Arvind Gopalakrishnan is a part of the AIM Writers Programme.… Data mining is taking turns in the industry like anything, but have you ever heard of Opinion Mining? Leveraging customer opinion as quantifiable data is a concept of future to a layman but with Natural Language Processing, the world can finally process and completely absorb customer feedback. Often data is associated with quantity-based statistics with numbers and metrics floating around, however, with natural language processing (NLP), qualitative factors like customer feedback can be processed and used as quantifiable data. For example, if a specific mobile phone models witness a higher number of sales in a given year, the manufacturers tend to incorporate features of that mobile phone to increase the sales of other models where they somehow miss to make upgrades properly basis the customer feedback.

The FBI and Justice Department are assisting the Altoona Police Department's investigation after a noose was found last month at a work site on the Facebook Data Center property in Altoona, Iowa. Altoona police officials say they contacted the FBI on June 19, the day the noose was found. The date coincided with Juneteenth, the annual holiday celebrating the end of slavery. Interviews are still being conducted in the investigation, according to Altoona Police Department Public Information Officer Alyssa Wilson. While federal investigators were already involved with the incident, as of Thursday, all information in the case will be filtered through the FBI's Omaha office.

Due to its decentralized nature, Federated Learning (FL) lends itself to adversarial attacks in the form of backdoors during training. The goal of a backdoor is to corrupt the performance of the trained model on specific sub-tasks (e.g., by classifying green cars as frogs). A range of FL backdoor attacks have been introduced in the literature, but also methods to defend against them, and it is currently an open question whether FL systems can be tailored to be robust against backdoors. In this work, we provide evidence to the contrary. We first establish that, in the general case, robustness to backdoors implies model robustness to adversarial examples, a major open problem in itself. Furthermore, detecting the presence of a backdoor in a FL model is unlikely assuming first order oracles or polynomial time. We couple our theoretical results with a new family of backdoor attacks, which we refer to as edge-case backdoors. An edge-case backdoor forces a model to misclassify on seemingly easy inputs that are however unlikely to be part of the training, or test data, i.e., they live on the tail of the input distribution. We explain how these edge-case backdoors can lead to unsavory failures and may have serious repercussions on fairness, and exhibit that with careful tuning at the side of the adversary, one can insert them across a range of machine learning tasks (e.g., image classification, OCR, text prediction, sentiment analysis).

It is stated that data scientists spend almost 70% of their time on data cleaning. It is one of the most tedious tasks. The model's performance is directly proportional to how clean your data is. Here cleaning includes removing duplicate data, unnecessary elements, and handling missing data. We will perform a couple of standard cleaning techniques before we preprocess the text.

By Natalia Modjeska, MBA, PhD, helps organizations make sense of AI/ML. Recently I had the opportunity to attend the inaugural Emotion AI Conference, organized by Seth Grimes, a leading analyst and business consultant in the areas of natural language processing (NLP), text analytics, sentiment analysis, and their business applications. The conference was attended by about 70 people (including presenters and panelists) from industry and academia in the US, Canada, and Europe. Given the conference topic, what is emotion AI, why is it relevant, and what do you need to know about it? Read on to find out (warning: this is a long-ish article), but first, some background. We humans are highly emotional beings, and emotions impact everything we do, even if we are not, for the most part, aware of it.

The Github repo for this post contains a notebook and the data needed to generate some of the charts in this post, as well as a sample of the Plotly chart and CSV table of the results. The code can be easily tweaked if you wish to generate results for multiple speeches in one go. The data comprises six official speech transcripts taken from the websites of the Singapore Government as well as the Prime Minister's Office. These speeches focused on the Government's plans to deal with the challenges from Covid-19, and are set to frame the broader debate for Singapore's upcoming election. Some excessively long chunks of text were broken up into smaller paragraphs for a fairer assessment of the sentiment, but the vast majority of the speeches were analysed in their original form.

