COVID-19 has spread all over the world, having an enormous effect on our daily life and work. In response to the epidemic, a lot of important decisions need to be taken to save communities and economies worldwide. Data clearly plays a vital role in effective decision making. Data-driven decision making uses data related evidence and insights to guide the decision making process and to verify the plan of action before it is committed. To better handle the epidemic, governments and policy making institutes have investigated abundant data originating from COVID-19. These data include those related to medicine, knowledge, media, etc. Based on these data, many prevention and control policies are made. In this survey paper, we summarize the progress of data-driven decision making in the response to COVID-19, including COVID-19 prevention and control, psychological counselling, financial aid, work resumption, and school re-opening. We also propose some current challenges and open issues in data-driven decision making, including data collection and quality, complex data analysis, and fairness in decision making. This survey paper sheds light on current policy making driven by data, which also provides a feasible direction for further scientific research.
Human action recognition and analysis have great demand and important application significance in video surveillance, video retrieval, and human-computer interaction. The task of human action quality evaluation requires the intelligent system to automatically and objectively evaluate the action completed by the human. The action quality assessment model can reduce the human and material resources spent in action evaluation and reduce subjectivity. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of existing papers on video-based action quality assessment. Different from human action recognition, the application scenario of action quality assessment is relatively narrow. Most of the existing work focuses on sports and medical care. We first introduce the definition and challenges of human action quality assessment. Then we present the existing datasets and evaluation metrics. In addition, we summarized the methods of sports and medical care according to the model categories and publishing institutions according to the characteristics of the two fields. At the end, combined with recent work, the promising development direction in action quality assessment is discussed.
Training a model with access to human explanations can improve data efficiency and model performance on in- and out-of-domain data. Adding to these empirical findings, similarity with the process of human learning makes learning from explanations a promising way to establish a fruitful human-machine interaction. Several methods have been proposed for improving natural language processing (NLP) models with human explanations, that rely on different explanation types and mechanism for integrating these explanations into the learning process. These methods are rarely compared with each other, making it hard for practitioners to choose the best combination of explanation type and integration mechanism for a specific use-case. In this paper, we give an overview of different methods for learning from human explanations, and discuss different factors that can inform the decision of which method to choose for a specific use-case.
Gaussian Process (GP) emulators are widely used to approximate complex computer model behaviour across the input space. Motivated by the problem of coupling computer models, recently progress has been made in the theory of the analysis of networks of connected GP emulators. In this paper, we combine these recent methodological advances with classical state-space models to construct a Bayesian decision support system. This approach gives a coherent probability model that produces predictions with the measure of uncertainty in terms of two first moments and enables the propagation of uncertainty from individual decision components. This methodology is used to produce a decision support tool for a UK county council considering low carbon technologies to transform its infrastructure to reach a net-zero carbon target. In particular, we demonstrate how to couple information from an energy model, a heating demand model, and gas and electricity price time-series to quantitatively assess the impact on operational costs of various policy choices and changes in the energy market.
The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak quickly spread around the world, resulting in over 240 million infections and 4 million deaths by Oct 2021. While the virus is spreading from person to person silently, fear has also been spreading around the globe. The COVID-19 information from the Australian Government is convincing but not timely or detailed, and there is much information on social networks with both facts and rumors. As software engineers, we have spontaneously and rapidly constructed a COVID-19 information dashboard aggregating reliable information semi-automatically checked from different sources for providing one-stop information sharing site about the latest status in Australia. Inspired by the John Hopkins University COVID-19 Map, our dashboard contains the case statistics, case distribution, government policy, latest news, with interactive visualization. In this paper, we present a participant's in-person observations in which the authors acted as founders of //covid-19-au.com/ serving more than 830K users with 14M page views since March 2020. According to our first-hand experience, we summarize 9 lessons for developers, researchers and instructors. These lessons may inspire the development, research and teaching in software engineer aspects for coping with similar public crises in the future.
At the same time that AI and machine learning are becoming central to human life, their potential harms become more vivid. In the presence of such drawbacks, a critical question one needs to address before using these data-driven technologies to make a decision is whether to trust their outcomes. Aligned with recent efforts on data-centric AI, this paper proposes a novel approach to address the trust question through the lens of data, by associating data sets with distrust quantification that specify their scope of use for predicting future query points. The distrust values raise warning signals when a prediction based on a dataset is questionable and are valuable alongside other techniques for trustworthy AI. We propose novel algorithms for computing the distrust values in the neighborhood of a query point efficiently and effectively. Learning the necessary components of the measures from the data itself, our sub-linear algorithms scale to very large and multi-dimensional settings. Besides demonstrating the efficiency of our algorithms, our extensive experiments reflect a consistent correlation between distrust values and model performance. This underscores the message that when the distrust value of a query point is high, the prediction outcome should be discarded or at least not considered for critical decisions.
