Algorithmic bias in healthcare mirrors existing data biases. However, the factors driving unfairness are not always known. Medical devices capture significant amounts of data but are prone to errors; for instance, pulse oximeters overestimate the arterial oxygen saturation of darker-skinned individuals, leading to worse outcomes. The impact of this bias in machine learning (ML) models remains unclear. This study addresses the technical challenges of quantifying the impact of medical device bias in downstream ML. Our experiments compare a "perfect world", without pulse oximetry bias, using SaO2 (blood-gas), to the "actual world", with biased measurements, using SpO2 (pulse oximetry). Under this counterfactual design, two models are trained with identical data, features, and settings, except for the method of measuring oxygen saturation: models using SaO2 are a "control" and models using SpO2 a "treatment". The blood-gas oximetry linked dataset was a suitable test-bed, containing 163,396 nearly-simultaneous SpO2 - SaO2 paired measurements, aligned with a wide array of clinical features and outcomes. We studied three classification tasks: in-hospital mortality, respiratory SOFA score in the next 24 hours, and SOFA score increase by two points. Models using SaO2 instead of SpO2 generally showed better performance. Patients with overestimation of O2 by pulse oximetry of > 3% had significant decreases in mortality prediction recall, from 0.63 to 0.59, P < 0.001. This mirrors clinical processes where biased pulse oximetry readings provide clinicians with false reassurance of patients' oxygen levels. A similar degradation happened in ML models, with pulse oximetry biases leading to more false negatives in predicting adverse outcomes.

Path loss prediction for wireless communications is highly dependent on the local environment. Propagation models including clutter information have been shown to significantly increase model accuracy. This paper explores the application of deep learning to satellite imagery to identify environmental clutter types automatically. Recognizing these clutter types has numerous uses, but our main application is to use clutter information to enhance propagation prediction models. Knowing the type of obstruction (tree, building, and further classifications) can improve the prediction accuracy of key propagation metrics such as path loss.

The discourse on risks from advanced AI systems ("AIs") typically focuses on misuse, accidents and loss of control, but the question of AIs' moral status could have negative impacts which are of comparable significance and could be realised within similar timeframes. Our paper evaluates these impacts by investigating (1) the factual question of whether future advanced AI systems will be conscious, together with (2) the epistemic question of whether future human society will broadly believe advanced AI systems to be conscious. Assuming binary responses to (1) and (2) gives rise to four possibilities: in the true positive scenario, society predominantly correctly believes that AIs are conscious; in the false positive scenario, that belief is incorrect; in the true negative scenario, society correctly believes that AIs are not conscious; and lastly, in the false negative scenario, society incorrectly believes that AIs are not conscious. The paper offers vivid vignettes of the different futures to ground the two-dimensional framework. Critically, we identify four major risks: AI suffering, human disempowerment, geopolitical instability, and human depravity. We evaluate each risk across the different scenarios and provide an overall qualitative risk assessment for each scenario. Our analysis suggests that the worst possibility is the wrong belief that AI is non-conscious, followed by the wrong belief that AI is conscious. The paper concludes with the main recommendations to avoid research aimed at intentionally creating conscious AI and instead focus efforts on reducing our current uncertainties on both the factual and epistemic questions on AI consciousness.

The rise of smart factories has heightened the demand for automated maintenance, and normal-data-based anomaly detection has proved particularly effective in environments where anomaly data are scarce. This method, which does not require anomaly data during training, has prompted researchers to focus not only on detecting anomalies but also on classifying severity levels by using anomaly scores. However, the existing performance metrics, such as the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC), do not effectively reflect the performance of models in classifying severity levels based on anomaly scores. To address this limitation, we propose the weighted sum of the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (WS-AUROC), which combines AUROC with a penalty for severity level differences. We conducted various experiments using different penalty assignment methods: uniform penalty regardless of severity level differences, penalty based on severity level index differences, and penalty based on actual physical quantities that cause anomalies. The latter method was the most sensitive. Additionally, we propose an anomaly detector that achieves clear separation of distributions and outperforms the ablation models on the WS-AUROC and AUROC metrics.

