Existing simulations designed for cultural and interpersonal skill training rely on pre-defined responses with a menu option selection interface. Using a multiple-choice interface and restricting trainees' responses may limit the trainees' ability to apply the lessons in real life situations. This systems also uses a simplistic evaluation model, where trainees' selected options are marked as either correct or incorrect. This model may not capture sufficient information that could drive an adaptive feedback mechanism to improve trainees' cultural awareness. This paper describes the design of a dialogue-based simulation for cultural awareness training. The simulation, built around a disaster management scenario involving a joint coalition between the US and the Chinese armies. Trainees were able to engage in realistic dialogue with the Chinese agent. Their responses, at different points, get evaluated by different multi-label classification models. Based on training on our dataset, the models score the trainees' responses for cultural awareness in the Chinese culture. Trainees also get feedback that informs the cultural appropriateness of their responses. The result of this work showed the following; i) A feature-based evaluation model improves the design, modeling and computation of dialogue-based training simulation systems; ii) Output from current automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems gave comparable end results compared with the output from manual transcription; iii) A multi-label classification model trained as a cultural expert gave results which were comparable with scores assigned by human annotators.

Mitotic count is a commonly used method to assess the level of progression of breast cancer, which is now the fourth most prevalent cancer. Unfortunately, counting mitosis is a tedious and subjective task with poor reproducibility, especially for non-experts. Luckily, since the machine can read and compare more data with greater efficiency this could be the next modern technique to count mitosis. Furthermore, technological advancements in medicine have led to the increase in image data available for use in training. In this work, we propose a network constructed using a similar approach to one that has been used for image fraud detection with the segmented image map as the second stream input to Faster RCNN. This region-based detection model combines a fully convolutional Region Proposal Network to generate proposals and a classification network to classify each of these proposals as containing mitosis or not. Features from both streams are fused in the bilinear pooling layer to maintain the spatial concurrence of each. After training this model on the ICPR 2014 MITOSIS contest dataset, we received an F-measure score of 0.507, higher than both the winners score and scores from recent tests on the same data. Our method is clinically applicable, taking only around five min per ten full High Power Field slides when tested on a Quadro P6000 cloud GPU.

This paper introduces the Sylvester graphical lasso (SyGlasso) that captures multiway dependencies present in tensor-valued data. The model is based on the Sylvester equation that defines a generative model. The proposed model complements the tensor graphical lasso (Greenewald et al., 2019) that imposes a Kronecker sum model for the inverse covariance matrix by providing an alternative Kronecker sum model that is generative and interpretable. A nodewise regression approach is adopted for estimating the conditional independence relationships among variables. The statistical convergence of the method is established, and empirical studies are provided to demonstrate the recovery of meaningful conditional dependency graphs. We apply the SyGlasso to an electroencephalography (EEG) study to compare the brain connectivity of alcoholic and nonalcoholic subjects. We demonstrate that our model can simultaneously estimate both the brain connectivity and its temporal dependencies.

Could natural language models improve their ability to answer questions on the fly? That's what a team of Amazon researchers set out to answer in a study scheduled to be presented at the 2020 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in New York. They posit a method for adapting models based on Google's Transformer architecture -- which is particularly good at learning long-range dependencies among input data (such as the semantic and syntactic relationships between individual words of a sentence) -- to address the problem of answer selection. The team says that in tests on a benchmark data set, their proposed model demonstrated a 10% absolute improvement in mean average precision (which measures the quality of a sorted list of answers according to the correctness of the ranking) over the previous state-of-the-art answer selection model, achieving an error rate reduction of 50%. The approach -- Transfer and Adapt, or TANDA -- was first proposed late last year but has since been refined.

