Justice-centered approaches to equitable computer science (CS) education prioritize the development of students' CS disciplinary identities toward social justice rather than corporations, industry, empire, and militarism by emphasizing ethics, identity, and political vision. However, most research in justice-centered approaches to equitable CS education focus on K-12 learning environments. In this position paper, we problematize the lack of attention to justice-centered approaches to CS in higher education and then describe a justice-centered approach for undergraduate Data Structures and Algorithms that (1) critiques sociopolitical values of data structure and algorithm design and dominant computing epistemologies that approach social good without design justice; (2) centers students in culturally responsive-sustaining pedagogies to resist dominant computing culture and value Indigenous ways of living in nature; and (3) ensures the rightful presence of political struggles through reauthoring rights and problematizing the political power of computing. Through a case study of this Critical Comparative Data Structures and Algorithms pedagogy, we argue that justice-centered approaches to higher CS education can help students not only critique the ethical implications of nominally technical concepts, but also develop greater respect for diverse epistemologies, cultures, and narratives around computing that can help all of us realize the socially-just worlds we need.
Data from different sources rarely conform to a single formatting even if they describe the same set of entities, and this raises concerns when data from multiple sources must be joined or cross-referenced. Such a formatting mismatch is unavoidable when data is gathered from various public and third-party sources. Commercial database systems are not able to perform the join when there exist differences in data representation or formatting, and manual reformatting is both time consuming and error-prone. We study the problem of efficiently joining textual data under the condition that the join columns are not formatted the same and cannot be equi-joined, but they become joinable under some transformations. The problem is challenging simply because the number of possible transformations explodes with both the length of the input and the number of rows, even if each transformation is formed using very few basic units. We show that an efficient algorithm can be developed based on the common characteristics of the joined columns, and develop one such algorithm over a rich set of basic operations that can be composed to form transformations. We compare both the coverage and the running time of our algorithm to a state-of-the-art approach, and show that our algorithm covers every transformation that is covered in the state-of-the-art approach but is a few orders of magnitude faster, as evaluated on various real and synthetic data.
The unprecedented volume, diversity and richness of aviation data that can be acquired, generated, stored, and managed provides unique capabilities for the aviation-related industries and pertains value that remains to be unlocked with the adoption of the innovative Big Data Analytics technologies. Despite the large efforts and investments on research and innovation, the Big Data technologies introduce a number of challenges to its adopters. Besides the effective storage and access to the underlying big data, efficient data integration and data interoperability should be considered, while at the same time multiple data sources should be effectively combined by performing data exchange and data sharing between the different stakeholders. However, this reveals additional challenges for the crucial preservation of the information security of the collected data, the trusted and secure data exchange and data sharing, as well as the robust data access control. The current paper aims to introduce the ICARUS big data-enabled platform that aims provide a multi-sided platform that offers a novel aviation data and intelligence marketplace accompanied by a trusted and secure analytics workspace. It holistically handles the complete big data lifecycle from the data collection, data curation and data exploration to the data integration and data analysis of data originating from heterogeneous data sources with different velocity, variety and volume in a trusted and secure manner.
In December 2019, a novel virus called COVID-19 had caused an enormous number of causalities to date. The battle with the novel Coronavirus is baffling and horrifying after the Spanish Flu 2019. While the front-line doctors and medical researchers have made significant progress in controlling the spread of the highly contiguous virus, technology has also proved its significance in the battle. Moreover, Artificial Intelligence has been adopted in many medical applications to diagnose many diseases, even baffling experienced doctors. Therefore, this survey paper explores the methodologies proposed that can aid doctors and researchers in early and inexpensive methods of diagnosis of the disease. Most developing countries have difficulties carrying out tests using the conventional manner, but a significant way can be adopted with Machine and Deep Learning. On the other hand, the access to different types of medical images has motivated the researchers. As a result, a mammoth number of techniques are proposed. This paper first details the background knowledge of the conventional methods in the Artificial Intelligence domain. Following that, we gather the commonly used datasets and their use cases to date. In addition, we also show the percentage of researchers adopting Machine Learning over Deep Learning. Thus we provide a thorough analysis of this scenario. Lastly, in the research challenges, we elaborate on the problems faced in COVID-19 research, and we address the issues with our understanding to build a bright and healthy environment.
Human-aware robot navigation promises a range of applications in which mobile robots bring versatile assistance to people in common human environments. While prior research has mostly focused on modeling pedestrians as independent, intentional individuals, people move in groups; consequently, it is imperative for mobile robots to respect human groups when navigating around people. This paper explores learning group-aware navigation policies based on dynamic group formation using deep reinforcement learning. Through simulation experiments, we show that group-aware policies, compared to baseline policies that neglect human groups, achieve greater robot navigation performance (e.g., fewer collisions), minimize violation of social norms and discomfort, and reduce the robot's movement impact on pedestrians. Our results contribute to the development of social navigation and the integration of mobile robots into human environments.
