OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Temporal Conformance Checking at Runtime based on Time-infused Process Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Conformance checking quantifies the deviations between a set of traces in a given process log and a set of possible traces defined by a process model. Current approaches mostly focus on added or missing events. Lately, multi-perspective mining has provided means to check for conformance with time and resource constraints encoded as data elements. This paper presents an approach for quantifying temporal deviations in conformance checking based on infusing the input process model with a temporal profile. The temporal profile is calculated based on an associated process log considering task durations and the temporal distance between events. Moreover, a simple semantic annotation on tasks in the process model signifies their importance with respect to time. During runtime, deviations between an event stream and the process model with the temporal profile are quantified through a cost function for temporal deviations. The evaluation of the approach shows that the results for two real-world data sets from the financial and a manufacturing domain hold the promise to improve runtime process monitoring and control capabilities.
Lanfrica: A Participatory Approach to Documenting Machine Translation Research on African Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Over the years, there have been campaigns to include the African languages in the growing research on machine translation (MT) in particular, and natural language processing (NLP) in general. Africa has the highest language diversity, with 1500-2000 documented languages and many more undocumented or extinct languages(Lewis, 2009; Bendor-Samuel, 2017). This makes it hard to keep track of the MT research, models and dataset that have been developed for some of them. As the internet and social media make up the daily lives of more than half of the world(Lin, 2020), as well as over 40% of Africans(Campbell, 2019), online platforms can be useful in creating accessibility to researches, benchmarks and datasets in these African languages, thereby improving reproducibility and sharing of existing research and their results. In this paper, we introduce Lanfrica, a novel, on-going framework that employs a participatory approach to documenting researches, projects, benchmarks and dataset on African languages.
Bias and Discrimination in AI: a cross-disciplinary perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

With the widespread and pervasive use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for automated decision-making systems, AI bias is becoming more apparent and problematic. One of its negative consequences is discrimination: the unfair, or unequal treatment of individuals based on certain characteristics. However, the relationship between bias and discrimination is not always clear. In this paper, we survey relevant literature about bias and discrimination in AI from an interdisciplinary perspective that embeds technical, legal, social and ethical dimensions. We show that finding solutions to bias and discrimination in AI requires robust cross-disciplinary collaborations.
Expected Utilitarianism
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

We want artificial intelligence (AI) to be beneficial. This is the grounding assumption of most of the attitudes towards AI research. We want AI to be "good" for humanity. We want it to help, not hinder, humans. Yet what exactly this entails in theory and in practice is not immediately apparent. Theoretically, this declarative statement subtly implies a commitment to a consequentialist ethics. Practically, some of the more promising machine learning techniques to create a robust AI, and perhaps even an artificial general intelligence (AGI) also commit one to a form of utilitarianism. In both dimensions, the logic of the beneficial AI movement may not in fact create "beneficial AI" in either narrow applications or in the form of AGI if the ethical assumptions are not made explicit and clear. Additionally, as it is likely that reinforcement learning (RL) will be an important technique for machine learning in this area, it is also important to interrogate how RL smuggles in a particular type of consequentialist reasoning into the AI: particularly, a brute form of hedonistic act utilitarianism. Since the mathematical logic commits one to a maximization function, the result is that an AI will inevitably be seeking more and more rewards. We have two conclusions that arise from this. First, is that if one believes that a beneficial AI is an ethical AI, then one is committed to a framework that posits 'benefit' is tantamount to the greatest good for the greatest number. Second, if the AI relies on RL, then the way it reasons about itself, the environment, and other agents, will be through an act utilitarian morality. This proposition may, or may not, in fact be actually beneficial for humanity.
Interactive Visualization for Debugging RL
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Visualization tools for supervised learning allow users to interpret, introspect, and gain an intuition for the successes and failures of their models. While reinforcement learning practitioners ask many of the same questions, existing tools are not applicable to the RL setting as these tools address challenges typically found in the supervised learning regime. In this work, we design and implement an interactive visualization tool for debugging and interpreting RL algorithms. Our system addresses many features missing from previous tools such as (1) tools for supervised learning often are not interactive; (2) while debugging RL policies researchers use state representations that are different from those seen by the agent; (3) a framework designed to make the debugging RL policies more conducive. We provide an example workflow of how this system could be used, along with ideas for future extensions.
On Improving Throughput of Multichannel ALOHA using Preamble-based Exploration
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Machine-type communication (MTC) has been extensively studied to provide connectivity for devices and sensors in the Internet-of-Thing (IoT). Thanks to the sparse activity, random access, e.g., ALOHA, is employed for MTC to lower signaling overhead. In this paper, we propose to adopt exploration for multichannel ALOHA by transmitting preambles before transmitting data packets in MTC, and show that the maximum throughput can be improved by a factor of 2 - exp(-1) = 1.632, In the proposed approach, a base station (BS) needs to send the feedback information to active users to inform the numbers of transmitted preambles in multiple channels, which can be reliably estimated as in compressive random access. A steady-state analysis is also performed with fast retrial, which shows that the probability of packet collision becomes lower and, as a result, the delay outage probability is greatly reduced for a lightly loaded system. Simulation results also confirm the results from analysis.
Statistical Analytics and Regional Representation Learning for COVID-19 Pandemic Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