The Model Order Reduction (MOR) technique can provide compact numerical models for fast simulation. Different from the intrusive MOR methods, the non-intrusive MOR does not require access to the Full Order Models (FOMs), especially system matrices. Since the non-intrusive MOR methods strongly rely on the snapshots of the FOMs, constructing good snapshot sets becomes crucial. In this work, we propose a new active learning approach with two novelties. A novel idea with our approach is the use of single-time step snapshots from the system states taken from an estimation of the reduced-state space. These states are selected using a greedy strategy supported by an error estimator based Gaussian Process Regression (GPR). Additionally, we introduce a use case-independent validation strategy based on Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) learning. In this work, we use Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to identify the Reduced Order Model (ROM), however the method could be similarly applied to other ROM identification methods. The performance of the whole workflow is tested by a 2-D thermal conduction and a 3-D vacuum furnace model. With little required user interaction and a training strategy independent to a specific use case, the proposed method offers a huge potential for industrial usage to create so-called executable Digital Twins (DTs).
Owing to effective and flexible data acquisition, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has recently become a hotspot across the fields of computer vision (CV) and remote sensing (RS). Inspired by recent success of deep learning (DL), many advanced object detection and tracking approaches have been widely applied to various UAV-related tasks, such as environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, traffic management. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the research progress and prospects of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods. More specifically, we first outline the challenges, statistics of existing methods, and provide solutions from the perspectives of DL-based models in three research topics: object detection from the image, object detection from the video, and object tracking from the video. Open datasets related to UAV-dominated object detection and tracking are exhausted, and four benchmark datasets are employed for performance evaluation using some state-of-the-art methods. Finally, prospects and considerations for the future work are discussed and summarized. It is expected that this survey can facilitate those researchers who come from remote sensing field with an overview of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods, along with some thoughts on their further developments.
Human knowledge provides a formal understanding of the world. Knowledge graphs that represent structural relations between entities have become an increasingly popular research direction towards cognition and human-level intelligence. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review on knowledge graph covering overall research topics about 1) knowledge graph representation learning, 2) knowledge acquisition and completion, 3) temporal knowledge graph, and 4) knowledge-aware applications, and summarize recent breakthroughs and perspective directions to facilitate future research. We propose a full-view categorization and new taxonomies on these topics. Knowledge graph embedding is organized from four aspects of representation space, scoring function, encoding models and auxiliary information. For knowledge acquisition, especially knowledge graph completion, embedding methods, path inference and logical rule reasoning are reviewed. We further explore several emerging topics including meta relational learning, commonsense reasoning, and temporal knowledge graphs. To facilitate future research on knowledge graphs, we also provide a curated collection of datasets and open-source libraries on different tasks. In the end, we have a thorough outlook on several promising research directions.
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.
Explainable Recommendation refers to the personalized recommendation algorithms that address the problem of why -- they not only provide the user with the recommendations, but also make the user aware why such items are recommended by generating recommendation explanations, which help to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, persuasiveness, and user satisfaction of recommender systems. In recent years, a large number of explainable recommendation approaches -- especially model-based explainable recommendation algorithms -- have been proposed and adopted in real-world systems. In this survey, we review the work on explainable recommendation that has been published in or before the year of 2018. We first high-light the position of explainable recommendation in recommender system research by categorizing recommendation problems into the 5W, i.e., what, when, who, where, and why. We then conduct a comprehensive survey of explainable recommendation itself in terms of three aspects: 1) We provide a chronological research line of explanations in recommender systems, including the user study approaches in the early years, as well as the more recent model-based approaches. 2) We provide a taxonomy for explainable recommendation algorithms, including user-based, item-based, model-based, and post-model explanations. 3) We summarize the application of explainable recommendation in different recommendation tasks, including product recommendation, social recommendation, POI recommendation, etc. We devote a chapter to discuss the explanation perspectives in the broader IR and machine learning settings, as well as their relationship with explainable recommendation research. We end the survey by discussing potential future research directions to promote the explainable recommendation research area.