Since the proliferation of social media usage, hate speech has become a major crisis. Hateful content can spread quickly and create an environment of distress and hostility. Further, what can be considered hateful is contextual and varies with time. While online hate speech reduces the ability of already marginalised groups to participate in discussion freely, offline hate speech leads to hate crimes and violence against individuals and communities. The multifaceted nature of hate speech and its real-world impact have already piqued the interest of the data mining and machine learning communities. Despite our best efforts, hate speech remains an evasive issue for researchers and practitioners alike. This article presents methodological challenges that hinder building automated hate mitigation systems. These challenges inspired our work in the broader area of combating hateful content on the web. We discuss a series of our proposed solutions to limit the spread of hate speech on social media.
Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have fueled the emergence of human-AI collaboration, a setting where AI is a coequal partner. Especially in clinical decision-making, it has the potential to improve treatment quality by assisting overworked medical professionals. Even though research has started to investigate the utilization of AI for clinical decision-making, its potential benefits do not imply its adoption by medical professionals. While several studies have started to analyze adoption criteria from a technical perspective, research providing a human-centered perspective with a focus on AI's potential for becoming a coequal team member in the decision-making process remains limited. Therefore, in this work, we identify factors for the adoption of human-AI collaboration by conducting a series of semi-structured interviews with experts in the healthcare domain. We identify six relevant adoption factors and highlight existing tensions between them and effective human-AI collaboration.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques have been increasingly used in several fields to improve performance and the level of automation. In recent years, this use has exponentially increased due to the advancement of high-performance computing and the ever increasing size of data. One of such fields is that of hardware design; specifically the design of digital and analog integrated circuits~(ICs), where AI/ ML techniques have been extensively used to address ever-increasing design complexity, aggressive time-to-market, and the growing number of ubiquitous interconnected devices (IoT). However, the security concerns and issues related to IC design have been highly overlooked. In this paper, we summarize the state-of-the-art in AL/ML for circuit design/optimization, security and engineering challenges, research in security-aware CAD/EDA, and future research directions and needs for using AI/ML for security-aware circuit design.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining momentum, and its importance for the future of work in many areas, such as medicine and banking, is continuously rising. However, insights on the effective collaboration of humans and AI are still rare. Typically, AI supports humans in decision-making by addressing human limitations. However, it may also evoke human bias, especially in the form of automation bias as an over-reliance on AI advice. We aim to shed light on the potential to influence automation bias by explainable AI (XAI). In this pre-test, we derive a research model and describe our study design. Subsequentially, we conduct an online experiment with regard to hotel review classifications and discuss first results. We expect our research to contribute to the design and development of safe hybrid intelligence systems.
Rumor detection has become an emerging and active research field in recent years. At the core is to model the rumor characteristics inherent in rich information, such as propagation patterns in social network and semantic patterns in post content, and differentiate them from the truth. However, existing works on rumor detection fall short in modeling heterogeneous information, either using one single information source only (e.g. social network, or post content) or ignoring the relations among multiple sources (e.g. fusing social and content features via simple concatenation). Therefore, they possibly have drawbacks in comprehensively understanding the rumors, and detecting them accurately. In this work, we explore contrastive self-supervised learning on heterogeneous information sources, so as to reveal their relations and characterize rumors better. Technically, we supplement the main supervised task of detection with an auxiliary self-supervised task, which enriches post representations via post self-discrimination. Specifically, given two heterogeneous views of a post (i.e. representations encoding social patterns and semantic patterns), the discrimination is done by maximizing the mutual information between different views of the same post compared to that of other posts. We devise cluster-wise and instance-wise approaches to generate the views and conduct the discrimination, considering different relations of information sources. We term this framework as Self-supervised Rumor Detection (SRD). Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of SRD for automatic rumor detection on social media.
Anomaly Detection is becoming increasingly popular within the experimental physics community. At experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider, anomaly detection is at the forefront of finding new physics beyond the Standard Model. This paper details the implementation of a novel Machine Learning architecture, called Flux+Mutability, which combines cutting-edge conditional generative models with clustering algorithms. In the `flux' stage we learn the distribution of a reference class. The `mutability' stage at inference addresses if data significantly deviates from the reference class. We demonstrate the validity of our approach and its connection to multiple problems spanning from one-class classification to anomaly detection. In particular, we apply our method to the isolation of neutral showers in an electromagnetic calorimeter and show its performance in detecting anomalous dijets events from standard QCD background. This approach limits assumptions on the reference sample and remains agnostic to the complementary class of objects of a given problem. We describe the possibility of dynamically generating a reference population and defining selection criteria via quantile cuts. Remarkably this flexible architecture can be deployed for a wide range of problems, and applications like multi-class classification or data quality control are left for further exploration.