The rapid spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has severely impacted almost all countries around the world. It not only has caused a tremendous burden on health-care providers to bear, but it has also brought severe impacts on the economy and social life. The presence of reliable data and the results of in-depth statistical analyses provide researchers and policymakers with invaluable information to understand this pandemic and its growth pattern more clearly. This paper combines and processes an extensive collection of publicly available datasets to provide a unified information source for representing geographical regions with regards to their pandemic-related behavior. The features are grouped into various categories to account for their impact based on the higher-level concepts associated with them. This work uses several correlation analysis techniques to observe value and order relationships between features, feature groups, and COVID-19 occurrences. Dimensionality reduction techniques and projection methodologies are used to elaborate on individual and group importance of these representative features. A specific RNN-based inference pipeline called DoubleWindowLSTM-CP is proposed in this work for predictive event modeling. It utilizes sequential patterns and enables concise record representation while using but a minimal amount of historical data. The quantitative results of our statistical analytics indicated critical patterns reflecting on many of the expected collective behavior and their associated outcomes. Predictive modeling with DoubleWindowLSTM-CP instance exhibits efficient performance in quantitative and qualitative assessments while reducing the need for extended and reliable historical information on the pandemic.
Memory networks for consumer protection:unfairness exposed
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Recent work has demonstrated how data-driven AI methods can leverage consumer protection by supporting the automated analysis of legal documents. However, a shortcoming of data-driven approaches is poor explainability. We posit that in this domain useful explanations of classifier outcomes can be provided by resorting to legal rationales. We thus consider several configurations of memory-augmented neural networks where rationales are given a special role in the modeling of context knowledge. Our results show that rationales not only contribute to improve the classification accuracy, but are also able to offer meaningful, natural language explanations of otherwise opaque classifier outcomes.
Maximum Customers' Satisfaction in One-way Car-sharing: Modeling, Exact and Heuristic Solving
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

One-way car-sharing systems are transportation systems that allow customers to rent cars at stations scattered around the city, use them for a short journey, and return them at any station. The maximum customers' satisfaction problem concerns the task of assigning the cars, initially located at given stations, to maximize the number of satisfied customers. We consider the problem with two stations where each customer has exactly two demands in opposite directions between both stations, and a customer is satisfied only if both their demands are fulfilled. For solving this problem, we propose mixed-integer programming (MIP) models and matheuristics based on local search. We created a benchmark of instances used to test the exact and heuristic approaches. Additionally, we proposed a preprocessing procedure to reduce the size of the instance. Our MIP models can solve to optimality 85% of the proposed instances with 1000 customers in 10 minutes, with an average gap smaller than 0.1% for all these instances. For larger instances (2500 and 5000 customers), except for some particular cases, they presented an average gap smaller than 0.8%. Also, our local-based matheuristics presented small average gaps which are better than the MIP models in some larger instances.
[not Rp] Reproducibility of 'Poincare dodecahedral space parameter estimates'
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Is a scientific research paper based on (i) public, online observational data files and (ii) providing free-licensed software for reproducing its results easy to reproduce by the same author a decade later? This paper attempts to reproduce a cosmic topology observational paper published in 2008 and satisfying both criteria (i) and (ii). The reproduction steps are defined formally in a free-licensed git repository package "0807.4260" and qualitatively in the current paper. It was found that the effort in upgrading the Fortran 77 code at the heart of the software, interfaced with a C front end, and originally compiled with g77, in the content of the contemporary gfortran compiler, risked being too great to be justified on any short time scale. In this sense, the results of RBG08 are not as reproducible as they appeared to be, despite both (i) data availability and (ii) free-licensing and public availability of the software. The software and a script to reproduce the steps of this incomplete reproduction are combined in a new git repository named 0807.4260, following the ArXiv identity code (arXiv:0807.4260) of RBG08.
Versatile Filamentary Resistive Switching Model
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2020
Year: 2020

