Poor sitting habits have been identified as a risk factor to musculoskeletal disorders and lower back pain especially on the elderly, disabled people, and office workers. In the current computerized world, even while involved in leisure or work activity, people tend to spend most of their days sitting at computer desks. This can result in spinal pain and related problems. Therefore, a means to remind people about their sitting habits and provide recommendations to counterbalance, such as physical exercise, is important. Posture recognition for seated postures have not received enough attention as most works focus on standing postures. Wearable sensors, pressure or force sensors, videos and images were used for posture recognition in the literature. The aim of this study is to build Machine Learning models for classifying sitting posture of a person by analyzing data collected from a chair platted with two 32 by 32 pressure sensors at its seat and backrest. Models were built using five algorithms: Random Forest (RF), Gaussian Na\"ive Bayes, Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine and Deep Neural Network (DNN). All the models are evaluated using KFold cross-validation technique. This paper presents experiments conducted using the two separate datasets, controlled and realistic, and discusses results achieved at classifying six sitting postures. Average classification accuracies of 98% and 97% were achieved on the controlled and realistic datasets, respectively.
Objective: When patients develop acute respiratory failure, accurately identifying the underlying etiology is essential for determining the best treatment. However, differentiating between common medical diagnoses can be challenging in clinical practice. Machine learning models could improve medical diagnosis by aiding in the diagnostic evaluation of these patients. Materials and Methods: Machine learning models were trained to predict the common causes of acute respiratory failure (pneumonia, heart failure, and/or COPD). Models were trained using chest radiographs and clinical data from the electronic health record (EHR) and applied to an internal and external cohort. Results: The internal cohort of 1,618 patients included 508 (31%) with pneumonia, 363 (22%) with heart failure, and 137 (8%) with COPD based on physician chart review. A model combining chest radiographs and EHR data outperformed models based on each modality alone. Models had similar or better performance compared to a randomly selected physician reviewer. For pneumonia, the combined model area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) was 0.79 (0.77-0.79), image model AUROC was 0.74 (0.72-0.75), and EHR model AUROC was 0.74 (0.70-0.76). For heart failure, combined: 0.83 (0.77-0.84), image: 0.80 (0.71-0.81), and EHR: 0.79 (0.75-0.82). For COPD, combined: AUROC = 0.88 (0.83-0.91), image: 0.83 (0.77-0.89), and EHR: 0.80 (0.76-0.84). In the external cohort, performance was consistent for heart failure and increased for COPD, but declined slightly for pneumonia. Conclusions: Machine learning models combining chest radiographs and EHR data can accurately differentiate between common causes of acute respiratory failure. Further work is needed to determine how these models could act as a diagnostic aid to clinicians in clinical settings.
Neural networks have had discernible achievements in a wide range of applications. The wide-spread adoption also raises the concern of their dependability and reliability. Similar to traditional decision-making programs, neural networks can have defects that need to be repaired. The defects may cause unsafe behaviors, raise security concerns or unjust societal impacts. In this work, we address the problem of repairing a neural network for desirable properties such as fairness and the absence of backdoor. The goal is to construct a neural network that satisfies the property by (minimally) adjusting the given neural network's parameters (i.e., weights). Specifically, we propose CARE (\textbf{CA}usality-based \textbf{RE}pair), a causality-based neural network repair technique that 1) performs causality-based fault localization to identify the `guilty' neurons and 2) optimizes the parameters of the identified neurons to reduce the misbehavior. We have empirically evaluated CARE on various tasks such as backdoor removal, neural network repair for fairness and safety properties. Our experiment results show that CARE is able to repair all neural networks efficiently and effectively. For fairness repair tasks, CARE successfully improves fairness by $61.91\%$ on average. For backdoor removal tasks, CARE reduces the attack success rate from over $98\%$ to less than $1\%$. For safety property repair tasks, CARE reduces the property violation rate to less than $1\%$. Results also show that thanks to the causality-based fault localization, CARE's repair focuses on the misbehavior and preserves the accuracy of the neural networks.
The most common sensing modalities found in a robot perception system are vision and touch, which together can provide global and highly localized data for manipulation. However, these sensing modalities often fail to adequately capture the behavior of target objects during the critical moments as they transition out of static, controlled contact with an end-effector to dynamic and uncontrolled motion. In this work, we present a novel multimodal visuotactile sensor that provides simultaneous visuotactile and proximity depth data. The sensor integrates an RGB camera and air pressure sensor to sense touch with an infrared time-of-flight (ToF) camera to sense proximity by leveraging a selectively transmissive soft membrane to enable the dual sensing modalities. We present the mechanical design, fabrication techniques, algorithm implementations, and evaluation of the sensor's tactile and proximity modalities. The sensor is demonstrated in three open-loop robotic tasks: approaching and contacting an object, catching, and throwing. The fusion of tactile and proximity data could be used to capture key information about a target object's transition behavior for sensor-based control in dynamic manipulation.
The accurate diagnosis and molecular profiling of colorectal cancers are critical for planning the best treatment options for patients. Microsatellite instability (MSI) or mismatch repair (MMR) status plays a vital role inappropriate treatment selection, has prognostic implications and is used to investigate the possibility of patients having underlying genetic disorders (Lynch syndrome). NICE recommends that all CRC patients should be offered MMR/microsatellite instability (MSI) testing. Immunohistochemistry is commonly used to assess MMR status with subsequent molecular testing performed as required. This incurs significant extra costs and requires additional resources. The introduction of automated methods that can predict MSI or MMR status from a target image could substantially reduce the cost associated with MMR testing. Unlike previous studies on MSI prediction involving training a CNN using coarse labels (Microsatellite Instable vs Microsatellite Stable), we have utilised fine-grain MMR labels for training purposes. In this paper, we present our work on predicting MSI status in a two-stage process using a single target slide either stained with CK8/18 or H\&E. First, we trained a multi-headed convolutional neural network model where each head was responsible for predicting one of the MMR protein expressions. To this end, we performed the registration of MMR stained slides to the target slide as a pre-processing step. In the second stage, statistical features computed from the MMR prediction maps were used for the final MSI prediction. Our results demonstrated that MSI classification can be improved by incorporating fine-grained MMR labels in comparison to the previous approaches in which only coarse labels were utilised.
