Abstract-- A rise in popularity of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), attributed to more powerful GPUs and widely available datasets, has seen them being increasingly used within safetycritical domains.One such domain, self-driving, has benefited from significant performance improvements, with millions of miles having been driven with no human intervention. Despite this, crashes and erroneous behaviours still occur, in part due to the complexity of verifying the correctness of DNNs and a lack of safety guarantees. In this paper, we demonstrate how quantitative measures of uncertainty can be extracted in real-time, and their quality evaluated in end-to-end controllers for self-driving cars. We propose evaluation techniques for the uncertainty on two separate architectures which use the uncertainty to predict crashes up to five seconds in advance. We find that mutual information, a measure of uncertainty in classification networks, is a promising indicator of forthcoming crashes. I. INTRODUCTION Deep learning, and in particular Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), have seen a surge in popularity over the past decade, and their use has become widespread in many fields. This increase in popularity, attributed to (i) more powerful GPU implementations and (ii) the availability of large amounts of data, has led to significant performance gains.

Sparse Inverse Covariance Estimation (SICE) is useful in many practical data analyses. Recovering the connectivity, non-connectivity graph of covariates is classified amongst the most important data mining and learning problems. In this paper, we introduce a novel SICE approach using adaptive thresholding. Our method is based on updates in a transformed domain of the desired matrix and exponentially decaying adaptive thresholding in the main domain (Inverse Covariance matrix domain). In addition to the proposed algorithm, the convergence analysis is also provided. In the Numerical Experiments Section, we show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy.

As we increasingly delegate decision-making to algorithms, whether directly or indirectly, important questions emerge in circumstances where those decisions have direct consequences for individual rights and personal opportunities, as well as for the collective good. A key problem for policymakers is that the social implications of these new methods can only be grasped if there is an adequate comprehension of their general technical underpinnings. The discussion here focuses primarily on the case of enforcement decisions in the criminal justice system, but draws on similar situations emerging from other algorithms utilised in controlling access to opportunities, to explain how machine learning works and, as a result, how decisions are made by modern intelligent algorithms or 'classifiers'. It examines the key aspects of the performance of classifiers, including how classifiers learn, the fact that they operate on the basis of correlation rather than causation, and that the term 'bias' in machine learning has a different meaning to common usage.An example of a real world 'classifier', the Harm Assessment Risk Tool (HART), is examined, through identification of its technical features: the classification method, the training data and the test data, the features and the labels, validation and performance measures. Four normative benchmarks are then considered by reference to HART: (a) prediction accuracy (b) fairness and equality before the law (c) transparency and accountability (d) informational privacy and freedom of expression, in order to demonstrate how its technical features have important normative dimensions that bear directly on the extent to which the system can be regarded as a viable and legitimate support for, or even alternative to, existing human decision-makers.

There is often latent network structure in spatial and temporal data and the tools of network analysis can yield fascinating insights into such data. In this paper, we develop a nonparametric method for network reconstruction from spatiotemporal data sets using multivariate Hawkes processes. In contrast to prior work on network reconstruction with point-process models, which has often focused on exclusively temporal information, our approach uses both temporal and spatial information and does not assume a specific parametric form of network dynamics. This leads to an effective way of recovering an underlying network. We illustrate our approach using both synthetic networks and networks constructed from real-world data sets (a location-based social media network, a narrative of crime events, and violent gang crimes). Our results demonstrate that, in comparison to using only temporal data, our spatiotemporal approach yields improved network reconstruction, providing a basis for meaningful subsequent analysis --- such as community structure and motif analysis --- of the reconstructed networks.

