Proper allocation of law enforcement resources remains a critical issue in crime prediction and prevention that operates by characterizing spatially aggregated crime activities and a multitude of predictor variables of interest. Despite the critical nature of proper resource allocation for mental health incidents, there has been little progress in statistical modeling of the geo-spatial nature of mental health events in Little Rock, Arkansas. In this article, we provide insights into the spatial nature of mental health data from Little Rock, Arkansas between 2015 and 2018, under a supervised spatial modeling framework while extending the popular risk terrain modeling (Caplan et al., 2011, 2015; Drawve, 2016) approach. We provide evidence of spatial clustering and identify the important features influencing such heterogeneity via a spatially informed hierarchy of generalized linear models, spatial regression models and a tree based method, viz., Poisson regression, spatial Durbin error model, Manski model and Random Forest. The insights obtained from these different models are presented here along with their relative predictive performances. The inferential tools developed here can be used in a broad variety of spatial modeling contexts and have the potential to aid both law enforcement agencies and the city in properly allocating resources.
Embedding ethics modules within computer science courses has become a popular response to the growing recognition that CS programs need to better equip their students to navigate the ethical dimensions of computing technologies like AI, machine learning, and big data analytics. However, the popularity of this approach has outpaced the evidence of its positive outcomes. To help close that gap, this empirical study reports positive results from Northeastern's program that embeds values analysis modules into CS courses. The resulting data suggest that such modules have a positive effect on students' moral attitudes and that students leave the modules believing they are more prepared to navigate the ethical dimensions they will likely face in their eventual careers. Importantly, these gains were accomplished at an institution without a philosophy doctoral program, suggesting this strategy can be effectively employed by a wider range of institutions than many have thought.
Transaction fees represent a major incentive in many blockchain systems as a way to incentivize processing transactions. Unfortunately, they also introduce an enormous amount of incentive asymmetry compared to alternatives like fixed block rewards. We analyze some of the incentive compatibility issues that arise from transaction fees, which relate to the bids that users submit, the allocation rules that miners use to choose which transactions to include, and where they choose to mine in the context of longest-chain consensus. We start by surveying a variety of mining attacks including undercutting, fee sniping, and fee-optimized selfish mining. Then, we move to analyzing mechanistic notions of user incentive compatibility, myopic miner incentive compatibility, and off-chain-agreement-proofness, as well as why they are provably incompatible in their full form. Then, we discuss weaker notions of nearly and $\gamma$-weak incentive compatibility, and how all of these forms of incentive compatibility hold or fail in the trustless auctioneer setup of blockchains, examining classical mechanisms as well as more recent ones such as Ethereum's EIP-1559 mechanism and \cite{chung}'s burning second-price auction. Throughout, we generalize and interrelate existing notions, provide new unifying perspectives and intuitions on analysis, and discuss both specific and overarching open problems for future work.
Over the course of the past two decades, a substantial body of research has substantiated the viability of utilising cardiac signals as a biometric modality. This paper presents a novel approach for patient identification in healthcare systems using electrocardiogram signals. A convolutional neural network is used to classify users based on images extracted from ECG signals. The proposed identification system is evaluated in multiple databases, providing a comprehensive understanding of its potential in real-world scenarios. The impact of Cardiovascular Diseases on generic user identification has been largely overlooked in previous studies. The presented method takes into account the cardiovascular condition of the patients, ensuring that the results obtained are not biased or limited. Furthermore, the results obtained are consistent and reliable, with lower error rates and higher accuracy metrics, as demonstrated through extensive experimentation. All these features make the proposed method a valuable contribution to the field of patient identification in healthcare systems, and make it a strong contender for practical applications.
Safe control methods are often intended to behave safely even in worst-case human uncertainties. However, humans may exploit such safety-first systems, which results in greater risk for everyone. Despite their significance, no prior work has investigated and accounted for such factors in safe control. In this paper, we leverage an interaction-based payoff structure from game theory to model humans' short-sighted, self-seeking behaviors and how humans change their strategies toward machines based on prior experience. We integrate such strategic human behaviors into a safe control architecture. As a result, our approach achieves better safety and performance trade-offs when compared to both deterministic worst-case safe control techniques and equilibrium-based stochastic methods. Our findings suggest an urgent need to fundamentally rethink the safe control framework used in human-technology interaction in pursuit of greater safety for all.
