United States

Air pollution is a global problem and severely impacts human health. Fine-grained air quality (AQ) monitoring is important in mitigating air pollution. However, existing AQ station deployments are sparse. Conventional interpolation techniques fail to learn the complex AQ phenomena. Physics-based models require domain knowledge and pollution source data for AQ modeling. In this work, we propose a Gaussian processes based approach for estimating AQ. The important features of our approach are: a) a non-stationary (NS) kernel to allow input depended smoothness of fit; b) a Hamming distance-based kernel for categorical features; and c) a locally periodic kernel to capture temporal periodicity. We leverage batch-wise training to scale our approach to a large amount of data. Our approach outperforms the conventional baselines and a state-of-the-art neural attention-based approach.

AAAI 2022

Accurate and Scalable Gaussian Processes for Fine-Grained Air Quality Inference

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Along with the rapid growth and rise to prominence of food delivery platforms, concerns have also risen about the terms of employment of the ``gig workers'' underpinning this growth. Our analysis on data derived from a real-world food delivery platform across three large cities from India show that there is significant inequality in the money delivery agents earn. In this paper, we formulate the problem of fair income distribution among agents while also ensuring timely food delivery. We establish that the problem is not only NP-hard but also inapproximable in polynomial time. We overcome this computational bottleneck through a novel matching algorithm called FairFoody. Extensive experiments over real-world food delivery datasets show FairFoody imparts up to 10 times improvement in equitable income distribution when compared to baseline strategies, while also ensuring minimal impact on customer experience.

FairFoody: Bringing in Fairness in Food Delivery

Waves in the oceans are one of the most significant renewable energy sources and are an excellent resource to tackle climate challenges through decarbonizing energy generation. Lowering the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) for energy generation from ocean waves is critical for competitiveness with other forms of clean energy like wind and solar. It requires complex controllers to maximize efficiency for state-of-the-art multi-generator industrial Wave Energy Converters (WEC), which optimizes the reactive forces of the generators on multiple legs of WEC. This paper introduces Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning controller (MARL) architectures that can handle these various objectives for LCOE. MARL can help increase energy capture efficiency to boost revenue, reduce structural stress to limit maintenance cost, and adaptively and proactively protect the wave energy converter from catastrophic weather events preserving investments and lowering effective capital cost. These architectures include 2-agent and 3-agent MARL implementing proximal policy optimization (PPO) with various optimizations to help sustain the training convergence in the complex hyperplane without falling off the cliff. Also, the design for trust assures the operation of WEC within a safe zone of mechanical compliance. As a part of this design, reward shaping for multiple objectives of energy capture and penalty for harmful motions minimizes stress and lowers the cost of maintenance. We achieved double-digit gains in energy capture efficiency across the waves of different principal frequencies over the baseline Spring Damper controller with the proposed MARL controllers.

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Controller to Maximize Energy Efficiency for Multi-Generator Industrial Wave Energy Converter

Over the last few years, YouTube Kids has emerged as one of the highly competitive alternatives to television for children's entertainment. Consequently, YouTube Kids' content should receive an additional level of scrutiny to ensure children's safety. While research on detecting offensive or inappropriate content for kids is gaining momentum, little or no current work exists that investigates to what extent AI applications can (accidentally) introduce content that is inappropriate for kids. 

In this paper, we present a novel (and troubling) finding that well-known automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems may produce text content highly inappropriate for kids while transcribing YouTube Kids' videos. We dub this phenomenon as inappropriate content hallucination. Our analyses suggest that such hallucinations are far from occasional, and the ASR systems often produce them with high confidence. We release a first-of-its-kind data set of audios for which the existing state-of-the-art ASR systems hallucinate inappropriate content for kids. In addition, we demonstrate that some of these errors can be fixed using language models.

Beach' to 'Bitch': Inadvertent Unsafe Transcription of Kids' Content on YouTube

The prosperity of mobile and financial technologies has bred and expanded various kinds of financial products to a broader scope of people, which contributes to financial inclusion. It brings non-trivial social benefits of diminishing financial inequality. However, the technical challenges in individual financial risk evaluation exacerbated by the unforeseen user characteristic distribution and limited credit history of new users, as well as the inexperience of newly-entered companies in handling complex data and obtaining accurate labels, impede further promotion of financial inclusion. To tackle these challenges, this paper develops a novel transfer learning algorithm (i.e., TransBoost) that combines the merits of tree-based models and kernel methods. The TransBoost is designed with a parallel tree structure and
 efficient weights updating mechanism with theoretical guarantee, which enables it to excel in tackling real-world data with high dimensional features and sparsity in O(n) time complexity. We conduct extensive experiments on two public datasets and a unique largescale dataset from Tencent Mobile Payment. The results show that the TransBoost outperforms other state-of-the-
 art benchmark transfer learning algorithms in terms of prediction accuracy with superior efficiency, demonstrate stronger robustness to data sparsity, and provide meaningful model interpretation. Besides, given a financial risk level, the TransBoost enables financial service providers to serve the largest number of users including those who would otherwise be excluded by other algorithms. That is, the TransBoost improves financial inclusion.

TransBoost: A Boosting-Tree Kernel Transfer Learning Algorithm for Improving Financial Inclusion

Keeping track of scientific challenges, advances and emerging directions is a fundamental part of research. However, researchers face a flood of papers that hinders discovery of important knowledge. In biomedicine, this directly impacts human lives. To address this problem, we present a novel task of extraction and search of scientific challenges and directions, to facilitate rapid knowledge discovery. We construct and release an expert-annotated corpus of texts sampled from full-length papers, labeled with novel semantic categories that generalize across many types of challenges and directions. We focus on a large corpus of interdisciplinary work relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, ranging from biomedicine to areas such as AI and economics. We apply a model trained on our data to identify challenges and directions across the corpus and build a dedicated search engine. In experiments with 19 researchers and clinicians using our system, we outperform a popular scientific search engine in assisting knowledge discovery. Finally, we show that models trained on our resource generalize to the wider biomedical domain and to AI papers, highlighting its broad utility. We make our data, model and search engine publicly available.