This work proposes a structured approach to baselining a model, identifying attack vectors, and securing the machine learning models after deployment. This method for securing each model post deployment is called the BAD (Build, Attack, and Defend) Architecture. Two implementations of the BAD architecture are evaluated to quantify the adversarial life cycle for a black box Sentiment Analysis system. As a challenging diagnostic, the Jigsaw Toxic Bias dataset is selected as the baseline in our performance tool. Each implementation of the architecture will build a baseline performance report, attack a common weakness, and defend the incoming attack. As an important note: each attack surface demonstrated in this work is detectable and preventable. The goal is to demonstrate a viable methodology for securing a machine learning model in a production setting.

The objective of the study is to examine coronavirus disease (COVID-19) related discussions, concerns, and sentiments that emerged from tweets posted by Twitter users. We analyze 4 million Twitter messages related to the COVID-19 pandemic using a list of 25 hashtags such as "coronavirus," "COVID-19," "quarantine" from March 1 to April 21 in 2020. We use a machine learning approach, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), to identify popular unigram, bigrams, salient topics and themes, and sentiments in the collected Tweets. Popular unigrams include "virus," "lockdown," and "quarantine." Popular bigrams include "COVID-19," "stay home," "corona virus," "social distancing," and "new cases." We identify 13 discussion topics and categorize them into five different themes, such as "public health measures to slow the spread of COVID-19," "social stigma associated with COVID-19," "coronavirus news cases and deaths," "COVID-19 in the United States," and "coronavirus cases in the rest of the world". Across all identified topics, the dominant sentiments for the spread of coronavirus are anticipation that measures that can be taken, followed by a mixed feeling of trust, anger, and fear for different topics. The public reveals a significant feeling of fear when they discuss the coronavirus new cases and deaths than other topics. The study shows that Twitter data and machine learning approaches can be leveraged for infodemiology study by studying the evolving public discussions and sentiments during the COVID-19. Real-time monitoring and assessment of the Twitter discussion and concerns can be promising for public health emergency responses and planning. Already emerged pandemic fear, stigma, and mental health concerns may continue to influence public trust when there occurs a second wave of COVID-19 or a new surge of the imminent pandemic.

Google app market captures the school of thought of users via ratings and text reviews. The critique's viewpoint regarding an app is proportional to their satisfaction level. Consequently, this helps other users to gain insights before downloading or purchasing the apps. The potential information from the reviews can't be extracted manually, due to its exponential growth. Sentiment analysis, by machine learning algorithms employing NLP, is used to explicitly uncover and interpret the emotions. This study aims to perform the sentiment classification of the app reviews and identify the university students' behavior towards the app market. We applied machine learning algorithms using the TF-IDF text representation scheme and the performance was evaluated on the ensemble learning method. Our model was trained on Google reviews and tested on students' reviews. SVM recorded the maximum accuracy(93.37\%), F-score(0.88) on tri-gram + TF-IDF scheme. Bagging enhanced the performance of LR and NB with accuracy of 87.80\% and 85.5\% respectively.

Behavioral cues play a significant part in human communication and cognitive perception. In most professional domains, employee recruitment policies are framed such that both professional skills and personality traits are adequately assessed. Hiring interviews are structured to evaluate expansively a potential employee's suitability for the position - their professional qualifications, interpersonal skills, ability to perform in critical and stressful situations, in the presence of time and resource constraints, etc. Therefore, candidates need to be aware of their positive and negative attributes and be mindful of behavioral cues that might have adverse effects on their success. We propose a multimodal analytical framework that analyzes the candidate in an interview scenario and provides feedback for predefined labels such as engagement, speaking rate, eye contact, etc. We perform a comprehensive analysis that includes the interviewee's facial expressions, speech, and prosodic information, using the video, audio, and text transcripts obtained from the recorded interview. We use these multimodal data sources to construct a composite representation, which is used for training machine learning classifiers to predict the class labels. Such analysis is then used to provide constructive feedback to the interviewee for their behavioral cues and body language. Experimental validation showed that the proposed methodology achieved promising results.