Our blood transports many chemicals besides oxygen and carbon dioxide. Some of these molecules provide useful indicators of the state of our health. Indeed, measuring such biomarkers is a common feature of clinical blood tests. Other molecules present, such as hormones and drugs, directly affect health by modulating processes such as metabolism and immune responses. Writing in Nature, Bar et al.1 shed light on the factors that affect the recipe for human blood's chemical brew.

Today is the era of intelligence in machines. With the advances in Artificial Intelligence, machines have started to impersonate different human traits, a chatbot is the next big thing in the domain of conversational services. A chatbot is a virtual person who is capable to carry out a natural conversation with people. They can include skills that enable them to converse with the humans in audio, visual, or textual formats. Artificial intelligence conversational entities, also called chatbots, conversational agents, or dialogue system, are an excellent example of such machines. Obtaining the right information at the right time and place is the key to effective disaster management. The term "disaster management" encompasses both natural and human-caused disasters. To assist citizens, our project is to create a COVID Assistant to provide the need of up to date information to be available 24 hours. With the growth in the World Wide Web, it is quite intelligible that users are interested in the swift and relatedly correct information for their hunt. A chatbot can be seen as a question-and-answer system in which experts provide knowledge to solicit users. This master thesis is dedicated to discuss COVID Assistant chatbot and explain each component in detail. The design of the proposed chatbot is introduced by its seven components: Ontology, Web Scraping module, DB, State Machine, keyword Extractor, Trained chatbot, and User Interface.

The thesis explores the role machine learning methods play in creating intuitive computational models of neural processing. Combined with interpretability techniques, machine learning could replace human modeler and shift the focus of human effort to extracting the knowledge from the ready-made models and articulating that knowledge into intuitive descroptions of reality. This perspective makes the case in favor of the larger role that exploratory and data-driven approach to computational neuroscience could play while coexisting alongside the traditional hypothesis-driven approach. We exemplify the proposed approach in the context of the knowledge representation taxonomy with three research projects that employ interpretability techniques on top of machine learning methods at three different levels of neural organization. The first study (Chapter 3) explores feature importance analysis of a random forest decoder trained on intracerebral recordings from 100 human subjects to identify spectrotemporal signatures that characterize local neural activity during the task of visual categorization. The second study (Chapter 4) employs representation similarity analysis to compare the neural responses of the areas along the ventral stream with the activations of the layers of a deep convolutional neural network. The third study (Chapter 5) proposes a method that allows test subjects to visually explore the state representation of their neural signal in real time. This is achieved by using a topology-preserving dimensionality reduction technique that allows to transform the neural data from the multidimensional representation used by the computer into a two-dimensional representation a human can grasp. The approach, the taxonomy, and the examples, present a strong case for the applicability of machine learning methods to automatic knowledge discovery in neuroscience.

Diagnosis of Parkinson's disease (PD) is commonly based on medical observations and assessment of clinical signs, including the characterization of a variety of motor symptoms. However, traditional diagnostic approaches may suffer from subjectivity as they rely on the evaluation of movements that are sometimes subtle to human eyes and therefore difficult to classify, leading to possible misclassification. In the meantime, early non-motor symptoms of PD may be mild and can be caused by many other conditions. Therefore, these symptoms are often overlooked, making diagnosis of PD at an early stage challenging. To address these difficulties and to refine the diagnosis and assessment procedures of PD, machine learning methods have been implemented for the classification of PD and healthy controls or patients with similar clinical presentations (e.g., movement disorders or other Parkinsonian syndromes). To provide a comprehensive overview of data modalities and machine learning methods that have been used in the diagnosis and differential diagnosis of PD, in this study, we conducted a systematic literature review of studies published until February 14, 2020, using the PubMed and IEEE Xplore databases. A total of 209 studies were included, extracted for relevant information and presented in this systematic review, with an investigation of their aims, sources of data, types of data, machine learning methods and associated outcomes. These studies demonstrate a high potential for adaptation of machine learning methods and novel biomarkers in clinical decision making, leading to increasingly systematic, informed diagnosis of PD.

