Data science workflows are human-centered processes involving on-demand programming and analysis. While programmable and interactive interfaces such as widgets embedded within computational notebooks are suitable for these workflows, they lack robust state management capabilities and do not support user-defined customization of the interactive components. The absence of such capabilities hinders workflow reusability and transparency while limiting the scope of exploration of the end-users. In response, we developed MAGNETON, a framework for authoring interactive widgets within computational notebooks that enables transparent, reusable, and customizable data science workflows. The framework enhances existing widgets to support fine-grained interaction history management, reusable states, and user-defined customizations. We conducted three case studies in a real-world knowledge graph construction and serving platform to evaluate the effectiveness of these widgets. Based on the observations, we discuss future implications of employing MAGNETON widgets for general-purpose data science workflows.
Automated hand gesture recognition has been a focus of the AI community for decades. Traditionally, work in this domain revolved largely around scenarios assuming the availability of the flow of images of the user hands. This has partly been due to the prevalence of camera-based devices and the wide availability of image data. However, there is growing demand for gesture recognition technology that can be implemented on low-power devices using limited sensor data instead of high-dimensional inputs like hand images. In this work, we demonstrate a hand gesture recognition system and method that uses signals from capacitive sensors embedded into the etee hand controller. The controller generates real-time signals from each of the wearer five fingers. We use a machine learning technique to analyse the time series signals and identify three features that can represent 5 fingers within 500 ms. The analysis is composed of a two stage training strategy, including dimension reduction through principal component analysis and classification with K nearest neighbour. Remarkably, we found that this combination showed a level of performance which was comparable to more advanced methods such as supervised variational autoencoder. The base system can also be equipped with the capability to learn from occasional errors by providing it with an additional adaptive error correction mechanism. The results showed that the error corrector improve the classification performance in the base system without compromising its performance. The system requires no more than 1 ms of computing time per input sample, and is smaller than deep neural networks, demonstrating the feasibility of agile gesture recognition systems based on this technology.
Video games are one of the richest and most popular forms of human-computer interaction and, hence, their role is critical for our understanding of human behaviour and affect at a large scale. As artificial intelligence (AI) tools are gradually adopted by the game industry a series of ethical concerns arise. Such concerns, however, have so far not been extensively discussed in a video game context. Motivated by the lack of a comprehensive review of the ethics of AI as applied to games, we survey the current state of the art in this area and discuss ethical considerations of these systems from the holistic perspective of the affective loop. Through the components of this loop, we study the ethical challenges that AI faces in video game development. Elicitation highlights the ethical boundaries of artificially induced emotions; sensing showcases the trade-off between privacy and safe gaming spaces; and detection, as utilised during in-game adaptation, poses challenges to transparency and ownership. This paper calls for an open dialogue and action for the games of today and the virtual spaces of the future. By setting an appropriate framework we aim to protect users and to guide developers towards safer and better experiences for their customers.
In order to advance academic research, it is important to assess and evaluate the academic influence of researchers and the findings they produce. Citation metrics are universally used methods to evaluate researchers. Amongst the several variations of citation metrics, the h-index proposed by Hirsch has become the leading measure. Recent work shows that h-index is not an effective measure to determine scientific impact - due to changing authorship patterns. This can be mitigated by using h-index of a paper to compute h- index of an author. We show that using fractional allocation of h-index gives better results. In this work, we reapply two indices based on the h-index of a single paper. The indices are referred to as: hp-index and hp-frac-index. We run large-scale experiments in three different fields with about a million publications and 3,000 authors. We also compare h-index of a paper with nine h-index like metrics. Our experiments show that hp-frac-index provides a unique ranking when compared to h-index. It also performs better than h-index in providing higher ranks to the awarded researcher.
Over the years, several memory models have been proposed to capture the subtle concurrency semantics of C/C++.One of the most fundamental problems associated with a memory model M is consistency checking: given an execution X, is X consistent with M? This problem lies at the heart of numerous applications, including specification testing and litmus tests, stateless model checking, and dynamic analyses. As such, it has been explored extensively and its complexity is well-understood for traditional models like SC and TSO. However, less is known for the numerous model variants of C/C++, for which the problem becomes challenging due to the intricacies of their concurrency primitives. In this work we study the problem of consistency checking for popular variants of the C11 memory model, in particular, the RC20 model, its release-acquire (RA) fragment, the strong and weak variants of RA (SRA and WRA), as well as the Relaxed fragment of RC20. Motivated by applications in testing and model checking, we focus on reads-from consistency checking. The input is an execution X specifying a set of events, their program order and their reads-from relation, and the task is to decide the existence of a modification order on the writes of X that makes X consistent in a memory model. We draw a rich complexity landscape for this problem; our results include (i)~nearly-linear-time algorithms for certain variants, which improve over prior results, (ii)~fine-grained optimality results, as well as (iii)~matching upper and lower bounds (NP-hardness) for other variants. To our knowledge, this is the first work to characterize the complexity of consistency checking for C11 memory models. We have implemented our algorithms inside the TruSt model checker and the C11Tester testing tool. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that our new algorithms improve consistency checking, often by a significant margin.
