pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
High-level Approaches to Detect Malicious Political Activity on Twitter
Authors: Miguel Sozinho Ramalho
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Our work represents another step into the detection and prevention of these ever-more present political manipulation efforts. We, therefore, start by focusing on understanding what the state-of-the-art approaches lack -- since the problem remains, this is a fair assumption. We find concerning issues within the current literature and follow a diverging path. Notably, by placing emphasis on using data features that are less susceptible to malicious manipulation and also on looking for high-level approaches that avoid a granularity level that is biased towards easy-to-spot and low impact cases. We designed and implemented a framework -- Twitter Watch -- that performs structured Twitter data collection, applying it to the Portuguese Twittersphere. We investigate a data snapshot taken on May 2020, with around 5 million accounts and over 120 million tweets (this value has since increased to over 175 million). The analyzed time period stretches from August 2019 to May 2020, with a focus on the Portuguese elections of October 6th, 2019. However, the Covid-19 pandemic showed itself in our data, and we also delve into how it affected typical Twitter behavior. We performed three main approaches: content-oriented, metadata-oriented, and network interaction-oriented. We learn that Twitter's suspension patterns are not adequate to the type of political trolling found in the Portuguese Twittersphere -- identified by this work and by an independent peer - nor to fake news posting accounts. We also surmised that the different types of malicious accounts we independently gathered are very similar both in terms of content and interaction, through two distinct analysis, and are simultaneously very distinct from regular accounts.
AI Development for the Public Interest: From Abstraction Traps to Sociotechnical Risks
Authors: McKane Andrus, Sarah Dean, Thomas Krendl Gilbert, Nathan Lambert, Tom Zick
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00

Despite interest in communicating ethical problems and social contexts within the undergraduate curriculum to advance Public Interest Technology (PIT) goals, interventions at the graduate level remain largely unexplored. This may be due to the conflicting ways through which distinct Artificial Intelligence (AI) research tracks conceive of their interface with social contexts. In this paper we track the historical emergence of sociotechnical inquiry in three distinct subfields of AI research: AI Safety, Fair Machine Learning (Fair ML) and Human-in-the-Loop (HIL) Autonomy. We show that for each subfield, perceptions of PIT stem from the particular dangers faced by past integration of technical systems within a normative social order. We further interrogate how these histories dictate the response of each subfield to conceptual traps, as defined in the Science and Technology Studies literature. Finally, through a comparative analysis of these currently siloed fields, we present a roadmap for a unified approach to sociotechnical graduate pedagogy in AI.
Concentration of Non-Isotropic Random Tensors with Applications to Learning and Empirical Risk Minimization
Authors: Mathieu Even, Laurent Massoulié
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Distributed Optimization

Dimension is an inherent bottleneck to some modern learning tasks, where optimization methods suffer from the size of the data. In this paper, we study non-isotropic distributions of data and develop tools that aim at reducing these dimensional costs by a dependency on an effective dimension rather than the ambient one. Based on non-asymptotic estimates of the metric entropy of ellipsoids -- that prove to generalize to infinite dimensions -- and on a chaining argument, our uniform concentration bounds involve an effective dimension instead of the global dimension, improving over existing results. We show the importance of taking advantage of non-isotropic properties in learning problems with the following applications: i) we improve state-of-the-art results in statistical preconditioning for communication-efficient distributed optimization, ii) we introduce a non-isotropic randomized smoothing for non-smooth optimization. Both applications cover a class of functions that encompasses empirical risk minization (ERM) for linear models.
Problematic Machine Behavior: A Systematic Literature Review of Algorithm Audits
Authors: Jack Bandy
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Systematic Literature Review

