United States

African smallholder farmers have struggled with low agricultural productivity for decades, partly due to their inability to proactively assess irrigation needs in their farms in the face of long-term climate change. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by employing data-driven techniques to develop forecasting tools for three widely used crop-productivity related variables (i.e., actual evapotranspiration, reference evapotranspiration, and net primary production), which can then be used by farmers to take corrective actions on their farms. Prior work in this domain, despite using data-driven methods, suffers from two major limitations: (i) they mainly focus on estimating variable values (as opposed to forecasting the future); and (ii) they mostly use classical Machine Learning (ML) prediction models, despite the abundance of data sufficient to train sophisticated deep learning models. To fill this research gap, we collaborate with PlantVillage, the world&#39;s leading non-profit agricultural knowledge delivery platform for African farmers, to identify âˆ¼2,200 smallholder farm locations, and gather remote-sensed data of these farms over a period of five years. Next, we propose CLIMATES, a meta-algorithm leveraging structural insights about temporal patterns of this time-series data to accurately forecast their future values. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate its performance in this domain. Our experimental results show that CLIMATES outperforms several state-of-the-art time-series forecasting models. We also provide insights about the poor performance of some competing models. Our work is being evaluated by officials at PlantVillage for potential future deployment as an early warning system in East Africa. We release the code at https://github.com/maryam-tabar/CLIMATES.

AAAI 2022

Mitigating Low Agricultural Productivity of Smallholder Farms in Africa: Time-Series Forecasting for Environmental Stressors

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

African smallholder farmers have struggled with low agricultural productivity for decades, partly due to their inability to proactively assess irrigation needs in their farms in the face of long-term climate change. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by employing data-driven techniques to develop forecasting tools for three widely used crop-productivity related variables (i.e., actual evapotranspiration, reference evapotranspiration, and net primary production), which can then be used by farmers to take corrective actions on their farms. Prior work in this domain, despite using data-driven methods, suffers from two major limitations: (i) they mainly focus on estimating variable values (as opposed to forecasting the future); and (ii) they mostly use classical Machine Learning (ML) prediction models, despite the abundance of data sufficient to train sophisticated deep learning models. To fill this research gap, we collaborate with PlantVillage, the world's leading non-profit agricultural knowledge delivery platform for African farmers, to identify âˆ¼2,200 smallholder farm locations, and gather remote-sensed data of these farms over a period of five years. Next, we propose CLIMATES, a meta-algorithm leveraging structural insights about temporal patterns of this time-series data to accurately forecast their future values. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate its performance in this domain. Our experimental results show that CLIMATES outperforms several state-of-the-art time-series forecasting models. We also provide insights about the poor performance of some competing models. Our work is being evaluated by officials at PlantVillage for potential future deployment as an early warning system in East Africa. We release the code at https://github.com/maryam-tabar/CLIMATES.

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. 

Micronutrient deficiency (MND), which is a form of malnutrition that can have serious health consequences, is difficult to diagnose in early stages without blood draws, which are expensive and time-consuming to collect and process. It is even more difficult at a public health scale seeking to identify regions at higher risk of MND. To provide data more widely and frequently, we propose an accurate, scalable, low-cost, and interpretable regional-level MND prediction system. Specifically, our work is the first to use satellite data, such as forest cover, weather, and presence of water, to predict deficiency of micronutrients such as iron, Vitamin B12, and Vitamin A, directly from their biomarkers. We use real-world, ground truth biomarker data collected from four different regions across Madagascar for training, and demonstrate that satellite data are viable for predicting regional-level MND, surprisingly exceeding the performance of baseline predictions based only on survey responses. Our method could be broadly applied to other countries where satellite data are available, and potentially create high societal impact if these predictions are used by policy makers, public health officials, or healthcare providers.