We describe a cognitive architecture intended to solve a wide range of problems based on the five identified principles of brain activity, with their implementation in three subsystems: logical-probabilistic inference, probabilistic formal concepts, and functional systems theory. Building an architecture involves the implementation of a task-driven approach that allows defining the target functions of applied applications as tasks formulated in terms of the operating environment corresponding to the task, expressed in the applied ontology. We provide a basic ontology for a number of practical applications as well as for the subject domain ontologies based upon it, describe the proposed architecture, and give possible examples of the execution of these applications in this architecture.
Medical data is often highly sensitive in terms of data privacy and security concerns. Federated learning, one type of machine learning techniques, has been started to use for the improvement of the privacy and security of medical data. In the federated learning, the training data is distributed across multiple machines, and the learning process is performed in a collaborative manner. There are several privacy attacks on deep learning (DL) models to get the sensitive information by attackers. Therefore, the DL model itself should be protected from the adversarial attack, especially for applications using medical data. One of the solutions for this problem is homomorphic encryption-based model protection from the adversary collaborator. This paper proposes a privacy-preserving federated learning algorithm for medical data using homomorphic encryption. The proposed algorithm uses a secure multi-party computation protocol to protect the deep learning model from the adversaries. In this study, the proposed algorithm using a real-world medical dataset is evaluated in terms of the model performance.
The world population is anticipated to increase by close to 2 billion by 2050 causing a rapid escalation of food demand. A recent projection shows that the world is lagging behind accomplishing the "Zero Hunger" goal, in spite of some advancements. Socio-economic and well being fallout will affect the food security. Vulnerable groups of people will suffer malnutrition. To cater to the needs of the increasing population, the agricultural industry needs to be modernized, become smart, and automated. Traditional agriculture can be remade to efficient, sustainable, eco-friendly smart agriculture by adopting existing technologies. In this survey paper the authors present the applications, technological trends, available datasets, networking options, and challenges in smart agriculture. How Agro Cyber Physical Systems are built upon the Internet-of-Agro-Things is discussed through various application fields. Agriculture 4.0 is also discussed as a whole. We focus on the technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) which support the automation, along with the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) which provides data integrity and security. After an in-depth study of different architectures, we also present a smart agriculture framework which relies on the location of data processing. We have divided open research problems of smart agriculture as future research work in two groups - from a technological perspective and from a networking perspective. AI, ML, the blockchain as a DLT, and Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) based hardware security fall under the technology group, whereas any network related attacks, fake data injection and similar threats fall under the network research problem group.
Multimodal sentiment analysis is a very actively growing field of research. A promising area of opportunity in this field is to improve the multimodal fusion mechanism. We present a novel feature fusion strategy that proceeds in a hierarchical fashion, first fusing the modalities two in two and only then fusing all three modalities. On multimodal sentiment analysis of individual utterances, our strategy outperforms conventional concatenation of features by 1%, which amounts to 5% reduction in error rate. On utterance-level multimodal sentiment analysis of multi-utterance video clips, for which current state-of-the-art techniques incorporate contextual information from other utterances of the same clip, our hierarchical fusion gives up to 2.4% (almost 10% error rate reduction) over currently used concatenation. The implementation of our method is publicly available in the form of open-source code.
We propose a novel approach to multimodal sentiment analysis using deep neural networks combining visual analysis and natural language processing. Our goal is different than the standard sentiment analysis goal of predicting whether a sentence expresses positive or negative sentiment; instead, we aim to infer the latent emotional state of the user. Thus, we focus on predicting the emotion word tags attached by users to their Tumblr posts, treating these as "self-reported emotions." We demonstrate that our multimodal model combining both text and image features outperforms separate models based solely on either images or text. Our model's results are interpretable, automatically yielding sensible word lists associated with emotions. We explore the structure of emotions implied by our model and compare it to what has been posited in the psychology literature, and validate our model on a set of images that have been used in psychology studies. Finally, our work also provides a useful tool for the growing academic study of images - both photographs and memes - on social networks.
State-of-the-art recommendation algorithms -- especially the collaborative filtering (CF) based approaches with shallow or deep models -- usually work with various unstructured information sources for recommendation, such as textual reviews, visual images, and various implicit or explicit feedbacks. Though structured knowledge bases were considered in content-based approaches, they have been largely neglected recently due to the availability of vast amount of data, and the learning power of many complex models. However, structured knowledge bases exhibit unique advantages in personalized recommendation systems. When the explicit knowledge about users and items is considered for recommendation, the system could provide highly customized recommendations based on users' historical behaviors. A great challenge for using knowledge bases for recommendation is how to integrated large-scale structured and unstructured data, while taking advantage of collaborative filtering for highly accurate performance. Recent achievements on knowledge base embedding sheds light on this problem, which makes it possible to learn user and item representations while preserving the structure of their relationship with external knowledge. In this work, we propose to reason over knowledge base embeddings for personalized recommendation. Specifically, we propose a knowledge base representation learning approach to embed heterogeneous entities for recommendation. Experimental results on real-world dataset verified the superior performance of our approach compared with state-of-the-art baselines.