Movement disorders are typically diagnosed by consensus-based expert evaluation of clinically acquired patient videos. However, such broad sharing of patient videos poses risks to patient privacy. Face blurring can be used to de-identify videos, but this process is often manual and time-consuming. Available automated face blurring techniques are subject to either excessive, inconsistent, or insufficient facial blurring - all of which can be disastrous for video assessment and patient privacy. Furthermore, assessing movement disorders in these videos is often subjective. The extraction of quantifiable kinematic features can help inform movement disorder assessment in these videos, but existing methods to do this are prone to errors if using pre-blurred videos. We have developed an open-source software called SecurePose that can both achieve reliable face blurring and automated kinematic extraction in patient videos recorded in a clinic setting using an iPad. SecurePose, extracts kinematics using a pose estimation method (OpenPose), tracks and uniquely identifies all individuals in the video, identifies the patient, and performs face blurring. The software was validated on gait videos recorded in outpatient clinic visits of 116 children with cerebral palsy. The validation involved assessing intermediate steps of kinematics extraction and face blurring with manual blurring (ground truth). Moreover, when SecurePose was compared with six selected existing methods, it outperformed other methods in automated face detection and achieved ceiling accuracy in 91.08% less time than a robust manual face blurring method. Furthermore, ten experienced researchers found SecurePose easy to learn and use, as evidenced by the System Usability Scale. The results of this work validated the performance and usability of SecurePose on clinically recorded gait videos for face blurring and kinematics extraction.

Distribution shifts are ubiquitous in real-world machine learning applications, posing a challenge to the generalization of models trained on one data distribution to another. We focus on scenarios where data distributions vary across multiple segments of the entire population and only make local assumptions about the differences between training and test (deployment) distributions within each segment. We propose a two-stage multiply robust estimation method to improve model performance on each individual segment for tabular data analysis. The method involves fitting a linear combination of the based models, learned using clusters of training data from multiple segments, followed by a refinement step for each segment. Our method is designed to be implemented with commonly used off-the-shelf machine learning models. We establish theoretical guarantees on the generalization bound of the method on the test risk. With extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method substantially improves over existing alternatives in prediction accuracy and robustness on both regression and classification tasks. We also assess its effectiveness on a user city prediction dataset from a large technology company.

Estimating the ratio of two probability densities from finitely many samples, is a central task in machine learning and statistics. In this work, we show that a large class of kernel methods for density ratio estimation suffers from error saturation, which prevents algorithms from achieving fast error convergence rates on highly regular learning problems. To resolve saturation, we introduce iterated regularization in density ratio estimation to achieve fast error rates. Our methods outperform its non-iteratively regularized versions on benchmarks for density ratio estimation as well as on large-scale evaluations for importance-weighted ensembling of deep unsupervised domain adaptation models.

Scalable service-Oriented Middleware over IP (SOME/IP) is an Ethernet communication standard protocol in the Automotive Open System Architecture (AUTOSAR), promoting ECU-to-ECU communication over the IP stack. However, SOME/IP lacks a robust security architecture, making it susceptible to potential attacks. Besides, random hardware failure of ECU will disrupt SOME/IP communication. In this paper, we propose SISSA, a SOME/IP communication traffic-based approach for modeling and analyzing in-vehicle functional safety and cyber security. Specifically, SISSA models hardware failures with the Weibull distribution and addresses five potential attacks on SOME/IP communication, including Distributed Denial-of-Services, Man-in-the-Middle, and abnormal communication processes, assuming a malicious user accesses the in-vehicle network. Subsequently, SISSA designs a series of deep learning models with various backbones to extract features from SOME/IP sessions among ECUs. We adopt residual self-attention to accelerate the model's convergence and enhance detection accuracy, determining whether an ECU is under attack, facing functional failure, or operating normally. Additionally, we have created and annotated a dataset encompassing various classes, including indicators of attack, functionality, and normalcy. This contribution is noteworthy due to the scarcity of publicly accessible datasets with such characteristics.Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of SISSA.

Recently, there has been a surge of explainable AI (XAI) methods driven by the need for understanding machine learning model behaviors in high-stakes scenarios. However, properly evaluating the effectiveness of the XAI methods inevitably requires the involvement of human subjects, and conducting human-centered benchmarks is challenging in a number of ways: designing and implementing user studies is complex; numerous design choices in the design space of user study lead to problems of reproducibility; and running user studies can be challenging and even daunting for machine learning researchers. To address these challenges, this paper presents OpenHEXAI, an open-source framework for human-centered evaluation of XAI methods. OpenHEXAI features (1) a collection of diverse benchmark datasets, pre-trained models, and post hoc explanation methods; (2) an easy-to-use web application for user study; (3) comprehensive evaluation metrics for the effectiveness of post hoc explanation methods in the context of human-AI decision making tasks; (4) best practice recommendations of experiment documentation; and (5) convenient tools for power analysis and cost estimation. OpenHEAXI is the first large-scale infrastructural effort to facilitate human-centered benchmarks of XAI methods. It simplifies the design and implementation of user studies for XAI methods, thus allowing researchers and practitioners to focus on the scientific questions. Additionally, it enhances reproducibility through standardized designs. Based on OpenHEXAI, we further conduct a systematic benchmark of four state-of-the-art post hoc explanation methods and compare their impacts on human-AI decision making tasks in terms of accuracy, fairness, as well as users' trust and understanding of the machine learning model.