Research in Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE) has established many sources and forms of algorithmic harm, in domains as diverse as health care, finance, policing, and recommendations. Much work remains to be done to mitigate the serious harms of these systems, particularly those disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. Despite these ongoing harms, new systems are being developed and deployed which threaten the perpetuation of the same harms and the creation of novel ones. In response, the FATE community has emphasized the importance of anticipating harms. Our work focuses on the anticipation of harms from increasingly agentic systems. Rather than providing a definition of agency as a binary property, we identify 4 key characteristics which, particularly in combination, tend to increase the agency of a given algorithmic system: underspecification, directness of impact, goal-directedness, and long-term planning. We also discuss important harms which arise from increasing agency -- notably, these include systemic and/or long-range impacts, often on marginalized stakeholders. We emphasize that recognizing agency of algorithmic systems does not absolve or shift the human responsibility for algorithmic harms. Rather, we use the term agency to highlight the increasingly evident fact that ML systems are not fully under human control. Our work explores increasingly agentic algorithmic systems in three parts. First, we explain the notion of an increase in agency for algorithmic systems in the context of diverse perspectives on agency across disciplines. Second, we argue for the need to anticipate harms from increasingly agentic systems. Third, we discuss important harms from increasingly agentic systems and ways forward for addressing them. We conclude by reflecting on implications of our work for anticipating algorithmic harms from emerging systems.
Machine learning with Semantic Web ontologies follows several strategies, one of which involves projecting ontologies into graph structures and applying graph embeddings or graph-based machine learning methods to the resulting graphs. Several methods have been developed that project ontology axioms into graphs. However, these methods are limited in the type of axioms they can project (totality), whether they are invertible (injectivity), and how they exploit semantic information. These limitations restrict the kind of tasks to which they can be applied. Category-theoretical semantics of logic languages formalizes interpretations using categories instead of sets, and categories have a graph-like structure. We developed CatE, which uses the category-theoretical formulation of the semantics of the Description Logic $\mathcal{ALC}$ to generate a graph representation for ontology axioms. The CatE projection is total and injective, and therefore overcomes limitations of other graph-based ontology embedding methods which are generally not invertible. We apply CatE to a number of different tasks, including deductive and inductive reasoning, and we demonstrate that CatE improves over state of the art ontology embedding methods. Furthermore, we show that CatE can also outperform model-theoretic ontology embedding methods in machine learning tasks in the biomedical domain.
Modern software development extensively depends on existing libraries written by other developer teams from the same or a different organization. When a developer executes the software, the execution trace may go across the boundaries of multiple software products and create cross-project failures (CPFs). Existing studies show that a stand-alone executable failure report may enable the most effective communication, but creating such a report is often challenging due to the complicated files and dependencies interactions in the software ecosystems. In this paper, to solve the CPF report trilemma, we developed PExReport, which automatically creates stand-alone executable CPF reports. PExReport leverages build tools to prune source code and dependencies, and further analyzes the build process to create a pruned build environment for reproducing the CPF. We performed an evaluation on 74 software project issues with 198 CPFs, and the evaluation results show that PExReport can create executable CPF reports for 184 out of 198 test failures in our dataset, with an average reduction of 72.97% on source classes and the classes in internal JARs.
As human-robot interaction (HRI) systems advance, so does the difficulty of evaluating and understanding the strengths and limitations of these systems in different environments and with different users. To this end, previous methods have algorithmically generated diverse scenarios that reveal system failures in a shared control teleoperation task. However, these methods require directly evaluating generated scenarios by simulating robot policies and human actions. The computational cost of these evaluations limits their applicability in more complex domains. Thus, we propose augmenting scenario generation systems with surrogate models that predict both human and robot behaviors. In the shared control teleoperation domain and a more complex shared workspace collaboration task, we show that surrogate assisted scenario generation efficiently synthesizes diverse datasets of challenging scenarios. We demonstrate that these failures are reproducible in real-world interactions.
COVID-19 had an unprecedented impact on scientific collaboration. The pandemic and its broad response from the scientific community has forged new relationships among domain experts, mathematical modelers, and scientific computing specialists. Computationally, however, it also revealed critical gaps in the ability of researchers to exploit advanced computing systems. These challenging areas include gaining access to scalable computing systems, porting models and workflows to new systems, sharing data of varying sizes, and producing results that can be reproduced and validated by others. Informed by our team's work in supporting public health decision makers during the COVID-19 pandemic and by the identified capability gaps in applying high-performance computing (HPC) to the modeling of complex social systems, we present the goals, requirements, and initial implementation of OSPREY, an open science platform for robust epidemic analysis. The prototype implementation demonstrates an integrated, algorithm-driven HPC workflow architecture, coordinating tasks across federated HPC resources, with robust, secure and automated access to each of the resources. We demonstrate scalable and fault-tolerant task execution, an asynchronous API to support fast time-to-solution algorithms, an inclusive, multi-language approach, and efficient wide-area data management. The example OSPREY code is made available on a public repository.
Multimodal machine learning is a vibrant multi-disciplinary research field that aims to design computer agents with intelligent capabilities such as understanding, reasoning, and learning through integrating multiple communicative modalities, including linguistic, acoustic, visual, tactile, and physiological messages. With the recent interest in video understanding, embodied autonomous agents, text-to-image generation, and multisensor fusion in application domains such as healthcare and robotics, multimodal machine learning has brought unique computational and theoretical challenges to the machine learning community given the heterogeneity of data sources and the interconnections often found between modalities. However, the breadth of progress in multimodal research has made it difficult to identify the common themes and open questions in the field. By synthesizing a broad range of application domains and theoretical frameworks from both historical and recent perspectives, this paper is designed to provide an overview of the computational and theoretical foundations of multimodal machine learning. We start by defining two key principles of modality heterogeneity and interconnections that have driven subsequent innovations, and propose a taxonomy of 6 core technical challenges: representation, alignment, reasoning, generation, transference, and quantification covering historical and recent trends. Recent technical achievements will be presented through the lens of this taxonomy, allowing researchers to understand the similarities and differences across new approaches. We end by motivating several open problems for future research as identified by our taxonomy.