Language is a valuable source of clinical information in Alzheimer's Disease, as it declines concurrently with neurodegeneration. Consequently, speech and language data have been extensively studied in connection with its diagnosis. This paper summarises current findings on the use of artificial intelligence, speech and language processing to predict cognitive decline in the context of Alzheimer's Disease, detailing current research procedures, highlighting their limitations and suggesting strategies to address them. We conducted a systematic review of original research between 2000 and 2019, registered in PROSPERO (reference CRD42018116606). An interdisciplinary search covered six databases on engineering (ACM and IEEE), psychology (PsycINFO), medicine (PubMed and Embase) and Web of Science. Bibliographies of relevant papers were screened until December 2019. From 3,654 search results 51 articles were selected against the eligibility criteria. Four tables summarise their findings: study details (aim, population, interventions, comparisons, methods and outcomes), data details (size, type, modalities, annotation, balance, availability and language of study), methodology (pre-processing, feature generation, machine learning, evaluation and results) and clinical applicability (research implications, clinical potential, risk of bias and strengths/limitations). While promising results are reported across nearly all 51 studies, very few have been implemented in clinical research or practice. We concluded that the main limitations of the field are poor standardisation, limited comparability of results, and a degree of disconnect between study aims and clinical applications. Attempts to close these gaps should support translation of future research into clinical practice.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly emerged as a key disruptive technology in the 21st century. At the heart of modern AI lies Deep Learning (DL), an emerging class of algorithms that has enabled today's platforms and organizations to operate at unprecedented efficiency, effectiveness, and scale. Despite significant interest, IS contributions in DL have been limited, which we argue is in part due to issues with defining, positioning, and conducting DL research. Recognizing the tremendous opportunity here for the IS community, this work clarifies, streamlines, and presents approaches for IS scholars to make timely and high-impact contributions. Related to this broader goal, this paper makes five timely contributions. First, we systematically summarize the major components of DL in a novel Deep Learning for Information Systems Research (DL-ISR) schematic that illustrates how technical DL processes are driven by key factors from an application environment. Second, we present a novel Knowledge Contribution Framework (KCF) to help IS scholars position their DL contributions for maximum impact. Third, we provide ten guidelines to help IS scholars generate rigorous and relevant DL-ISR in a systematic, high-quality fashion. Fourth, we present a review of prevailing journal and conference venues to examine how IS scholars have leveraged DL for various research inquiries. Finally, we provide a unique perspective on how IS scholars can formulate DL-ISR inquiries by carefully considering the interplay of business function(s), application areas(s), and the KCF. This perspective intentionally emphasizes inter-disciplinary, intra-disciplinary, and cross-IS tradition perspectives. Taken together, these contributions provide IS scholars a timely framework to advance the scale, scope, and impact of deep learning research.

Over the next few years, society as a whole will need to address what core values it wishes to protect when dealing with technology. Anthropology, a field dedicated to the very notion of what it means to be human, can provide some interesting insights into how to cope and tackle these changes in our Western society and other areas of the world. It can be challenging for social science practitioners to grasp and keep up with the pace of technological innovation, with many being unfamiliar with the jargon of AI. This short guide serves as both an introduction to AI ethics and social science and anthropological perspectives on the development of AI. It intends to provide those unfamiliar with the field with an insight into the societal impact of AI systems and how, in turn, these systems can lead us to rethink how our world operates.

The TriRhenaTech alliance presents a collection of accepted papers of the cancelled tri-national 'Upper-Rhine Artificial Inteeligence Symposium' planned for 13th May 2020 in Karlsruhe. The TriRhenaTech alliance is a network of universities in the Upper-Rhine Trinational Metropolitan Region comprising of the German universities of applied sciences in Furtwangen, Kaiserslautern, Karlsruhe, and Offenburg, the Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University Loerrach, the French university network Alsace Tech (comprised of 14 'grandes \'ecoles' in the fields of engineering, architecture and management) and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. The alliance's common goal is to reinforce the transfer of knowledge, research, and technology, as well as the cross-border mobility of students.

Time series analysis is a field of data science which is interested in analyzing sequences of numerical values ordered in time. Time series are particularly interesting because they allow us to visualize and understand the evolution of a process over time. Their analysis can reveal trends, relationships and similarities across the data. There exists numerous fields containing data in the form of time series: health care (electrocardiogram, blood sugar, etc.), activity recognition, remote sensing, finance (stock market price), industry (sensors), etc. Time series classification consists of constructing algorithms dedicated to automatically label time series data. The sequential aspect of time series data requires the development of algorithms that are able to harness this temporal property, thus making the existing off-the-shelf machine learning models for traditional tabular data suboptimal for solving the underlying task. In this context, deep learning has emerged in recent years as one of the most effective methods for tackling the supervised classification task, particularly in the field of computer vision. The main objective of this thesis was to study and develop deep neural networks specifically constructed for the classification of time series data. We thus carried out the first large scale experimental study allowing us to compare the existing deep methods and to position them compared other non-deep learning based state-of-the-art methods. Subsequently, we made numerous contributions in this area, notably in the context of transfer learning, data augmentation, ensembling and adversarial attacks. Finally, we have also proposed a novel architecture, based on the famous Inception network (Google), which ranks among the most efficient to date.

Equipping machines with comprehensive knowledge of the world's entities and their relationships has been a long-standing goal of AI. Over the last decade, large-scale knowledge bases, also known as knowledge graphs, have been automatically constructed from web contents and text sources, and have become a key asset for search engines. This machine knowledge can be harnessed to semantically interpret textual phrases in news, social media and web tables, and contributes to question answering, natural language processing and data analytics. This article surveys fundamental concepts and practical methods for creating and curating large knowledge bases. It covers models and methods for discovering and canonicalizing entities and their semantic types and organizing them into clean taxonomies. On top of this, the article discusses the automatic extraction of entity-centric properties. To support the long-term life-cycle and the quality assurance of machine knowledge, the article presents methods for constructing open schemas and for knowledge curation. Case studies on academic projects and industrial knowledge graphs complement the survey of concepts and methods.