Reservoir Computing is an Unconventional Computation model to perform computation on various different substrates, such as RNNs or physical materials. The method takes a "black-box" approach, training only the outputs of the system it is built on. As such, evaluating the computational capacity of these systems can be challenging. We review and critique the evaluation methods used in the field of Reservoir Computing. We introduce a categorisation of benchmark tasks. We review multiple examples of benchmarks from the literature as applied to reservoir computing, and note their strengths and shortcomings. We suggest ways in which benchmarks and their uses may be improved to the benefit of the reservoir computing community

The widespread application of Electronic Health Records (EHR) data in the medical field has led to early successes in disease risk prediction using deep learning methods. These methods typically require extensive data for training due to their large parameter sets. However, existing works do not exploit the full potential of EHR data. A significant challenge arises from the infrequent occurrence of many medical codes within EHR data, limiting their clinical applicability. Current research often lacks in critical areas: 1) incorporating disease domain knowledge; 2) heterogeneously learning disease representations with rich meanings; 3) capturing the temporal dynamics of disease progression. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel heterogeneous graph learning model designed to assimilate disease domain knowledge and elucidate the intricate relationships between drugs and diseases. This model innovatively incorporates temporal data into visit-level embeddings and leverages a time-aware transformer alongside an adaptive attention mechanism to produce patient representations. When evaluated on two healthcare datasets, our approach demonstrated notable enhancements in both prediction accuracy and interpretability over existing methodologies, signifying a substantial advancement towards personalized and proactive healthcare management.

Objectives: This study aims to systematically review the literature on the computational processing of the language of pain, or pain narratives, whether generated by patients or physicians, identifying current trends and challenges. Methods: Following the PRISMA guidelines, a comprehensive literature search was conducted to select relevant studies on the computational processing of the language of pain and answer pre-defined research questions. Data extraction and synthesis were performed to categorize selected studies according to their primary purpose and outcome, patient and pain population, textual data, computational methodology, and outcome targets. Results: Physician-generated language of pain, specifically from clinical notes, was the most used data. Tasks included patient diagnosis and triaging, identification of pain mentions, treatment response prediction, biomedical entity extraction, correlation of linguistic features with clinical states, and lexico-semantic analysis of pain narratives. Only one study included previous linguistic knowledge on pain utterances in their experimental setup. Most studies targeted their outcomes for physicians, either directly as clinical tools or as indirect knowledge. The least targeted stage of clinical pain care was self-management, in which patients are most involved. Affective and sociocultural dimensions were the least studied domains. Only one study measured how physician performance on clinical tasks improved with the inclusion of the proposed algorithm. Discussion: This review found that future research should focus on analyzing patient-generated language of pain, developing patient-centered resources for self-management and patient-empowerment, exploring affective and sociocultural aspects of pain, and measuring improvements in physician performance when aided by the proposed tools.

Data drifts pose a critical challenge in the lifecycle of machine learning (ML) models, affecting their performance and reliability. In response to this challenge, we present a microbenchmark study, called D3Bench, which evaluates the efficacy of open-source drift detection tools. D3Bench examines the capabilities of Evidently AI, NannyML, and Alibi-Detect, leveraging real-world data from two smart building use cases.We prioritize assessing the functional suitability of these tools to identify and analyze data drifts. Furthermore, we consider a comprehensive set of non-functional criteria, such as the integrability with ML pipelines, the adaptability to diverse data types, user-friendliness, computational efficiency, and resource demands. Our findings reveal that Evidently AI stands out for its general data drift detection, whereas NannyML excels at pinpointing the precise timing of shifts and evaluating their consequent effects on predictive accuracy.

We study the problem of efficiently detecting Out-of-Distribution (OOD) samples at test time in supervised and unsupervised learning contexts. While ML models are typically trained under the assumption that training and test data stem from the same distribution, this is often not the case in realistic settings, thus reliably detecting distribution shifts is crucial at deployment. We re-formulate the OOD problem under the lenses of statistical testing and then discuss conditions that render the OOD problem identifiable in statistical terms. Building on this framework, we study convergence guarantees of an OOD test based on the Wasserstein distance, and provide a simple empirical evaluation.