In many application domains, time series are monitored to detect extreme events like technical faults, natural disasters, or disease outbreaks. Unfortunately, it is often non-trivial to select both a time series that is informative about events and a powerful detection algorithm: detection may fail because the detection algorithm is not suitable, or because there is no shared information between the time series and the events of interest. In this work, we thus propose a non-parametric statistical test for shared information between a time series and a series of observed events. Our test allows identifying time series that carry information on event occurrences without committing to a specific event detection methodology. In a nutshell, we test for divergences of the value distributions of the time series at increasing lags after event occurrences with a multiple two-sample testing approach. In contrast to related tests, our approach is applicable for time series over arbitrary domains, including multivariate numeric, strings or graphs. We perform a large-scale simulation study to show that it outperforms or is on par with related tests on our task for univariate time series. We also demonstrate the real-world applicability of our approach on datasets from social media and smart home environments.

We consider distributions arising from a mixture of causal models, where each model is represented by a directed acyclic graph (DAG). We provide a graphical representation of such mixture distributions and prove that this representation encodes the conditional independence relations of the mixture distribution. We then consider the problem of structure learning based on samples from such distributions. Since the mixing variable is latent, we consider causal structure discovery algorithms such as FCI that can deal with latent variables. We show that such algorithms recover a "union" of the component DAGs and can identify variables whose conditional distribution across the component DAGs vary. We demonstrate our results on synthetic and real data showing that the inferred graph identifies nodes that vary between the different mixture components. As an immediate application, we demonstrate how retrieval of this causal information can be used to cluster samples according to each mixture component.

The 2016 United States presidential election was marked by the abuse of targeted advertising on Facebook. Concerned with the risk of the same kind of abuse to happen in the 2018 Brazilian elections, we designed and deployed an independent auditing system to monitor political ads on Facebook in Brazil. To do that we first adapted a browser plugin to gather ads from the timeline of volunteers using Facebook. We managed to convince more than 2000 volunteers to help our project and install our tool. Then, we use a Convolution Neural Network (CNN) to detect political Facebook ads using word embeddings. To evaluate our approach, we manually label a data collection of 10k ads as political or non-political and then we provide an in-depth evaluation of proposed approach for identifying political ads by comparing it with classic supervised machine learning methods. Finally, we deployed a real system that shows the ads identified as related to politics. We noticed that not all political ads we detected were present in the Facebook Ad Library for political ads. Our results emphasize the importance of enforcement mechanisms for declaring political ads and the need for independent auditing platforms.

The eye disease diabetic retinopathy is the fastest growing cause of blindness in the world. There are over 100 million people in the world with diabetes and ideally, they would be screened each year for this degenerative eye condition. It is fully treatable if caught early, however if it's not detected you could suffer partial or full vision loss. They look for scattered hemorrhages and micro-aneurysms to grade the image. This is quite subjective in that a grade of two (2) means come back in a year and a grade of three (3) means come to the clinic right away.

Many classification applications require accurate probability estimates in addition to good class separation but often classifiers are designed focusing only on the latter. Calibration is the process of improving probability estimates by post-processing but commonly used calibration algorithms work poorly on small data sets and assume the classification task to be binary. Both of these restrictions limit their real-world applicability. Previously introduced Data Generation and Grouping algorithm alleviates the problem posed by small data sets and in this article, we will demonstrate that its application to multi-class problems is also possible which solves the other limitation. Our experiments show that calibration error can be decreased using the proposed approach and the additional computational cost is acceptable.

Classification algorithms to mine data stream have been extensively studied in recent years. However, a lot of these algorithms are designed for supervised learning which requires labeled instances. Nevertheless, the labeling of the data is costly and time-consuming. Because of this, alternative learning paradigms have been proposed to reduce the cost of the labeling process without significant loss of model performance. Active learning is one of these paradigms, whose main objective is to build classification models that request the lowest possible number of labeled examples achieving adequate levels of accuracy. Therefore, this work presents the FASE-AL algorithm which induces classification models with non-labeled instances using Active Learning. FASE-AL is based on the algorithm Fast Adaptive Stacking of Ensembles (FASE). FASE is an ensemble algorithm that detects and adapts the model when the input data stream has concept drift. FASE-AL was compared with four different strategies of active learning found in the literature. Real and synthetic databases were used in the experiments. The algorithm achieves promising results in terms of the percentage of correctly classified instances.