Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distributed Finite-Time State Estimation of Interconnected Complex Metabolic Networks

A set of distributed robust finite-time state observers was developed and tested to estimate the main biochemical substances in interconnected metabolic networks with complex structure. The finite-time estimator was designed by composing several supertwisting based step-by-step state observers. This segmented structure was proposed accordingly to the partition of metabolic network obtained as a result of applying the observability analysis of the model used to represent metabolic networks. The observer was developed under the assumption that a sufficient and small number of intracellular compounds can be obtained by some feasible analytic techniques. These techniques are enlisted to demonstrate the feasibility of designing the proposed observer. A set of numerical simulations was proposed to test the observer design over the hydrogen producing metabolic behavior of Escherichia coli. The numerical evaluations showed the superior performance of the observer (on recovering immeasurable state values) over classical approaches (high gain). The variations of internal metabolites inserted in the hydrogen productive metabolic networks were collected from databases. This information supplied to the observer served to validate its ability to recover the time evolution of nonmeasurable metabolites.
On the Design Complexity of Cyberphysical Production Systems

Establishing mass-customization practices, in a sustainable way, at a time of increased market uncertainty, is a pressing challenge for modern producing companies and one that traditional automation solutions cannot cope with. Industry 4.0 seeks to mitigate current practice’s limitations. It promotes a vision of a fully interconnected ecosystem of systems, machines, products, and many different stakeholders. In this environment, dynamically interconnected autonomous systems support humans in multifaceted decision-making. Industrial Internet of Things and cyberphysical systems (CPSs) are just two of the emerging concepts that embody the design and behavioral principles of these highly complex technical systems. The research within multiagent systems in manufacturing, by embodying most of the defining principles of industrial CPSs (ICPSs), is often regarded as a precursor for many of today’s emerging ICPS architectures. However, the domain has been fuzzy in specifying clear-cut design objectives and rules. Designs have been proposed with different positioning, creating confusion in concepts and supporting technologies. This paper contributes by providing clear definitions and interpretations of the main functional traits spread across the literature. A characterization of the defining functional requirements of ICPSs follows, in the form of a scale, rating systems according to the degree of implementation of the different functions.
Semantic Representation of Data Science Programs

Your computer is continuously executing programs, but does it really understand them? Not in any meaningful sense. That burden falls upon human knowledge workers, who are increasingly asked to write and understand code. They would benefit greatly from intelligent tools that reveal the connections between their code and its subject matter. Towards this prospect, we present an AI system that forms semantic representations of computer programs, using techniques from knowledge representation and program analysis. These representations are created through a novel algorithm for the semantic enrichment of dataflow graphs. We illustrate its workings with examples from the field of data science. The algorithm is undergirded by a new ontology language for modeling computer programs and a new ontology about data science, written in this language.
Evaluation on the genetic instability detecting methods for rapid diagnose of Fanconi anemia used in the undeveloped areas of China

Fanconi anemia (FA), as one of the congenital bone marrow failure syndromes, is characterized by severe bone marrow hypocellularity and pancytopenia which is similar with acquired aplastic anemia (AAA). However, patients with FA or AAA need an accurate diagnose, as the two syndromes differ significantly in both treatment and prognosis. FA results from gene mutations of the FA pathway genes specifically required for DNA repair, and the mutation of these genes contributes to the genome instability of FA cells. Based on this feature, chromosome aberration (CA) has been used as a “golden standard” to the auxiliary diagnosis of FA from AAA. However, CA diagnose calls for more technical requirements and a long time for the subsequent statistical analysis.
High Resolution Feature Recovering for Accelerating Urban Scene Parsing

Both accuracy and speed are equally important in urban scene parsing. Most of the existing methods mainly focus on improving parsing accuracy, ignoring the problem of low inference speed due to large-sized input and high resolution feature maps. To tackle this issue, we propose a High Resolution Feature Recovering (HRFR) framework to accelerate a given parsing network. A Super-Resolution Recovering module is employed to recover features of large original-sized images from features of down-sampled input. Therefore, our framework can combine the advantages of (1) fast speed of networks with down-sampled input and (2) high accuracy of networks with large original-sized input. Additionally, we employ auxiliary intermediate supervision and boundary region re-weighting to facilitate the optimization of the network. Extensive experiments on the two challenging Cityscapes and CamVid datasets well demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed HRFR framework, which can accelerate the scene parsing inference process by about 3.0x speedup from 1/2 down-sampled input with negligible accuracy reduction.
Joint Learning Embeddings for Chinese Words and their Components via Ladder Structured Networks