Memristors as emergent nano-electronic devices have been successfully fabricated and used in non-conventional and neuromorphic computing systems in the last years. Several behavioral or physical based models have been developed to explain their operation and to optimize their fabrication parameters. All existing memristor models are trade-offs between accuracy, universality and realism, but, to the best of our knowledge, none of them is purely characterized as quantum mechanical, despite the fact that quantum mechanical processes are a major part of the memristor operation. In this paper, we employ quantum mechanical methods to develop a complete and accurate filamentary model for the resistance variation during memristor's operating cycle. More specifically, we apply quantum walks to model and compute the motion of atoms forming the filament, tight-binding Hamiltonians to capture the filament structure and the Non-Equilibrium Green's Function (NEGF) method to compute the conductance of the device. Furthermore, we proceeded with the parallelization of the overall model through Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate our computations and enhance the model's performance adequately. Our simulation results successfully reproduce the resistive switching characteristics of memristors devices, match with existing fabricated devices experimental data, prove the efficacy and robustness of the proposed model in terms of multi-parameterization, and provide a new and useful insight into its operation.
Towards Smart Sustainable Cities: Addressing semantic heterogeneity in building management systems using discriminative models
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Building Management Systems (BMS) are crucial in the drive towards smart sustainable cities. This is due to the fact that they have been effective in significantly reducing the energy consumption of buildings. A typical BMS is composed of smart devices that communicate with one another in order to achieve their purpose. However, the heterogeneity of these devices and their associated meta-data impede the deployment of solutions that depend on the interactions among these devices. Nonetheless, automatically inferring the semantics of these devices using data-driven methods provides an ideal solution to the problems brought about by this heterogeneity. In this paper, we undertake a multi-dimensional study to address the problem of inferring the semantics of IoT devices using machine learning models. Using two datasets with over 67 million data points collected from IoT devices, we developed discriminative models that produced competitive results. Particularly, our study highlights the potential of Image Encoded Time Series (IETS) as a robust alternative to statistical feature-based inference methods. Leveraging just a fraction of the data required by feature-based methods, our evaluations show that this encoding competes with and even outperforms traditional methods in many cases.
An Overview on the Web of Clinical Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