A Search Engine for Discovery of Scientific Challenges and Directions

The potential for machine learning systems to amplify social inequities and unfairness is receiving increasing popular and academic attention. Much recent work has focused on developing algorithmic tools to assess and mitigate such unfairness. However, there is little work on enhancing fairness in graph algorithms. Here, we develop a simple, effective and general method, CrossWalk, that enhances fairness of various graph algorithms, including influence maximization, link prediction and node classification, applied to node embeddings. CrossWalk is applicable to any random walk based node representation learning algorithm, such as DeepWalk and Node2Vec. The key idea is to bias random walks to cross group boundaries, by upweighting edges which (1) are closer to the groups' peripheries or (2) connect different groups in the network. CrossWalk pulls nodes that are near groups' peripheries towards their neighbors from other groups in the embedding space, while preserving the necessary structural properties of the graph. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our algorithm to enhance fairness in various graph algorithms, including influence maximization, link prediction and node classification in synthetic and real networks, with only a very small decrease in performance.

CrossWalk: Fairness-Enhanced Node Representation Learning

Forest biomass is a key influence for future climate, and the world urgently needs highly scalable financing schemes, such as carbon offsetting certifications, to protect and restore forests. Current manual forest carbon stock inventory methods of measuring single trees by hand are time, labour, and cost intensive and have been shown to be subjective. They can lead to substantial overestimation of the carbon stock and ultimately distrust in forest financing. The potential for impact and scale of leveraging advancements in machine learning and remote sensing technologies is promising, but needs to be of high quality in order to replace the current forest stock protocols for certifications. 
 
 In this paper, we present ReforesTree, a benchmark dataset of forest carbon stock in six agro-forestry carbon offsetting sites in Ecuador. Furthermore, we show that a deep learning-based end-to-end model using individual tree detection from low cost RGB-only drone imagery is accurately estimating forest carbon stock within official carbon offsetting certification standards. Additionally, our baseline CNN model outperforms state-of-the-art satellite-based forest biomass and carbon stock estimates for this type of small-scale, tropical agro-forestry sites. We present this dataset to encourage machine learning research in this area to increase accountability and transparency of monitoring, verification and reporting (MVR) in carbon offsetting projects, as well as scaling global reforestation financing through accurate remote sensing.

ReforesTree: A Dataset for Estimating Tropical Forest Carbon Stock with Deep Learning and Aerial Imagery

The expression of displeasure on a consumer's behalf towards an organization, product, or event is denoted via the speech act known as complaint. Customers typically post reviews on retail websites and various social media platforms about the products or services they purchase, and the reviews may include complaints about the products or services. Automatic detection of consumers' complaints about items or services they buy can be critical for organizations and online merchants since they can use this insight to meet the customers' requirements, including handling and addressing the complaints. Previous studies on Complaint Identification (CI) are limited to text. Images posted with the reviews can provide cues to identify complaints better, thus emphasizing the importance of incorporating multi-modal inputs into the process. Furthermore, the customer's emotional state significantly impacts the complaint expression since emotions generally influence any speech act. As a result, the impact of emotion and sentiment on automatic complaint identification must also be investigated. One of the major contributions of this work is the creation of a new dataset- Complaint, Emotion, and Sentiment Annotated Multi-modal Amazon Reviews Dataset (CESAMARD), a collection of opinionated texts (reviews) and images of the products posted on the website of the retail giant Amazon. We present an attention-based multi-modal, adversarial multi-task deep neural network model for complaint detection to demonstrate the utility of the multi-modal dataset. Experimental results indicate that the multi-modality and multi-tasking complaint identification outperforms uni-modal and single-task variants.

Sentiment and Emotion-Aware Multi-Modal Complaint Identification

Recent social networks' misinformation mitigation approaches tend to investigate how to reduce misinformation by considering a whole-network statistical scale. However, unbalanced misinformation exposures among individuals urge to study fair allocation of mitigation resources. Moreover, the network has random dynamics which change over time. Therefore, we introduce a stochastic and non-stationary knapsack problem, and we apply its resolution to mitigate misinformation in social network campaigns. We further propose a generic misinformation mitigation algorithm that is robust to different social networks' misinformation statistics, allowing a promising impact in real-world scenarios. A novel loss function ensures fair mitigation among users. We achieve fairness by intelligently allocating a mitigation incentivization budget to the knapsack, and optimizing the loss function. To this end, a team of Learning Automata (LA) drives the budget allocation. Each LA is associated with a user and learns to minimize its exposure to misinformation by performing a non-stationary and stochastic walk over its state space. Our results show how our LA-based method is robust and outperforms similar misinformation mitigation methods in how the mitigation is fairly influencing the network users.

Socially Fair Mitigation of Misinformation on Social Networks via Constraint Stochastic Optimization

My doctoral research focuses on understanding semantic knowledge in neural network models trained solely to predict natural language (referred to as language models, or LMs), by drawing on insights from the study of concepts and categories grounded in cognitive science. I propose a framework inspired by 'inductive reasoning,' a phenomenon that sheds light on how humans utilize background knowledge to make inductive leaps and generalize from new pieces of information about concepts and their properties. Drawing from experiments that study inductive reasoning, I propose to analyze semantic inductive generalization in LMs using phenomena observed in human-induction literature, investigate inductive behavior on tasks such as implicit reasoning and emergent feature recognition, and analyze and relate induction dynamics to the learned conceptual representation space.

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