The concept of causality plays an important role in human cognition . In the past few decades, causal inference has been well developed in many fields, such as computer science, medicine, economics, and education. With the advancement of deep learning techniques, it has been increasingly used in causal inference against counterfactual data. Typically, deep causal models map the characteristics of covariates to a representation space and then design various objective optimization functions to estimate counterfactual data unbiasedly based on the different optimization methods. This paper focuses on the survey of the deep causal models, and its core contributions are as follows: 1) we provide relevant metrics under multiple treatments and continuous-dose treatment; 2) we incorporate a comprehensive overview of deep causal models from both temporal development and method classification perspectives; 3) we assist a detailed and comprehensive classification and analysis of relevant datasets and source code.
Learning on big data brings success for artificial intelligence (AI), but the annotation and training costs are expensive. In future, learning on small data is one of the ultimate purposes of AI, which requires machines to recognize objectives and scenarios relying on small data as humans. A series of machine learning models is going on this way such as active learning, few-shot learning, deep clustering. However, there are few theoretical guarantees for their generalization performance. Moreover, most of their settings are passive, that is, the label distribution is explicitly controlled by one specified sampling scenario. This survey follows the agnostic active sampling under a PAC (Probably Approximately Correct) framework to analyze the generalization error and label complexity of learning on small data using a supervised and unsupervised fashion. With these theoretical analyses, we categorize the small data learning models from two geometric perspectives: the Euclidean and non-Euclidean (hyperbolic) mean representation, where their optimization solutions are also presented and discussed. Later, some potential learning scenarios that may benefit from small data learning are then summarized, and their potential learning scenarios are also analyzed. Finally, some challenging applications such as computer vision, natural language processing that may benefit from learning on small data are also surveyed.
AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.
A community reveals the features and connections of its members that are different from those in other communities in a network. Detecting communities is of great significance in network analysis. Despite the classical spectral clustering and statistical inference methods, we notice a significant development of deep learning techniques for community detection in recent years with their advantages in handling high dimensional network data. Hence, a comprehensive overview of community detection's latest progress through deep learning is timely to both academics and practitioners. This survey devises and proposes a new taxonomy covering different categories of the state-of-the-art methods, including deep learning-based models upon deep neural networks, deep nonnegative matrix factorization and deep sparse filtering. The main category, i.e., deep neural networks, is further divided into convolutional networks, graph attention networks, generative adversarial networks and autoencoders. The survey also summarizes the popular benchmark data sets, model evaluation metrics, and open-source implementations to address experimentation settings. We then discuss the practical applications of community detection in various domains and point to implementation scenarios. Finally, we outline future directions by suggesting challenging topics in this fast-growing deep learning field.
Edge intelligence refers to a set of connected systems and devices for data collection, caching, processing, and analysis in locations close to where data is captured based on artificial intelligence. The aim of edge intelligence is to enhance the quality and speed of data processing and protect the privacy and security of the data. Although recently emerged, spanning the period from 2011 to now, this field of research has shown explosive growth over the past five years. In this paper, we present a thorough and comprehensive survey on the literature surrounding edge intelligence. We first identify four fundamental components of edge intelligence, namely edge caching, edge training, edge inference, and edge offloading, based on theoretical and practical results pertaining to proposed and deployed systems. We then aim for a systematic classification of the state of the solutions by examining research results and observations for each of the four components and present a taxonomy that includes practical problems, adopted techniques, and application goals. For each category, we elaborate, compare and analyse the literature from the perspectives of adopted techniques, objectives, performance, advantages and drawbacks, etc. This survey article provides a comprehensive introduction to edge intelligence and its application areas. In addition, we summarise the development of the emerging research field and the current state-of-the-art and discuss the important open issues and possible theoretical and technical solutions.
Causal inference is a critical research topic across many domains, such as statistics, computer science, education, public policy and economics, for decades. Nowadays, estimating causal effect from observational data has become an appealing research direction owing to the large amount of available data and low budget requirement, compared with randomized controlled trials. Embraced with the rapidly developed machine learning area, various causal effect estimation methods for observational data have sprung up. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of causal inference methods under the potential outcome framework, one of the well known causal inference framework. The methods are divided into two categories depending on whether they require all three assumptions of the potential outcome framework or not. For each category, both the traditional statistical methods and the recent machine learning enhanced methods are discussed and compared. The plausible applications of these methods are also presented, including the applications in advertising, recommendation, medicine and so on. Moreover, the commonly used benchmark datasets as well as the open-source codes are also summarized, which facilitate researchers and practitioners to explore, evaluate and apply the causal inference methods.