While algorithm audits are growing rapidly in commonality and public importance, relatively little scholarly work has gone toward synthesizing prior work and strategizing future research in the area. This systematic literature review aims to do just that, following PRISMA guidelines in a review of over 500 English articles that yielded 62 algorithm audit studies. The studies are synthesized and organized primarily by behavior (discrimination, distortion, exploitation, and misjudgement), with codes also provided for domain (e.g. search, vision, advertising, etc.), organization (e.g. Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.), and audit method (e.g. sock puppet, direct scrape, crowdsourcing, etc.). The review shows how previous audit studies have exposed public-facing algorithms exhibiting problematic behavior, such as search algorithms culpable of distortion and advertising algorithms culpable of discrimination. Based on the studies reviewed, it also suggests some behaviors (e.g. discrimination on the basis of intersectional identities), domains (e.g. advertising algorithms), methods (e.g. code auditing), and organizations (e.g. Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn) that call for future audit attention. The paper concludes by offering the common ingredients of successful audits, and discussing algorithm auditing in the context of broader research working toward algorithmic justice.
Fairness for Unobserved Characteristics: Insights from Technological Impacts on Queer Communities
Authors: Nenad Tomasev, Kevin R. McKee, Jackie Kay, Shakir Mohamed
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Advances in algorithmic fairness have largely omitted sexual orientation and gender identity. We explore queer concerns in privacy, censorship, language, online safety, health, and employment to study the positive and negative effects of artificial intelligence on queer communities. These issues underscore the need for new directions in fairness research that take into account a multiplicity of considerations, from privacy preservation, context sensitivity and process fairness, to an awareness of sociotechnical impact and the increasingly important role of inclusive and participatory research processes. Most current approaches for algorithmic fairness assume that the target characteristics for fairness--frequently, race and legal gender--can be observed or recorded. Sexual orientation and gender identity are prototypical instances of unobserved characteristics, which are frequently missing, unknown or fundamentally unmeasurable. This paper highlights the importance of developing new approaches for algorithmic fairness that break away from the prevailing assumption of observed characteristics.
Riiid! Answer Correctness Prediction Kaggle Challenge: 4th Place Solution Summary
Authors: Duc Kinh Le Tran
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00

This paper presents my solution to the challenge "Riiid! Answer Correctness Prediction" on Kaggle hosted by Riiid Labs (2020), which scores 0.817 (AUC) and ranks 4th on the final private leaderboard. It is a single transformer-based model heavily inspired from previous works such as SAKT, SAINT and SAINT+. Novel ingredients that I believed to have made a difference are the time-aware attention mechanism, the concatenation of the embeddings of the input sequences and the embedding of continuous features.
A Data-Driven Approach to Violin Making
Authors: Sebastian Gonzalez, Davide Salvi, Daniel Baeza, Fabio Antonacci, Augusto Sarti
Date: 2021-02-03 00:00:00

Of all the characteristics of a violin, those that concern its shape are probably the most important ones, as the violin maker has complete control over them. Contemporary violin making, however, is still based more on tradition than understanding, and a definitive scientific study of the specific relations that exist between shape and vibrational properties is yet to come and sorely missed. In this article, using standard statistical learning tools, we show that the modal frequencies of violin tops can, in fact, be predicted from geometric parameters, and that artificial intelligence can be successfully applied to traditional violin making. We also study how modal frequencies vary with the thicknesses of the plate (a process often referred to as {\em plate tuning}) and discuss the complexity of this dependency. Finally, we propose a predictive tool for plate tuning, which takes into account material and geometric parameters.
Increasing Energy Resiliency to Hurricanes with Battery and Rooftop Solar Through Intelligent Control
Authors: Ninad Gaikwad, Naren Srivaths Raman, Prabir Barooah
Date: 2021-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Model Predictive Control

Rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) panels together with batteries can provide resiliency to blackouts during natural disasters such as hurricanes. Without intelligent and automated decision making that can trade off conflicting requirements, a large PV system and a large battery is needed to provide meaningful resiliency. By utilizing the flexibility of various household demands, an intelligent system can ensure that critical loads are serviced longer than a non-intelligent system. As a result a smaller (and thus lower cost) system can provide the same energy resilience that a much larger system will be needed otherwise. In this paper we propose such an intelligent control system that uses a model predictive control (MPC) architecture. The optimization problem is formulated as a MILP (mixed integer linear program) due to the on/off decisions for the loads. Performance is compared with two rule based controllers, a simple all-or-none controller that mimics what is available now commercially, and a Rule-Based controller that uses the same information that the MPC controller uses. The controllers are tested through simulation on a PV-battery system chosen carefully for a small single family house in Florida. Simulations are conducted for a one week period during hurricane Irma in 2017. Simulations show that the size of the PV+battery system to provide a certain resiliency performance can be halved by the proposed control system.
Assessing Sensitivity of Machine Learning Predictions.A Novel Toolbox with an Application to Financial Literacy
Authors: Falco J. Bargagli Stoffi, Kenneth De Beckker, Joana E. Maldonado, Kristof De Witte
Date: 2021-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Sensitivity

