The pandemic COVID-19 disease has had a dramatic impact on almost all countries around the world so that many hospitals have been overwhelmed with Covid-19 cases. As medical resources are limited, deciding on the proper allocation of these resources is a very crucial issue. Besides, uncertainty is a major factor that can affect decisions, especially in medical fields. To cope with this issue, we use fuzzy logic (FL) as one of the most suitable methods in modeling systems with high uncertainty and complexity. We intend to make use of the advantages of FL in decisions on cases that need to treat in ICU. In this study, an interval type-2 fuzzy expert system is proposed for prediction of ICU admission in COVID-19 patients. For this prediction task, we also developed an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS). Finally, the results of these fuzzy systems are compared to some well-known classification methods such as Naive Bayes (NB), Case-Based Reasoning (CBR), Decision Tree (DT), and K Nearest Neighbor (KNN). The results show that the type-2 fuzzy expert system and ANFIS models perform competitively in terms of accuracy and F-measure compared to the other system modeling techniques.

Fields such as phylogenetics often work with a sort of abstracted family tree, called a phylogenetic tree, frequently abbreviated here as tree. These trees have different members of a population as their tips, and their branching points describe the relations between the tips and how recently they had a common ancestor. If some of the tips are censored, the tree topology simplifies in a process we refer to as restriction. If one has multiple trees restricted from the same original, uncensored tree, one may wish to reconstruct the original supertree. Suppose instead one has multiple probability distributions of restricted trees, then one may be interested in reconstructing the supertree probability distribution.

It is known that the human visual system performs a hierarchical information process in which early vision cues (or primitives) are fused in the visual cortex to compose complex shapes and descriptors. While different aspects of the process have been extensively studied, as the lens adaptation or the feature detection, some other,as the feature fusion, have been mostly left aside. In this work we elaborate on the fusion of early vision primitives using generalizations of the Choquet integral, and novel aggregation operators that have been extensively studied in recent years. We propose to use generalizations of the Choquet integral to sensibly fuse elementary edge cues, in an attempt to model the behaviour of neurons in the early visual cortex. Our proposal leads to a full-framed edge detection algorithm, whose performance is put to the test in state-of-the-art boundary detection datasets.

Discrete event systems (DES) have been established and deeply developed in the framework of probabilistic and fuzzy computing models due to the necessity of practical applications in fuzzy and probabilistic systems. With the development of quantum computing and quantum control, a natural problem is to simulate DES by means of quantum computing models and to establish {\it quantum DES} (QDES). The motivation is twofold: on the one hand, QDES have potential applications when DES are simulated and processed by quantum computers, where quantum systems are employed to simulate the evolution of states driven by discrete events, and on the other hand, QDES may have essential advantages over DES concerning state complexity for imitating some practical problems. The goal of this paper is to establish a basic framework of QDES by using {\it quantum finite automata} (QFA) as the modelling formalisms, and the supervisory control theorems of QDES are established and proved. Then we present a polynomial-time algorithm to decide whether or not the controllability condition holds. In particular, we construct a number of new examples of QFA to illustrate the supervisory control of QDES and to verify the essential advantages of QDES over DES in state complexity.

Why can the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for mixture models converge? Why can different initial parameters cause various convergence difficulties? The Q-L synchronization theory explains that the observed data log-likelihood L and the complete data log-likelihood Q are positively correlated; we can achieve maximum L by maximizing Q. According to this theory, the Deterministic Annealing EM (DAEM) algorithm's authors make great efforts to eliminate locally maximal Q for avoiding L's local convergence. However, this paper proves that in some cases, Q may and should decrease for L to increase; slow or local convergence exists only because of small samples and unfair competition. This paper uses marriage competition to explain different convergence difficulties and proposes the Fair Competition Principle (FCP) with an initialization map for improving initializations. It uses the rate-verisimilitude function, extended from the rate-distortion function, to explain the convergence of the EM and improved EM algorithms. This convergence proof adopts variational and iterative methods that Shannon et al. used for analyzing rate-distortion functions. The initialization map can vastly save both algorithms' running times for binary Gaussian mixtures. The FCP and the initialization map are useful for complicated mixtures but not sufficient; we need further studies for specific methods.

