We consider a setting with $N$ heterogeneous units and $p$ interventions. Our goal is to learn unit-specific potential outcomes for any combination of these $p$ interventions, i.e., $N \times 2^p$ causal parameters. Choosing combinations of interventions is a problem that naturally arises in many applications such as factorial design experiments, recommendation engines (e.g., showing a set of movies that maximizes engagement for users), combination therapies in medicine, selecting important features for ML models, etc. Running $N \times 2^p$ experiments to estimate the various parameters is infeasible as $N$ and $p$ grow. Further, with observational data there is likely confounding, i.e., whether or not a unit is seen under a combination is correlated with its potential outcome under that combination. To address these challenges, we propose a novel model that imposes latent structure across both units and combinations. We assume latent similarity across units (i.e., the potential outcomes matrix is rank $r$) and regularity in how combinations interact (i.e., the coefficients in the Fourier expansion of the potential outcomes is $s$ sparse). We establish identification for all causal parameters despite unobserved confounding. We propose an estimation procedure, Synthetic Combinations, and establish finite-sample consistency under precise conditions on the observation pattern. Our results imply Synthetic Combinations consistently estimates unit-specific potential outcomes given $\text{poly}(r) \times (N + s^2p)$ observations. In comparison, previous methods that do not exploit structure across both units and combinations have sample complexity scaling as $\min(N \times s^2p, \ \ r \times (N + 2^p))$. We use Synthetic Combinations to propose a data-efficient experimental design mechanism for combinatorial causal inference. We corroborate our theoretical findings with numerical simulations.

As the healthcare sector is facing major challenges, such as aging populations, staff shortages, and common chronic diseases, delivering high-quality care to individuals has become very difficult. Conversational agents have shown to be a promising technology to alleviate some of these issues. In the form of digital health assistants, they have the potential to improve the everyday life of the elderly and chronically ill people. This includes, for example, medication reminders, routine checks, or social chit-chat. In addition, conversational agents can satisfy the fundamental need of having access to information about daily news or local events, which enables individuals to stay informed and connected with the world around them. However, finding relevant news sources and navigating the plethora of news articles available online can be overwhelming, particularly for those who may have limited technological literacy or health-related impairments. To address this challenge, we propose an innovative solution that combines knowledge graphs and conversational agents for news search in assisted living. By leveraging graph databases to semantically structure news data and implementing an intuitive voice-based interface, our system can help care-dependent people to easily discover relevant news articles and give personalized recommendations. We explain our design choices, provide a system architecture, share insights of an initial user test, and give an outlook on planned future work.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly important in our daily lives. AI can automate routine and time-consuming tasks, allowing us to focus on more important activities. In addition, AI algorithms can analyze vast amounts of data to personalize products, services and experiences. Moreover, AI is driving innovation in various industries, such as finance, retail and education. Here are seven artificial intelligence examples in everyday life.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly important in our daily lives. AI can automate routine and time-consuming tasks, allowing us to focus on more important activities. In addition, AI algorithms can analyze vast amounts of data to personalize products, services and experiences. Moreover, AI is driving innovation in various industries, such as finance, retail and education. Here are seven artificial intelligence examples in everyday life.

Developers often struggle to navigate an Open Source Software (OSS) project's issue-tracking system and find a suitable task. Proper issue labeling can aid task selection, but current tools are limited to classifying the issues according to their type (e.g., bug, question, good first issue, feature, etc.). In contrast, this paper presents a tool (GiveMeLabeledIssues) that mines project repositories and labels issues based on the skills required to solve them. We leverage the domain of the APIs involved in the solution (e.g., User Interface (UI), Test, Databases (DB), etc.) as a proxy for the required skills. GiveMeLabeledIssues facilitates matching developers' skills to tasks, reducing the burden on project maintainers. The tool obtained a precision of 83.9% when predicting the API domains involved in the issues. The replication package contains instructions on executing the tool and including new projects. A demo video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic2quUue7i8