The components, such as characters and radicals, of a Chinese word are important sources to help in capturing semantic information of the word. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, namely, ladder structured networks (LSN), which contains three layers representing word, character and radical and learns their embeddings synchronously. LSN captures not only the relations among words, but also the relations among their component characters and radicals, as well as the relations across layers. Each layer in LSN is pluggable so that any particular type of unit (word, character, radical) can be removed and the LSN is thus adjusted for particular types of inputs. In evaluating our framework, we use word similarity as the intrinsic evaluation and part-of-speech tagging and document classification as extrinsic evaluations. Experimental results confirm the validity of our approach and show superiority of our approach over previous work.
Hierarchical Expertise Level Modeling for User Specific Contrastive Explanations

There is a growing interest within the AI research community in developing autonomous systems capable of explaining their behavior to users. However, the problem of computing explanations for users of different levels of expertise has received little research attention. We propose an approach for addressing this problem by representing the user's understanding of the task as an abstraction of the domain model that the planner uses. We present algorithms for generating minimal explanations in cases where this abstract human model is not known. We reduce the problem of generating an explanation to a search over the space of abstract models and show that while the complete problem is NP-hard, a greedy algorithm can provide good approximations of the optimal solution. We also empirically show that our approach can efficiently compute explanations for a variety of problems.
Best-Case and Worst-Case Behavior of Greedy Best-First Search

We study the impact of tie-breaking on the behavior of greedy best-first search with a fixed state space and fixed heuristic. We prove that it is NP-complete to determine the number of states that need to be expanded by greedy best-first search in the best case or in the worst case. However, the best- and worst-case behavior can be computed in polynomial time for undirected state spaces. We perform computational experiments on benchmark tasks from the International Planning Competitions that compare the best and worst cases of greedy best-first search to FIFO, LIFO and random tie-breaking. The experiments demonstrate the importance of tie-breaking in greedy best-first search.
An Exact Algorithm for Maximum k-Plexes in Massive Graphs

The maximum k-plex, a generalization of maximum clique, is used to cope with a great number of real-world problems. The aim of this paper is to propose a novel exact k-plex algorithm that can deal with large-scaled graphs with millions of vertices and edges. Specifically, we first propose several new graph reduction methods through a careful analyzing of structures of induced subgraphs. Afterwards, we present a preprocessing method to simplify initial graphs. Additionally, we present a branch-and-bound algorithm integrating the reduction methods as well as a new dynamic vertex selection mechanism. We perform intensive experiments to evaluate our algorithm, and show that the proposed strategies are effective and our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms, especially for real-world massive graphs.
Modeling Contemporaneous Basket Sequences with Twin Networks for Next-Item Recommendation

Our interactions with an application frequently leave a heterogeneous and contemporaneous trail of actions and adoptions (e.g., clicks, bookmarks, purchases). Given a sequence of a particular type (e.g., purchases)-- referred to as the target sequence, we seek to predict the next item expected to appear beyond this sequence. This task is known as next-item recommendation. We hypothesize two means for improvement. First, within each time step, a user may interact with multiple items (a basket), with potential latent associations among them. Second, predicting the next item in the target sequence may be helped by also learning from another supporting sequence (e.g., clicks). We develop three twin network structures modeling the generation of both target and support basket sequences. One based on "Siamese networks" facilitates full sharing of parameters between the two sequence types. The other two based on "fraternal networks" facilitate partial sharing of parameters. Experiments on real-world datasets show significant improvements upon baselines relying on one sequence type.
Topic-to-Essay Generation with Neural Networks

We focus on essay generation, which is a challenging task that generates a paragraph-level text with multiple topics.Progress towards understanding different topics and expressing diversity in this task requires more powerful generators and richer training and evaluation resources. To address this, we develop a multi-topic aware long short-term memory (MTA-LSTM) network.In this model, we maintain a novel multi-topic coverage vector, which learns the weight of each topic and is sequentially updated during the decoding process.Afterwards this vector is fed to an attention model to guide the generator.Moreover, we automatically construct two paragraph-level Chinese essay corpora, 305,000 essay paragraphs and 55,000 question-and-answer pairs.Empirical results show that our approach obtains much better BLEU score compared to various baselines.Furthermore, human judgment shows that MTA-LSTM has the ability to generate essays that are not only coherent but also closely related to the input topics.
Identification of ENTPD8 and cytidine in pancreatic cancer by metabolomic and transcriptomic conjoint analysis