In the last few years there has been an impressive growth of connections between medicine and artificial intelligence (AI) that have been characterized by the specific focus on single problems along with corresponding clinical data. This paper proposes a new perspective in which the focus is on the progressive accumulation of a universal repository of clinical hyperlinked data in the spirit that gave rise to the birth of the Web. The underlining idea is that this repository, that is referred to as the Web of Clinical Data (WCD), will dramatically change the AI approach to medicine and its effectiveness. It is claimed that research and AI-based applications will undergo an evolution process that will likely reinforce systematically the solutions implemented in medical apps made available in the WCD. The distinctive architectural feature of the WCD is that this universal repository will be under control of clinical units and hospitals, which is claimed to be the natural context for dealing with the critical issues of clinical data.
Integrating Deep Reinforcement Learning Networks with Health System Simulations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Background and motivation: Combining Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) and Health Systems Simulations has significant potential, for both research into improving Deep RL performance and safety, and in operational practice. While individual toolkits exist for Deep RL and Health Systems Simulations, no framework to integrate the two has been established. Aim: Provide a framework for integrating Deep RL Networks with Health System Simulations, and to ensure this framework is compatible with Deep RL agents that have been developed and tested using OpenAI Gym. Methods: We developed our framework based on the OpenAI Gym framework, and demonstrate its use on a simple hospital bed capacity model. We built the Deep RL agents using PyTorch, and the Hospital Simulatation using SimPy. Results: We demonstrate example models using a Double Deep Q Network or a Duelling Double Deep Q Network as the Deep RL agent. Conclusion: SimPy may be used to create Health System Simulations that are compatible with agents developed and tested on OpenAI Gym environments. GitHub repository of code: https://github.com/MichaelAllen1966/learninghospital
A Survey on the Use of AI and ML for Fighting the COVID-19 Pandemic
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have made a paradigm shift in health care which, eventually can be used for decision support and forecasting by exploring the medical data. Recent studies showed that AI and ML can be used to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the objective of this review study is to summarize the recent AI and ML based studies that have focused to fight against COVID-19 pandemic. From an initial set of 634 articles, a total of 35 articles were finally selected through an extensive inclusion-exclusion process. In our review, we have explored the objectives/aims of the existing studies (i.e., the role of AI/ML in fighting COVID-19 pandemic); context of the study (i.e., study focused to a specific country-context or with a global perspective); type and volume of dataset; methodology, algorithms or techniques adopted in the prediction or diagnosis processes; and mapping the algorithms/techniques with the data type highlighting their prediction/classification accuracy. We particularly focused on the uses of AI/ML in analyzing the pandemic data in order to depict the most recent progress of AI for fighting against COVID-19 and pointed out the potential scope of further research.
Stock Index Prediction with Multi-task Learning and Word Polarity Over Time
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Sentiment-based stock prediction systems aim to explore sentiment or event signals from online corpora and attempt to relate the signals to stock price variations. Both the feature-based and neural-networks-based approaches have delivered promising results. However, the frequently minor fluctuations of the stock prices restrict learning the sentiment of text from price patterns, and learning market sentiment from text can be biased if the text is irrelevant to the underlying market. In addition, when using discrete word features, the polarity of a certain term can change over time according to different events. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage system that consists of a sentiment extractor to extract the opinion on the market trend and a summarizer that predicts the direction of the index movement of following week given the opinions of the news over the current week. We adopt BERT with multitask learning which additionally predicts the worthiness of the news and propose a metric called Polarity-Over-Time to extract the word polarity among different event periods. A Weekly-Monday prediction framework and a new dataset, the 10-year Reuters financial news dataset, are also proposed.
Learning Graph Edit Distance by Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

The emergence of geometric deep learning as a novel framework to deal with graph-based representations has faded away traditional approaches in favor of completely new methodologies. In this paper, we propose a new framework able to combine the advances on deep metric learning with traditional approximations of the graph edit distance. Hence, we propose an efficient graph distance based on the novel field of geometric deep learning. Our method employs a message passing neural network to capture the graph structure, and thus, leveraging this information for its use on a distance computation. The performance of the proposed graph distance is validated on two different scenarios. On the one hand, in a graph retrieval of handwritten words~\ie~keyword spotting, showing its superior performance when compared with (approximate) graph edit distance benchmarks. On the other hand, demonstrating competitive results for graph similarity learning when compared with the current state-of-the-art on a recent benchmark dataset.
A Deep Dive into Adversarial Robustness in Zero-Shot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Machine learning (ML) systems have introduced significant advances in various fields, due to the introduction of highly complex models. Despite their success, it has been shown multiple times that machine learning models are prone to imperceptible perturbations that can severely degrade their accuracy. So far, existing studies have primarily focused on models where supervision across all classes were available. In constrast, Zero-shot Learning (ZSL) and Generalized Zero-shot Learning (GZSL) tasks inherently lack supervision across all classes. In this paper, we present a study aimed on evaluating the adversarial robustness of ZSL and GZSL models. We leverage the well-established label embedding model and subject it to a set of established adversarial attacks and defenses across multiple datasets. In addition to creating possibly the first benchmark on adversarial robustness of ZSL models, we also present analyses on important points that require attention for better interpretation of ZSL robustness results. We hope these points, along with the benchmark, will help researchers establish a better understanding what challenges lie ahead and help guide their work.
Information-Theoretic Privacy in Federated Submodel learning
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

We consider information-theoretic privacy in federated submodel learning, where a global server has multiple submodels. Compared to the privacy considered in the conventional federated submodel learning where secure aggregation is adopted for ensuring privacy, information-theoretic privacy provides the stronger protection on submodel selection by the local machine. We propose an achievable scheme that partially adopts the conventional private information retrieval (PIR) scheme that achieves the minimum amount of download. With respect to computation and communication overhead, we compare the achievable scheme with a naive approach for federated submodel learning with information-theoretic privacy.