The field of user experience (UX) based on the design philosophy of "user-centered design" is moving towards the intelligence era. Still, the existing UX paradigm mainly aims at non-intelligent systems and lacks a systematic approach to UX for intelligent systems. Throughout the development of UX, the UX paradigm shows the evolution characteristics of the cross-technology era. At present, the intelligence era has put forward new demands on the UX paradigm. For this reason, this paper proposes a "UX 3.0" paradigm framework and the corresponding UX methodology system in the intelligence era. The "UX 3.0" paradigm framework includes five categories of UX methods: ecological experience, innovation-enabled experience, AI-enabled experience, human-AI interaction-based experience, and human-AI collaboration-based experience methods, each providing corresponding multiple UX paradigmatic orientations. The proposal of the "UX 3.0" paradigm helps improve the existing UX methods and provides methodological support for the research and applications of UX in developing intelligent systems. Finally, this paper looks forward to future research and applications of the "UX 3.0" paradigm.

The following post is an excerpt from my book'Designing Human-Centric AI Experiences' on applied UX design for Artificial intelligence. We tend to anthropomorphize AI systems, i.e., we impute them with human-like qualities. Many popular depictions of AI, like Samantha in the movie Her or Ava in Ex-Machina, show a personality and sometimes even display emotions. Many AI systems like Alexa or Siri are designed with a personality in mind. However, choosing to give your AI system a personality has its advantages and disadvantages.

It has a broad range of general knowledge which it can tap into to have discussions on various topics. It is aimed more at helping users solve problems, make decisions and gain new insights. Dragonfly has a deeper level of domain-specific knowledge which allows it to reason about topics such as science, engineering and healthcare. Sage is tailored for simpler back-and-forth conversations. While Sage and Dragonfly have different strengths, they share some similarities as AI systems built by Anthropic to be helpful, harmless and honest using techniques like Constitutional AI. But they play quite different roles as virtual assistants focused on either conversation or problem-solving.

New powerful tools for tackling life science problems have been created by recent advances in machine learning. The purpose of the paper is to discuss the potential advantages of gene recommendation performed by artificial intelligence (AI). Indeed, gene recommendation engines try to solve this problem: if the user is interested in a set of genes, which other genes are likely to be related to the starting set and should be investigated? This task was solved with a custom deep learning recommendation engine, DeepProphet2 (DP2), which is freely available to researchers worldwide via https://www.generecommender.com?utm_source=DeepProphet2_paper&utm_medium=pdf. Hereafter, insights behind the algorithm and its practical applications are illustrated. The gene recommendation problem can be addressed by mapping the genes to a metric space where a distance can be defined to represent the real semantic distance between them. To achieve this objective a transformer-based model has been trained on a well-curated freely available paper corpus, PubMed. The paper describes multiple optimization procedures that were employed to obtain the best bias-variance trade-off, focusing on embedding size and network depth. In this context, the model's ability to discover sets of genes implicated in diseases and pathways was assessed through cross-validation. A simple assumption guided the procedure: the network had no direct knowledge of pathways and diseases but learned genes' similarities and the interactions among them. Moreover, to further investigate the space where the neural network represents genes, the dimensionality of the embedding was reduced, and the results were projected onto a human-comprehensible space. In conclusion, a set of use cases illustrates the algorithm's potential applications in a real word setting.

In recommendation systems, a large portion of the ratings are missing due to the selection biases, which is known as Missing Not At Random. The counterfactual inverse propensity scoring (IPS) was used to weight the imputation error of every observed rating. Although effective in multiple scenarios, we argue that the performance of IPS estimation is limited due to the uncertainty miscalibration of propensity estimation. In this paper, we propose the uncertainty calibration for the propensity estimation in recommendation systems with multiple representative uncertainty calibration techniques. Theoretical analysis on the bias and generalization bound shows the superiority of the calibrated IPS estimator over the uncalibrated one. Experimental results on the coat and yahoo datasets shows that the uncertainty calibration is improved and hence brings the better recommendation results.