To identify metabolic pathways that were perturbed in pancreatic cancer (PC), we investigated gene‐metabolite networks by integration of metabolomic and transcriptomic. In this research, we undertook the metabolomic study of 43 paired human PC samples, aiming to identify key metabolic alterations in PC. We also carried out in vitro experiments to validate that the key metabolite cytidine and its related gene ENTPD8 played an important role in PC cell proliferation. We screened out 13 metabolites differentially expressed in PC tissue (PCT) by liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry analysis on 34 metabolites, and the partial least square discrimination analysis results revealed that 9 metabolites among them were remarkably altered in PCT compared to adjacent noncancerous tissue (variable importance in projection >1, P < .05). Among the 9 metabolites, 7 might be potential biomarkers. The most significantly enriched metabolic pathway was pyrimidine metabolism. We analyzed 351 differentially expressed genes from The Cancer Genome Atlas and intersected them with Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes metabolic pathways. We found that ENTPD8 had a gene‐metabolite association with cytidine in the CTP dephosphorylation pathway. We verified by in vitro experiments that the CTP dephosphorylation pathway was changed in PCT compared with adjacent noncancerous tissue. ENTPD8 was downregulated in PCT, causing a reduction in cytidine formation and hence weakened CTP dephosphorylation in pyrimidine metabolism.
Joint Posterior Revision of NLP Annotations via Ontological Knowledge

Different well-established NLP tasks contribute to elicit the semantics of entities mentioned in natural language text, such as Named Entity Recognition and Classification (NERC) and Entity Linking (EL). However, combining the outcomes of these tasks may result in NLP annotations — such as a NERC organization linked by EL to a person — that are unlikely or contradictory when interpreted in the light of common world knowledge about the entities these annotations refer to. We thus propose a general probabilistic model that explicitly captures the relations between multiple NLP annotations for an entity mention, the ontological entity classes implied by those annotations, and the background ontological knowledge those classes may be consistent with. We use the model to estimate the posterior probability of NLP annotations given their confidences (prior probabilities) and the ontological knowledge, and consequently revise the best annotation choice performed by the NLP tools. In a concrete scenario with two stateof-the-art tools for NERC and EL, we experimentally show on three reference datasets that for these tasks, the joint annotation revision performed by the model consistently improves on the original results of the tools.
Content-Aware Hierarchical Point-of-Interest Embedding Model for Successive POI Recommendation

Recommending a point-of-interest (POI) a user will visit next based on temporal and spatial context information is an important task in mobile-based applications. Recently, several POI recommendation models based on conventional sequential-data modeling approaches have been proposed. However, such models focus on only a user's check-in sequence information and the physical distance between POIs. Furthermore, they do not utilize the characteristics of POIs or the relationships between POIs. To address this problem, we propose CAPE, the first content-aware POI embedding model which utilizes text content that provides information about the characteristics of a POI. CAPE consists of a check-in context layer and a text content layer. The check-in context layer captures the geographical influence of POIs from the check-in sequence of a user, while the text content layer captures the characteristics of POIs from the text content. To validate the efficacy of CAPE, we constructed a large-scale POI dataset. In the experimental evaluation, we show that the performance of the existing POI recommendation models can be significantly improved by simply applying CAPE to the models.
Greatly Enhanced Photovoltaic Performance of Crystalline Silicon Solar Cells via Metal Oxide

Band-gap alignment engineering has now been extensively studied due to its high potential for application. Here we demonstrate a simple route to synthesize two metal oxide layers and align them together according to their bandgaps on the surface of crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cells. The metal oxide layers not only extend absorption spectrum to generate extra carriers but also more efficiently separate electron–hole pairs. As a consequence, the photovoltaic performance of SnO2/CdO/Si double-layer solar cell (DLSC) is highly improved compared to the controlled Si solar cell, CdO/Si and SnO2/Si single-layer solar cells (SLSCs). Via alignment engineering, the SnO2/CdO/Si DLSC produces a short circuit photocurrent (Jsc) of 38.20 mA/cm2, an open circuit photovoltage (Voc) of 0.575 V and a fill factor (FF) of 68.7%, a conversion efficiency (η) of 15.09% under AM1.5 illumination.
IBM Scenario Planning Advisor: Plan Recognition as AI Planning in Practice