Existing approaches for generating human-aware agent behaviors have considered different measures of interpretability in isolation. Further, these measures have been studied under differing assumptions, thus precluding the possibility of designing a single framework that captures these measures under the same assumptions. In this paper, we present a unifying Bayesian framework that models a human observer's evolving beliefs about an agent and thereby define the problem of Generalized Human-Aware Planning. We will show that the definitions of interpretability measures like explicability, legibility and predictability from the prior literature fall out as special cases of our general framework. Through this framework, we also bring a previously ignored fact to light that the human-robot interactions are in effect open-world problems, particularly as a result of modeling the human's beliefs over the agent. Since the human may not only hold beliefs unknown to the agent but may also form new hypotheses about the agent when presented with novel or unexpected behaviors.

Reliability of machine learning (ML) systems is crucial in safety-critical applications such as healthcare, and uncertainty estimation is a widely researched method to highlight the confidence of ML systems in deployment. Sequential and parallel ensemble techniques have shown improved performance of ML systems in multi-modal settings by leveraging the feature sets together. We propose an uncertainty-aware boosting technique for multi-modal ensembling in order to focus on the data points with higher associated uncertainty estimates, rather than the ones with higher loss values. We evaluate this method on healthcare tasks related to Dementia and Parkinson's disease which involve real-world multi-modal speech and text data, wherein our method shows an improved performance. Additional analysis suggests that introducing uncertainty-awareness into the boosted ensembles decreases the overall entropy of the system, making it more robust to heteroscedasticity in the data, as well as better calibrating each of the modalities along with high quality prediction intervals. We open-source our entire codebase at https://github.com/usarawgi911/Uncertainty-aware-boosting

Conditioning is crucial in applied science when inference involving time series is involved. Belief calculus is an effective way of handling such inference in the presence of epistemic uncertainty -- unfortunately, different approaches to conditioning in the belief function framework have been proposed in the past, leaving the matter somewhat unsettled. Inspired by the geometric approach to uncertainty, in this paper we propose an approach to the conditioning of belief functions based on geometrically projecting them onto the simplex associated with the conditioning event in the space of all belief functions. We show here that such a geometric approach to conditioning often produces simple results with straightforward interpretations in terms of degrees of belief. This raises the question of whether classical approaches, such as for instance Dempster's conditioning, can also be reduced to some form of distance minimisation in a suitable space. The study of families of combination rules generated by (geometric) conditioning rules appears to be the natural prosecution of the presented research.

Since the depletion of fossil fuels, the world has started to rely heavily on renewable sources of energy. With every passing year, our dependency on the renewable sources of energy is increasing exponentially. As a result, complex and hybrid generation systems are being designed and developed to meet the energy demands and ensure energy security in a country. The continual improvement in the technology and an effort towards the provision of uninterrupted power to the end-users is strongly dependent on an effective and fault resilient Operation and Maintenance (O&M) system. Ingenious algorithms and techniques are hence been introduced aiming to minimize equipment and plant downtime. Efforts are being made to develop robust Prognostic Maintenance systems that can identify the faults before they occur. To this aim, complex Data Analytics and Machine Learning (ML) techniques are being used to increase the overall efficiency of these prognostic maintenance systems. This paper provides an overview of the predictive/prognostic maintenance frameworks reported in the literature. We pay a particular focus to the approaches, challenges including data-related issues, such as the availability and quality of the data and data auditing, feature engineering, interpretability, and security issues. Being a key aspect of ML-based solutions, we also discuss some of the commonly used publicly available datasets in the domain. The paper also identifies key future research directions. We believe such detailed analysis will provide a baseline for future research in the domain.

Randomized algorithms have propelled advances in artificial intelligence and represent a foundational research area in advancing AI for Science. Future advancements in DOE Office of Science priority areas such as climate science, astrophysics, fusion, advanced materials, combustion, and quantum computing all require randomized algorithms for surmounting challenges of complexity, robustness, and scalability. This report summarizes the outcomes of that workshop, "Randomized Algorithms for Scientific Computing (RASC)," held virtually across four days in December 2020 and January 2021.