Despite their popularity, machine learning predictions are sensitive to potential unobserved predictors. This paper proposes a general algorithm that assesses how the omission of an unobserved variable with high explanatory power could affect the predictions of the model. Moreover, the algorithm extends the usage of machine learning from pointwise predictions to inference and sensitivity analysis. In the application, we show how the framework can be applied to data with inherent uncertainty, such as students' scores in a standardized assessment on financial literacy. First, using Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART), we predict students' financial literacy scores (FLS) for a subgroup of students with missing FLS. Then, we assess the sensitivity of predictions by comparing the predictions and performance of models with and without a highly explanatory synthetic predictor. We find no significant difference in the predictions and performances of the augmented (i.e., the model with the synthetic predictor) and original model. This evidence sheds a light on the stability of the predictive model used in the application. The proposed methodology can be used, above and beyond our motivating empirical example, in a wide range of machine learning applications in social and health sciences.
Deep Learning Models May Spuriously Classify Covid-19 from X-ray Images Based on Confounders
Authors: Kaoutar Ben Ahmed, Lawrence O. Hall, Dmitry B. Goldgof, Gregory M. Goldgof, Rahul Paul
Date: 2021-01-08 00:00:00

Identifying who is infected with the Covid-19 virus is critical for controlling its spread. X-ray machines are widely available worldwide and can quickly provide images that can be used for diagnosis. A number of recent studies claim it may be possible to build highly accurate models, using deep learning, to detect Covid-19 from chest X-ray images. This paper explores the robustness and generalization ability of convolutional neural network models in diagnosing Covid-19 disease from frontal-view (AP/PA), raw chest X-ray images that were lung field cropped. Some concerning observations are made about high performing models that have learned to rely on confounding features related to the data source, rather than the patient's lung pathology, when differentiating between Covid-19 positive and negative labels. Specifically, these models likely made diagnoses based on confounding factors such as patient age or image processing artifacts, rather than medically relevant information.
Amazon Product Recommender System
Authors: Mohammad R. Rezaei
Date: 2021-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

The number of reviews on Amazon has grown significantly over the years. Customers who made purchases on Amazon provide reviews by rating the product from 1 to 5 stars and sharing a text summary of their experience and opinion of the product. The ratings of a product are averaged to provide an overall product rating. We analyzed what ratings score customers give to a specific product (a music track) in order to build a recommender model for digital music tracks on Amazon. We test various traditional models along with our proposed deep neural network (DNN) architecture to predict the reviews rating score. The Amazon review dataset contains 200,000 data samples; we train the models on 70% of the dataset and test the performance of the models on the remaining 30% of the dataset.
Computability, Complexity, Consistency and Controllability: A Four C's Framework for cross-disciplinary Ethical Algorithm Research
Authors: Elija Perrier
Date: 2021-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics, Philosophy

The ethical consequences of, constraints upon and regulation of algorithms arguably represent the defining challenges of our age, asking us to reckon with the rise of computational technologies whose potential to radically transforming social and individual orders and identity in unforeseen ways is already being realised. Yet despite the multidisciplinary impact of this algorithmic turn, there remains some way to go in motivating the crossdisciplinary collaboration that is crucial to advancing feasible proposals for the ethical design, implementation and regulation of algorithmic and automated systems. In this work, we provide a framework to assist cross-disciplinary collaboration by presenting a Four C's Framework covering key computational considerations researchers across such diverse fields should consider when approaching these questions: (i) computability, (ii) complexity, (iii) consistency and (iv) controllability. In addition, we provide examples of how insights from ethics, philosophy and population ethics are relevant to and translatable within sciences concerned with the study and design of algorithms. Our aim is to set out a framework which we believe is useful for fostering cross-disciplinary understanding of pertinent issues in ethical algorithmic literature which is relevant considering the feasibility of ethical algorithmic governance, especially the impact of computational constraints upon algorithmic governance.
Towards advancing the earthquake forecasting by machine learning of satellite data
Authors: Pan Xiong, Lei Tong, Kun Zhang, Xuhui Shen, Roberto Battiston, Dimitar Ouzounov, Roberto Iuppa, Danny Crookes, Cheng Long, Huiyu Zhou
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Amongst the available technologies for earthquake research, remote sensing has been commonly used due to its unique features such as fast imaging and wide image-acquisition range. Nevertheless, early studies on pre-earthquake and remote-sensing anomalies are mostly oriented towards anomaly identification and analysis of a single physical parameter. Many analyses are based on singular events, which provide a lack of understanding of this complex natural phenomenon because usually, the earthquake signals are hidden in the environmental noise. The universality of such analysis still is not being demonstrated on a worldwide scale. In this paper, we investigate physical and dynamic changes of seismic data and thereby develop a novel machine learning method, namely Inverse Boosting Pruning Trees (IBPT), to issue short-term forecast based on the satellite data of 1,371 earthquakes of magnitude six or above due to their impact on the environment. We have analyzed and compared our proposed framework against several states of the art machine learning methods using ten different infrared and hyperspectral measurements collected between 2006 and 2013. Our proposed method outperforms all the six selected baselines and shows a strong capability in improving the likelihood of earthquake forecasting across different earthquake databases.
The Landscape of Multi-Layer Linear Neural Network From the Perspective of Algebraic Geometry
Authors: Xiuyi Yang
Date: 2021-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