In this paper, we present a framework that unites obstacle avoidance and deliberate physical interaction for robotic manipulators. As humans and robots begin to coexist in work and household environments, pure collision avoidance is insufficient, as human-robot contact is inevitable and, in some situations, desired. Our work enables manipulators to anticipate, detect, and act on contact. To achieve this, we allow limited deviation from the robot's original trajectory through velocity reduction and motion restrictions. Then, if contact occurs, a robot can detect it and maneuver based on a novel dynamic contact thresholding algorithm. The core contribution of this work is dynamic contact thresholding, which allows a manipulator with onboard proximity sensors to track nearby objects and reduce contact forces in anticipation of a collision. Our framework elicits natural behavior during physical human-robot interaction. We evaluate our system on a variety of scenarios using the Franka Emika Panda robot arm; collectively, our results demonstrate that our contribution is not only able to avoid and react on contact, but also anticipate it.
Fast developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology has enabled various applied systems deployed in the real world, impacting people's everyday lives. However, many current AI systems were found vulnerable to imperceptible attacks, biased against underrepresented groups, lacking in user privacy protection, etc., which not only degrades user experience but erodes the society's trust in all AI systems. In this review, we strive to provide AI practitioners a comprehensive guide towards building trustworthy AI systems. We first introduce the theoretical framework of important aspects of AI trustworthiness, including robustness, generalization, explainability, transparency, reproducibility, fairness, privacy preservation, alignment with human values, and accountability. We then survey leading approaches in these aspects in the industry. To unify the current fragmented approaches towards trustworthy AI, we propose a systematic approach that considers the entire lifecycle of AI systems, ranging from data acquisition to model development, to development and deployment, finally to continuous monitoring and governance. In this framework, we offer concrete action items to practitioners and societal stakeholders (e.g., researchers and regulators) to improve AI trustworthiness. Finally, we identify key opportunities and challenges in the future development of trustworthy AI systems, where we identify the need for paradigm shift towards comprehensive trustworthy AI systems.
With the advances of data-driven machine learning research, a wide variety of prediction problems have been tackled. It has become critical to explore how machine learning and specifically deep learning methods can be exploited to analyse healthcare data. A major limitation of existing methods has been the focus on grid-like data; however, the structure of physiological recordings are often irregular and unordered which makes it difficult to conceptualise them as a matrix. As such, graph neural networks have attracted significant attention by exploiting implicit information that resides in a biological system, with interactive nodes connected by edges whose weights can be either temporal associations or anatomical junctions. In this survey, we thoroughly review the different types of graph architectures and their applications in healthcare. We provide an overview of these methods in a systematic manner, organized by their domain of application including functional connectivity, anatomical structure and electrical-based analysis. We also outline the limitations of existing techniques and discuss potential directions for future research.
Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, the edge computing systems integrate computing, storage and network resources at the edge of the network to provide computing infrastructure, enabling developers to quickly develop and deploy edge applications. Nowadays the edge computing systems have received widespread attention in both industry and academia. To explore new research opportunities and assist users in selecting suitable edge computing systems for specific applications, this survey paper provides a comprehensive overview of the existing edge computing systems and introduces representative projects. A comparison of open source tools is presented according to their applicability. Finally, we highlight energy efficiency and deep learning optimization of edge computing systems. Open issues for analyzing and designing an edge computing system are also studied in this survey.
Because of continuous advances in mathematical programing, Mix Integer Optimization has become a competitive vis-a-vis popular regularization method for selecting features in regression problems. The approach exhibits unquestionable foundational appeal and versatility, but also poses important challenges. We tackle these challenges, reducing computational burden when tuning the sparsity bound (a parameter which is critical for effectiveness) and improving performance in the presence of feature collinearity and of signals that vary in nature and strength. Importantly, we render the approach efficient and effective in applications of realistic size and complexity - without resorting to relaxations or heuristics in the optimization, or abandoning rigorous cross-validation tuning. Computational viability and improved performance in subtler scenarios is achieved with a multi-pronged blueprint, leveraging characteristics of the Mixed Integer Programming framework and by means of whitening, a data pre-processing step.
Like any large software system, a full-fledged DBMS offers an overwhelming amount of configuration knobs. These range from static initialisation parameters like buffer sizes, degree of concurrency, or level of replication to complex runtime decisions like creating a secondary index on a particular column or reorganising the physical layout of the store. To simplify the configuration, industry grade DBMSs are usually shipped with various advisory tools, that provide recommendations for given workloads and machines. However, reality shows that the actual configuration, tuning, and maintenance is usually still done by a human administrator, relying on intuition and experience. Recent work on deep reinforcement learning has shown very promising results in solving problems, that require such a sense of intuition. For instance, it has been applied very successfully in learning how to play complicated games with enormous search spaces. Motivated by these achievements, in this work we explore how deep reinforcement learning can be used to administer a DBMS. First, we will describe how deep reinforcement learning can be used to automatically tune an arbitrary software system like a DBMS by defining a problem environment. Second, we showcase our concept of NoDBA at the concrete example of index selection and evaluate how well it recommends indexes for given workloads.