Designers reportedly struggle with design optimization tasks where they are asked to find a combination of design parameters that maximizes a given set of objectives. In HCI, design optimization problems are often exceedingly complex, involving multiple objectives and expensive empirical evaluations. Model-based computational design algorithms assist designers by generating design examples during design, however they assume a model of the interaction domain. Black box methods for assistance, on the other hand, can work with any design problem. However, virtually all empirical studies of this human-in-the-loop approach have been carried out by either researchers or end-users. The question stands out if such methods can help designers in realistic tasks. In this paper, we study Bayesian optimization as an algorithmic method to guide the design optimization process. It operates by proposing to a designer which design candidate to try next, given previous observations. We report observations from a comparative study with 40 novice designers who were tasked to optimize a complex 3D touch interaction technique. The optimizer helped designers explore larger proportions of the design space and arrive at a better solution, however they reported lower agency and expressiveness. Designers guided by an optimizer reported lower mental effort but also felt less creative and less in charge of the progress. We conclude that human-in-the-loop optimization can support novice designers in cases where agency is not critical.
With the significant increase in users on social media platforms, a new means of political campaigning has appeared. Twitter and Facebook are now notable campaigning tools during elections. Indeed, the candidates and their parties now take to the internet to interact and spread their ideas. In this paper, we aim to identify political communities formed on Twitter during the 2022 French presidential election and analyze each respective community. We create a large-scale Twitter dataset containing 1.2 million users and 62.6 million tweets that mention keywords relevant to the election. We perform community detection on a retweet graph of users and propose an in-depth analysis of the stance of each community. Finally, we attempt to detect offensive tweets and automatic bots, comparing across communities in order to gain insight into each candidate's supporter demographics and online campaign strategy.
Detection and recognition of text in natural images are two main problems in the field of computer vision that have a wide variety of applications in analysis of sports videos, autonomous driving, industrial automation, to name a few. They face common challenging problems that are factors in how text is represented and affected by several environmental conditions. The current state-of-the-art scene text detection and/or recognition methods have exploited the witnessed advancement in deep learning architectures and reported a superior accuracy on benchmark datasets when tackling multi-resolution and multi-oriented text. However, there are still several remaining challenges affecting text in the wild images that cause existing methods to underperform due to there models are not able to generalize to unseen data and the insufficient labeled data. Thus, unlike previous surveys in this field, the objectives of this survey are as follows: first, offering the reader not only a review on the recent advancement in scene text detection and recognition, but also presenting the results of conducting extensive experiments using a unified evaluation framework that assesses pre-trained models of the selected methods on challenging cases, and applies the same evaluation criteria on these techniques. Second, identifying several existing challenges for detecting or recognizing text in the wild images, namely, in-plane-rotation, multi-oriented and multi-resolution text, perspective distortion, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex fonts, and special characters. Finally, the paper also presents insight into the potential research directions in this field to address some of the mentioned challenges that are still encountering scene text detection and recognition techniques.
Reinforcement learning is one of the core components in designing an artificial intelligent system emphasizing real-time response. Reinforcement learning influences the system to take actions within an arbitrary environment either having previous knowledge about the environment model or not. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on Reinforcement Learning focusing on various dimensions including challenges, the recent development of different state-of-the-art techniques, and future directions. The fundamental objective of this paper is to provide a framework for the presentation of available methods of reinforcement learning that is informative enough and simple to follow for the new researchers and academics in this domain considering the latest concerns. First, we illustrated the core techniques of reinforcement learning in an easily understandable and comparable way. Finally, we analyzed and depicted the recent developments in reinforcement learning approaches. My analysis pointed out that most of the models focused on tuning policy values rather than tuning other things in a particular state of reasoning.
In recent years, disinformation including fake news, has became a global phenomenon due to its explosive growth, particularly on social media. The wide spread of disinformation and fake news can cause detrimental societal effects. Despite the recent progress in detecting disinformation and fake news, it is still non-trivial due to its complexity, diversity, multi-modality, and costs of fact-checking or annotation. The goal of this chapter is to pave the way for appreciating the challenges and advancements via: (1) introducing the types of information disorder on social media and examine their differences and connections; (2) describing important and emerging tasks to combat disinformation for characterization, detection and attribution; and (3) discussing a weak supervision approach to detect disinformation with limited labeled data. We then provide an overview of the chapters in this book that represent the recent advancements in three related parts: (1) user engagements in the dissemination of information disorder; (2) techniques on detecting and mitigating disinformation; and (3) trending issues such as ethics, blockchain, clickbaits, etc. We hope this book to be a convenient entry point for researchers, practitioners, and students to understand the problems and challenges, learn state-of-the-art solutions for their specific needs, and quickly identify new research problems in their domains.