We describe a data-efficient, kernel-based approach to statistical testing of conditional independence. A major challenge of conditional independence testing, absent in tests of unconditional independence, is to obtain the correct test level (the specified upper bound on the rate of false positives), while still attaining competitive test power. Excess false positives arise due to bias in the test statistic, which is obtained using nonparametric kernel ridge regression. We propose three methods for bias control to correct the test level, based on data splitting, auxiliary data, and (where possible) simpler function classes. We show these combined strategies are effective both for synthetic and real-world data.

Our research investigates vibrotactile perception in four prosthetic hands with distinct kinematics and mechanical characteristics. We found that rigid and simple socket-based prosthetic devices can transmit tactile information and surprisingly enable users to identify the stimulated finger with high reliability. This ability decreases with more advanced prosthetic hands with additional articulations and softer mechanics. We conducted experiments to understand the underlying mechanisms. We assessed a prosthetic user's ability to discriminate finger contacts based on vibrations transmitted through the four prosthetic hands. We also performed numerical and mechanical vibration tests on the prostheses and used a machine learning classifier to identify the contacted finger. Our results show that simpler and rigid prosthetic hands facilitate contact discrimination (for instance, a user of a purely cosmetic hand can distinguish a contact on the index finger from other fingers with 83% accuracy), but all tested hands, including soft advanced ones, performed above chance level. Despite advanced hands reducing vibration transmission, a machine learning algorithm still exceeded human performance in discriminating finger contacts. These findings suggest the potential for enhancing vibrotactile feedback in advanced prosthetic hands and lay the groundwork for future integration of such feedback in prosthetic devices.

With the exponential growth of the life science literature, biomedical text mining (BTM) has become an essential technology for accelerating the extraction of insights from publications. Identifying named entities (e.g., diseases, drugs, or genes) in texts and their linkage to reference knowledge bases are crucial steps in BTM pipelines to enable information aggregation from different documents. However, tools for these two steps are rarely applied in the same context in which they were developed. Instead, they are applied in the wild, i.e., on application-dependent text collections different from those used for the tools' training, varying, e.g., in focus, genre, style, and text type. This raises the question of whether the reported performance of BTM tools can be trusted for downstream applications. Here, we report on the results of a carefully designed cross-corpus benchmark for named entity extraction, where tools were applied systematically to corpora not used during their training. Based on a survey of 28 published systems, we selected five for an in-depth analysis on three publicly available corpora encompassing four different entity types. Comparison between tools results in a mixed picture and shows that, in a cross-corpus setting, the performance is significantly lower than the one reported in an in-corpus setting. HunFlair2 showed the best performance on average, being closely followed by PubTator. Our results indicate that users of BTM tools should expect diminishing performances when applying them in the wild compared to original publications and show that further research is necessary to make BTM tools more robust.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into daily life, particularly through information retrieval and recommender systems, has necessitated advanced user modeling and profiling techniques to deliver personalized experiences. These techniques aim to construct accurate user representations based on the rich amounts of data generated through interactions with these systems. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the current state, evolution, and future directions of user modeling and profiling research. We provide a historical overview, tracing the development from early stereotype models to the latest deep learning techniques, and propose a novel taxonomy that encompasses all active topics in this research area, including recent trends. Our survey highlights the paradigm shifts towards more sophisticated user profiling methods, emphasizing implicit data collection, multi-behavior modeling, and the integration of graph data structures. We also address the critical need for privacy-preserving techniques and the push towards explainability and fairness in user modeling approaches. By examining the definitions of core terminology, we aim to clarify ambiguities and foster a clearer understanding of the field by proposing two novel encyclopedic definitions of the main terms. Furthermore, we explore the application of user modeling in various domains, such as fake news detection, cybersecurity, and personalized education. This survey serves as a comprehensive resource for researchers and practitioners, offering insights into the evolution of user modeling and profiling and guiding the development of more personalized, ethical, and effective AI systems.

Risk mitigation techniques are critical to avoiding accidents associated with driving behaviour. We provide a novel Multi-Class Driver Distraction Risk Assessment (MDDRA) model that considers the vehicle, driver, and environmental data during a journey. MDDRA categorises the driver on a risk matrix as safe, careless, or dangerous. It offers flexibility in adjusting the parameters and weights to consider each event on a specific severity level. We collect real-world data using the Field Operation Test (TeleFOT), covering drivers using the same routes in the East Midlands, United Kingdom (UK). The results show that reducing road accidents caused by driver distraction is possible. We also study the correlation between distraction (driver, vehicle, and environment) and the classification severity based on a continuous distraction severity score. Furthermore, we apply machine learning techniques to classify and predict driver distraction according to severity levels to aid the transition of control from the driver to the vehicle (vehicle takeover) when a situation is deemed risky. The Ensemble Bagged Trees algorithm performed best, with an accuracy of 96.2%.