We compare features for dynamic time warping based keyword spotting in an almost zero-resource setting. The objective is to support United Nations (UN) humanitarian relief efforts in parts of Africa with severely under-resourced languages. As supervised resource, we restrict ourselves to an easily-compiled small set of isolated keywords. For feature extraction, we integrate a multilingual bottleneck feature extractor (BNF), trained on well-resourced out-of-domain languages, with a correspondence autoencoder (CAE), trained on extremely sparse in-domain data. We find that, on their own, BNFs and CAE features achieve more than 2% absolute performance improvement over baseline MFCCs. However, by using BNFs as input to the CAE, even better performance is achieved, with an 11% absolute improvement in ROC AUC over MFCCs and twice as many top-10 retrievals. We conclude that integrating BNFs with the CAE allows both large out-of-domain and sparse in-domain resources to be exploited for improved ASR-free keyword spotting.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown considerable promise for mitigating the challenge of data scarcity when building machine learning-driven analysis algorithms. Specifically, a number of studies have shown that GAN-based image synthesis for data augmentation can aid in improving classification accuracy in a number of medical image analysis tasks, such as brain and liver image analysis. However, the efficacy of leveraging GANs for tackling prostate cancer analysis has not been previously explored. Motivated by this, in this study we introduce ProstateGAN, a GAN-based model for synthesizing realistic prostate diffusion imaging data. More specifically, in order to generate new diffusion imaging data corresponding to a particular cancer grade (Gleason score), we propose a conditional deep convolutional GAN architecture that takes Gleason scores into consideration during the training process. Experimental results show that high-quality synthetic prostate diffusion imaging data can be generated using the proposed ProstateGAN for specified Gleason scores.

Automatically annotating column types with knowledge base (KB) concepts is a critical task to gain a basic understanding of web tables. Current methods rely on either table metadata like column name or entity correspondences of cells in the KB, and may fail to deal with growing web tables with incomplete meta information. In this paper we propose a neural network based column type annotation framework named ColNet which is able to integrate KB reasoning and lookup with machine learning and can automatically train Convolutional Neural Networks for prediction. The prediction model not only considers the contextual semantics within a cell using word representation, but also embeds the semantics of a column by learning locality features from multiple cells. The method is evaluated with DBPedia and two different web table datasets, T2Dv2 from the general Web and Limaye from Wikipedia pages, and achieves higher performance than the state-of-the-art approaches.

We propose a multi-armed bandit algorithm that explores based on randomizing its history. The key idea is to estimate the value of the arm from the bootstrap sample of its history, where we add pseudo observations after each pull of the arm. The pseudo observations seem to be harmful. But on the contrary, they guarantee that the bootstrap sample is optimistic with a high probability. Because of this, we call our algorithm Giro, which is an abbreviation for garbage in, reward out. We analyze Giro in a $K$-armed Bernoulli bandit and prove a $O(K \Delta^{-1} \log n)$ bound on its $n$-round regret, where $\Delta$ denotes the difference in the expected rewards of the optimal and best suboptimal arms. The main advantage of our exploration strategy is that it can be applied to any reward function generalization, such as neural networks. We evaluate Giro and its contextual variant on multiple synthetic and real-world problems, and observe that Giro is comparable to or better than state-of-the-art algorithms.

Facial pain expression is an important modality for assessing pain, especially when the patient's verbal ability to communicate is impaired. The facial muscle-based action units (AUs), which are defined by the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), have been widely studied and are highly reliable as a method for detecting facial expressions (FE) including valid detection of pain. Unfortunately, FACS coding by humans is a very time-consuming task that makes its clinical use prohibitive. Significant progress on automated facial expression recognition (AFER) has led to its numerous successful applications in FACS-based affective computing problems. However, only a handful of studies have been reported on automated pain detection (APD), and its application in clinical settings is still far from a reality. In this paper, we review the progress in research that has contributed to automated pain detection, with focus on 1) the framework-level similarity between spontaneous AFER and APD problems; 2) the evolution of system design including the recent development of deep learning methods; 3) the strategies and considerations in developing a FACS-based pain detection framework from existing research; and 4) introduction of the most relevant databases that are available for AFER and APD studies. We attempt to present key considerations in extending a general AFER framework to an APD framework in clinical settings. In addition, the performance metrics are also highlighted in evaluating an AFER or an APD system.

Recent work has raised concerns on the risk of unintended bias in algorithmic decision making systems being used nowadays that can affect individuals unfairly based on race, gender or religion, among other possible characteristics. While a lot of bias metrics and fairness definitions have been proposed in recent years, there is no consensus on which metric/definition should be used and there are very few available resources to operationalize them. Therefore, despite recent awareness, auditing for bias and fairness when developing and deploying algorithmic decision making systems is not yet a standard practice. We present Aequitas, an open source bias and fairness audit toolkit that is an intuitive and easy to use addition to the machine learning workflow, enabling users to seamlessly test models for several bias and fairness metrics in relation to multiple population sub-groups. We believe Aequitas will facilitate informed and equitable decisions around developing and deploying algorithmic decision making systems for both data scientists, machine learning researchers and policymakers.