The clear understanding of the non-convex landscape of neural network is a complex incomplete problem. This paper studies the landscape of linear (residual) network, the simplified version of the nonlinear network. By treating the gradient equations as polynomial equations, we use algebraic geometry tools to solve it over the complex number field, the attained solution can be decomposed into different irreducible complex geometry objects. Then three hypotheses are proposed, involving how to calculate the loss on each irreducible geometry object, the losses of critical points have a certain range and the relationship between the dimension of each irreducible geometry object and strict saddle condition. Finally, numerical algebraic geometry is applied to verify the rationality of these three hypotheses which further clarify the landscape of linear network and the role of residual connection.
Reviewable Automated Decision-Making: A Framework for Accountable Algorithmic Systems
Authors: Jennifer Cobbe, Michelle Seng Ah Lee, Jatinder Singh
Date: 2021-01-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

This paper introduces reviewability as a framework for improving the accountability of automated and algorithmic decision-making (ADM) involving machine learning. We draw on an understanding of ADM as a socio-technical process involving both human and technical elements, beginning before a decision is made and extending beyond the decision itself. While explanations and other model-centric mechanisms may assist some accountability concerns, they often provide insufficient information of these broader ADM processes for regulatory oversight and assessments of legal compliance. Reviewability involves breaking down the ADM process into technical and organisational elements to provide a systematic framework for determining the contextually appropriate record-keeping mechanisms to facilitate meaningful review - both of individual decisions and of the process as a whole. We argue that a reviewability framework, drawing on administrative law's approach to reviewing human decision-making, offers a practical way forward towards more a more holistic and legally-relevant form of accountability for ADM.
Transforming India's Agricultural Sector using Ontology-based Tantra Framework
Authors: Shreekanth M Prabhu
Date: 2021-01-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Food production is a critical activity in which every nation would like to be self-sufficient. India is one of the largest producers of food grains in the world. In India, nearly 70 percent of rural households still depend on agriculture for their livelihood. Keeping farmers happy is particularly important in India as farmers form a large vote bank which politicians dare not disappoint. At the same time, Governments need to balance the interest of farmers with consumers, intermediaries and society at large. The whole agriculture sector is highly information-intensive. Even with enormous collection of data and statistics from different arms of Government, there continue to be information gaps. In this paper we look at how Tantra Social Information Management Framework can help analyze the agricultural sector and transform the same using a holistic approach. Advantage of Tantra Framework approach is that it looks at societal information as a whole without limiting it to only the sector at hand. Tantra Framework makes use of concepts from Zachman Framework to manage aspects of social information through different perspectives and concepts from Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) to represent interrelationships between aspects. Further, Tantra Framework interoperates with models such as Balanced Scorecard, Theory of Change and Theory of Separations. Finally, we model Indian Agricultural Sector as a business ecosystem and look at approaches to steer transformation from within.
Guilty Artificial Minds
Authors: Michael T. Stuart, Markus Kneer
Date: 2021-01-24 00:00:00

The concepts of blameworthiness and wrongness are of fundamental importance in human moral life. But to what extent are humans disposed to blame artificially intelligent agents, and to what extent will they judge their actions to be morally wrong? To make progress on these questions, we adopted two novel strategies. First, we break down attributions of blame and wrongness into more basic judgments about the epistemic and conative state of the agent, and the consequences of the agent's actions. In this way, we are able to examine any differences between the way participants treat artificial agents in terms of differences in these more basic judgments. our second strategy is to compare attributions of blame and wrongness across human, artificial, and group agents (corporations). Others have compared attributions of blame and wrongness between human and artificial agents, but the addition of group agents is significant because these agents seem to provide a clear middle-ground between human agents (for whom the notions of blame and wrongness were created) and artificial agents (for whom the question remains open).