to directly optimize the AUC score for high-dimensional sparse datasets under online learning setting and propose a new algorithm, \textsc{FTRL-AUC}. Our proposed algorithm can process data in an online fashion with a much cheaper per-iteration cost $\mathcal{O}(k)$, making it amenable for high-dimensional sparse streaming data analysis. Our new algorithmic design critically depends on a novel reformulation of the U-statistics AUC objective function as the empirical saddle point reformulation, and the innovative introduction of the "lazy update" rule so that the per-iteration complexity is dramatically reduced from $\mathcal{O}(d)$ to $\mathcal{O}(k)$. Furthermore, \textsc{FTRL-AUC} can inherently capture sparsity more effectively by applying a generalized Follow-The-Regularized-Leader (FTRL) framework. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that \textsc{FTRL-AUC} significantly improves both run time and model sparsity while achieving competitive AUC scores compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Comparison with the online learning method for logistic loss demonstrates that \textsc{FTRL-AUC} achieves higher AUC scores especially when datasets are imbalanced.

With the increased attention on thermal imagery for Covid-19 screening, the public sector may believe there are new opportunities to exploit thermal as a modality for computer vision and AI. Thermal physiology research has been ongoing since the late nineties. This research lies at the intersections of medicine, psychology, machine learning, optics, and affective computing. We will review the known factors of thermal vs. RGB imaging for facial emotion recognition. But we also propose that thermal imagery may provide a semi-anonymous modality for computer vision, over RGB, which has been plagued by misuse in facial recognition. However, the transition to adopting thermal imagery as a source for any human-centered AI task is not easy and relies on the availability of high fidelity data sources across multiple demographics and thorough validation. This paper takes the reader on a short review of machine learning in thermal FER and the limitations of collecting and developing thermal FER data for AI training. Our motivation is to provide an introductory overview into recent advances for thermal FER and stimulate conversation about the limitations in current datasets.