We present the IBM Research Scenario Planning Advisor (SPA), a decision support system that allows users to generate diverse alternate scenarios of the future and enhance their ability to imagine the different possible outcomes, including unlikely but potentially impactful futures. The system includes tooling for experts to intuitively encode their domain knowledge, and uses AI Planning to reason about this knowledge and the current state of the world, including news and social media, when generating scenarios.
Semi-Supervised Optimal Transport for Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation

Heterogeneous domain adaptation (HDA) aims to exploit knowledge from a heterogeneous source domain to improve the learning performance in a target domain. Since the feature spaces of the source and target domains are different, the transferring of knowledge is extremely difficult. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised algorithm for HDA by exploiting the theory of optimal transport (OT), a powerful tool originally designed for aligning two different distributions. To match the samples between heterogeneous domains, we propose to preserve the semantic consistency between heterogeneous domains by incorporating label information into the entropic Gromov-Wasserstein discrepancy, which is a metric in OT for different metric spaces, resulting in a new semi-supervised scheme. Via the new scheme, the target and transported source samples with the same label are enforced to follow similar distributions. Lastly, based on the Kullback-Leibler metric, we develop an efficient algorithm to optimize the resultant problem. Comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Quality Matters: Assessing cQA Pair Quality via Transductive Multi-View Learning

Community-based question answering (cQA) sites have become important knowledge sharing platforms, as massive cQA pairs are archived, but the uneven quality of cQA pairs leaves information seekers unsatisfied. Various efforts have been dedicated to predicting the quality of cQA contents. Most of them concatenate different features into single vectors and then feed them into regression models. In fact, the quality of cQA pairs is influenced by different views, and the agreement among them is essential for quality assessment. Besides, the lacking of labeled data significantly hinders the quality prediction performance. Toward this end, we present a transductive multi-view learning model. It is designed to find a latent common space by unifying and preserving information from various views, including question, answer, QA relevance, asker, and answerer. Additionally, rich information in the unlabeled test cQA pairs are utilized via transductive learning to enhance the representation ability of the common space. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets have well-validated the proposed model.
On the Efficiency of Data Collection for Crowdsourced Classification

The quality of crowdsourced data is often highly variable. For this reason, it is common to collect redundant data and use statistical methods to aggregate it. Empirical studies show that the policies we use to collect such data have a strong impact on the accuracy of the system. However, there is little theoretical understanding of this phenomenon. In this paper we provide the first theoretical explanation of the accuracy gap between the most popular collection policies: the non-adaptive uniform allocation, and the adaptive uncertainty sampling and information gain maximisation. To do so, we propose a novel representation of the collection process in terms of random walks. Then, we use this tool to derive lower and upper bounds on the accuracy of the policies. With these bounds, we are able to quantify the advantage that the two adaptive policies have over the non-adaptive one for the first time.
3-in-1 Correlated Embedding via Adaptive Exploration of the Structure and Semantic Subspaces

Combinational network embedding, which learns the node representation by exploring both topological and non-topological information, becomes popular due to the fact that the two types of information are complementing each other. Most of the existing methods either consider the topological and non-topological information being aligned or possess predetermined preferences during the embedding process.Unfortunately, previous methods fail to either explicitly describe the correlations between topological and non-topological information or adaptively weight their impacts. To address the existing issues, three new assumptions are proposed to better describe the embedding space and its properties. With the proposed assumptions, nodes, communities and topics are mapped into one embedding space. A novel generative model is proposed to formulate the generation process of the network and content from the embeddings, with respect to the Bayesian framework. The proposed model automatically leans to the information which is more discriminative.The embedding result can be obtained by maximizing the posterior distribution by adopting the variational inference and reparameterization trick. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method gives superior performances compared to the state-of-the-art methods when a variety of real-world networks is analyzed.
Five Years of Argument Mining: a Data-driven Analysis

Argument mining is the research area aiming at extracting natural language arguments and their relations from text, with the final goal of providing machine-processable structured data for computational models of argument. This research topic has started to attract the attention of a small community of researchers around 2014, and it is nowadays counted as one of the most promising research areas in Artificial Intelligence in terms of growing of the community, funded projects, and involvement of companies. In this paper, we present the argument mining tasks, and we discuss the obtained results in the area from a data-driven perspective. An open discussion highlights the main weaknesses suffered by the existing work in the literature, and proposes open challenges to be faced in the future.