A graph neural network (GNN) is a type of neural network that is specifically designed to process graph-structured data. Typically, GNNs can be implemented in two settings, including the transductive setting and the inductive setting. In the transductive setting, the trained model can only predict the labels of nodes that were observed at the training time. In the inductive setting, the trained model can be generalized to new nodes/graphs. Due to its flexibility, the inductive setting is the most popular GNN setting at the moment. Previous work has shown that transductive GNNs are vulnerable to a series of privacy attacks. However, a comprehensive privacy analysis of inductive GNN models is still missing. This paper fills the gap by conducting a systematic privacy analysis of inductive GNNs through the lens of link stealing attacks, one of the most popular attacks that are specifically designed for GNNs. We propose two types of link stealing attacks, i.e., posterior-only attacks and combined attacks. We define threat models of the posterior-only attacks with respect to node topology and the combined attacks by considering combinations of posteriors, node attributes, and graph features. Extensive evaluation on six real-world datasets demonstrates that inductive GNNs leak rich information that enables link stealing attacks with advantageous properties. Even attacks with no knowledge about graph structures can be effective. We also show that our attacks are robust to different node similarities and different graph features. As a counterpart, we investigate two possible defenses and discover they are ineffective against our attacks, which calls for more effective defenses.

Malicious software is a pernicious global problem. A novel multi-task learning framework is proposed in this paper for malware image classification for accurate and fast malware detection. We generate bitmap (BMP) and (PNG) images from malware features, which we feed to a deep learning classifier. Our state-of-the-art multi-task learning approach has been tested on a new dataset, for which we have collected approximately 100,000 benign and malicious PE, APK, Mach-o, and ELF examples. Experiments with seven tasks tested with 4 activation functions, ReLU, LeakyReLU, PReLU, and ELU separately demonstrate that PReLU gives the highest accuracy of more than 99.87% on all tasks. Our model can effectively detect a variety of obfuscation methods like packing, encryption, and instruction overlapping, strengthing the beneficial claims of our model, in addition to achieving the state-of-art methods in terms of accuracy.

Achieving gender equality is a pivotal factor in realizing the UN's Global Goals for Sustainable Development. Gender bias studies work towards this and rely on name-based gender inference tools to assign individual gender labels when gender information is unavailable. However, these tools often inaccurately predict gender for Chinese Pinyin names, leading to potential bias in such studies. With the growing participation of Chinese in international activities, this situation is becoming more severe. Specifically, current tools focus on pronunciation (Pinyin) information, neglecting the fact that the latent connections between Pinyin and Chinese characters (Hanzi) behind convey critical information. As a first effort, we formulate the Pinyin name-gender guessing problem and design a Multi-Task Learning Network assisted by Knowledge Distillation that enables the Pinyin embeddings in the model to possess semantic features of Chinese characters and to learn gender information from Chinese character names. Our open-sourced method surpasses commercial name-gender guessing tools by 9.70\% to 20.08\% relatively, and also outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms.

In this study, we utilized statistical analysis and machine learning methods to examine whether rehabilitation exercises can improve patients post-stroke functional abilities, as well as forecast the improvement in functional abilities. Our dataset is patients' rehabilitation exercises and demographic information recorded in the unstructured electronic health records (EHRs) data and free-text rehabilitation procedure notes. We collected data for 265 stroke patients from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. We employed a pre-existing natural language processing (NLP) algorithm to extract data on rehabilitation exercises and developed a rule-based NLP algorithm to extract Activity Measure for Post-Acute Care (AM-PAC) scores, covering basic mobility (BM) and applied cognitive (AC) domains, from procedure notes. Changes in AM-PAC scores were classified based on the minimal clinically important difference (MCID), and significance was assessed using Friedman and Wilcoxon tests. To identify impactful exercises, we used Chi-square tests, Fisher's exact tests, and logistic regression for odds ratios. Additionally, we developed five machine learning models-logistic regression (LR), Adaboost (ADB), support vector machine (SVM), gradient boosting (GB), and random forest (RF)-to predict outcomes in functional ability. Statistical analyses revealed significant associations between functional improvements and specific exercises. The RF model achieved the best performance in predicting functional outcomes. In this study, we identified three rehabilitation exercises that significantly contributed to patient post-stroke functional ability improvement in the first two months. Additionally, the successful application of a machine learning model to predict patient-specific functional outcomes underscores the potential for precision rehabilitation.

The scientific study of the Solar System's minor bodies ultimately starts with a search for those bodies. This chapter presents a review of the use of machine learning techniques to find moving objects, both natural and artificial, in astronomical imagery. After a short review of the classical non-machine learning techniques that are historically used, I review the relatively nascent machine learning literature, which can broadly be summarized into three categories: streak detection, detection of moving point sources in image sequences, and detection of moving sources in shift and stack searches. In most cases, convolutional neural networks are utilized, which is the obvious choice given the imagery nature of the inputs. In this chapter I present two example networks: a Residual Network I designed which is in use in various shift and stack searches, and a convolutional neural network that was designed for prediction of source brightnesses and their uncertainties in those same shift-stacks. In discussion of the literature and example networks, I discuss various pitfalls with the use of machine learning techniques, including a discussion on the important issue of overfitting. I discuss various pitfall associated with the use of machine learning techniques, and what I consider best practices to follow in the application of machine learning to a new problem, including methods for the creation of robust training sets, validation, and training to avoid overfitting.