In today's contemporary digital landscape, chatbots have become indispensable tools across various sectors, streamlining customer service, providing personal assistance, automating routine tasks, and offering health advice. However, their potential remains underexplored in the realm of network security, particularly for intrusion detection. To bridge this gap, we propose an architecture chatbot specifically designed to enhance security within edge networks specifically for intrusion detection. Leveraging advanced machine learning algorithms, this chatbot will monitor network traffic to identify and mitigate potential intrusions. By securing the network environment using an edge network managed by a Raspberry Pi module and ensuring ethical user consent promoting transparency and trust, this innovative solution aims to safeguard sensitive data and maintain a secure workplace, thereby addressing the growing need for robust network security measures in the digital age.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising solution to address the limitations of centralised machine learning (ML) in oncology, particularly in overcoming privacy concerns and harnessing the power of diverse, multi-center data. This systematic review synthesises current knowledge on the state-of-the-art FL in oncology, focusing on breast, lung, and prostate cancer. Distinct from previous surveys, our comprehensive review critically evaluates the real-world implementation and impact of FL on cancer care, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing ML generalisability, performance and data privacy in clinical settings and data. We evaluated state-of-the-art advances in FL, demonstrating its growing adoption amid tightening data privacy regulations. FL outperformed centralised ML in 15 out of the 25 studies reviewed, spanning diverse ML models and clinical applications, and facilitating integration of multi-modal information for precision medicine. Despite the current challenges identified in reproducibility, standardisation and methodology across studies, the demonstrable benefits of FL in harnessing real-world data and addressing clinical needs highlight its significant potential for advancing cancer research. We propose that future research should focus on addressing these limitations and investigating further advanced FL methods, to fully harness data diversity and realise the transformative power of cutting-edge FL in cancer care.

The mental health assessment of middle school students has always been one of the focuses in the field of education. This paper introduces a new ensemble learning network based on BERT, employing the concept of enhancing model performance by integrating multiple classifiers. We trained a range of BERT-based learners, which combined using the majority voting method. We collect social network text data of middle school students through China's Weibo and apply the method to the task of classifying emotional tendencies in middle school students' social network texts. Experimental results suggest that the ensemble learning network has a better performance than the base model and the performance of the ensemble learning model, consisting of three single-layer BERT models, is barely the same as a three-layer BERT model but requires 11.58% more training time. Therefore, in terms of balancing prediction effect and efficiency, the deeper BERT network should be preferred for training. However, for interpretability, network ensembles can provide acceptable solutions.

But questions of Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated human values and the answerability of the query generalization capabilities across NLP tasks such itself are difficult to model in terms of model confidence as question answering (QA) (Wei et al., 2022; (Yang et al., 2023). Chowdhery et al., 2022), abstractive summarization (Zhang et al., 2023a), and dialogue generation While prior work demonstrates the potential of (Yi et al., 2024). But these models are also unreliable, abstention in enhancing model safety and reliability having a tendency to "hallucinate" false information (Varshney et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2024c; in their responses (Ji et al., 2023b), generate Zhang et al., 2024a), the study of abstention has overly certain or authoritative responses (Zhou also been constrained to specific QA tasks. This et al., 2024b), answer with incomplete information task-specific approach limits the broader applicability (Zhou et al., 2023b), or produce harmful or of abstention strategies across the diverse dangerous responses (Anwar et al., 2024). In these range of scenarios encountered by general-purpose situations, the model should ideally abstain: to chatbots engaging in open-domain interactions.

We investigate methods for determining if a planar surface contains geometric deviations (e.g., protrusions, objects, divots, or cliffs) using only an instantaneous measurement from a miniature optical time-of-flight sensor. The key to our method is to utilize the entirety of information encoded in raw time-of-flight data captured by off-the-shelf distance sensors. We provide an analysis of the problem in which we identify the key ambiguity between geometry and surface photometrics. To overcome this challenging ambiguity, we fit a Gaussian mixture model to a small dataset of planar surface measurements. This model implicitly captures the expected geometry and distribution of photometrics of the planar surface and is used to identify measurements that are likely to contain deviations. We characterize our method on a variety of surfaces and planar deviations across a range of scenarios. We find that our method utilizing raw time-of-flight data outperforms baselines which use only derived distance estimates. We build an example application in which our method enables mobile robot obstacle and cliff avoidance over a wide field-of-view.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) and search engines by providing structured, interconnected data that improves reasoning and context-awareness. However, KGs only focus on text data, thereby neglecting other modalities such as speech. In this work, we introduce wav2graph, the first framework for supervised learning knowledge graph from speech data. Our pipeline are straightforward: (1) constructing a KG based on transcribed spoken utterances and a named entity database, (2) converting KG into embedding vectors, and (3) training graph neural networks (GNNs) for node classification and link prediction tasks. Through extensive experiments conducted in inductive and transductive learning contexts using state-of-the-art GNN models, we provide baseline results and error analysis for node classification and link prediction tasks on human transcripts and automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcripts, including evaluations using both encoder-based and decoder-based node embeddings, as well as monolingual and multilingual acoustic pre-trained models. All related code, data, and models are published online.