Micronutrient Deficiency Prediction via Publicly Available Satellite Data

We propose PaintTeR, our Paintings TextRank algorithm for extracting art-related text spans from passages on paintings. PaintTeR combines a lexicon of painting words curated automatically through distant supervision with random walks on a large-scale word co-occurrence graph for ranking passage spans for artistic characteristics. The spans extracted with PaintTeR are used in state-of-the-art Question Generation and Reading Comprehension models for designing an interactive aid that enables gallery and museum visitors focus on the artistic elements of paintings. We provide experiments on two datasets of expert-written passages on paintings to showcase the effectiveness of PaintTeR. Evaluations by both gallery experts as well as crowdworkers indicate that our proposed algorithm can be used to
select relevant and interesting art-centered questions. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work to effectively fine-tune question generation models using minimal supervision for a low-resource, specialized context such as gallery visits.

PaintTeR: Automatic Extraction of Text Spans for Generating Art-Centered Questions

As climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of climate and weather hazards, improving detection and monitoring of flood events is a priority. Being weather independent and high resolution, Sentinel 1 (S1) radar satellite imagery data has become the go to data source to detect flood events accurately. However, current methods are either based on fixed thresholds to differentiate water from land or train Artificial Intelligence (AI) models based on only S1 data, despite the availability of many other relevant data sources publicly. These models also lack comprehensive validations on out-of-sample data and deployment at scale.  In this study, we investigated whether adding extra input layers could increase the performance of AI models in detecting floods from S1 data. We also provide performance across a range of 11 historical events, with results ranging between 0.93 and 0.97 accuracy, 0.53 and 0.81 IoU, and 0.68 and 0.89 F1 scores. Finally, we show the infrastructure we developed to deploy our AI models at scale to satisfy a range of use cases and user requests.

Deploying an Artificial Intelligence Application to Detect Flood from Sentinel 1 Data

In recent years, companies in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry have started exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) can reduce time-consuming and repetitive tasks. One use case that can benefit from the adoption of AI is the determination of quantities in floor plans. This information is required for several planning and construction steps. Currently, the task requires companies to invest a significant amount of manual effort. Either digital floor plans are not available for existing buildings, or the formats cannot be processed due to lack of standardization. In this paper, we therefore propose a human-in-the-loop approach for the detection and classification of symbols in floor plans. The developed system calculates a measure of uncertainty for each detected symbol which is used to acquire the knowledge of human experts for those symbols that are difficult to classify. We evaluate our approach with a real-world dataset provided by an industry partner and find that the selective acquisition of human expert knowledge enhances the model's performance by up to 10.5%â€”resulting in an overall prediction accuracy of 92.1% on average. We further design a pipeline for the generation of synthetic training data that allows the systems to be adapted to new construction projects with minimal manual effort. Overall, our work supports professionals in the AEC industry on their journey to the data-driven generation of business value.

Designing a Human-in-the-Loop System for Object Detection in Floor Plans

We consider the car key localization task using ultra-wideband (UWB) signal measurements. Given labeled data for a certain car, we train a deep classifier to make the prediction about the new points. However, due to the differences in car models and possible environmental effects that might alter the signal propagation, data collection requires considerable effort for each car. In particular, we consider a situation where the data for the new car is collected only in one environment, so we have to utilize the measurements in other environments from a different car. We propose a framework based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) to generate missing parts of the data and train the classifier on it, mitigating the necessity to collect the real data. We show that the model trained on the synthetic data performs better than the baseline trained on the collected measurements only. Furthermore, our model closes the gap to the level of performance achieved when we would have the information about the new car in multiple environments by 35%.

Domain Reconstruction for UWB Car Key Localization Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Improving health equity is an urgent task for our society. The advent of mobile clinics plays an important role in enhancing health equity, as they can provide easier access to preventive healthcare for patients from disadvantaged populations. For effective functioning of mobile clinics, accurate prediction of demand (expected number of individuals visiting mobile clinic) is the key to their daily operations and staff/resource allocation. Despite its importance, there have been very limited studies on predicting demand of mobile clinics. To the best of our knowledge, we are among the first to explore this area, using AI-based techniques. A crucial challenge in this task is that there are no known existing data sources from which we can extract useful information to account for the exogenous factors that may affect the demand, while considering protection of client privacy. We propose a novel methodology that completely uses public data sources to extract the features, with several new components that are designed to improve the prediction. Empirical evaluation on a real-world dataset from the mobile clinic The Family Van shows that, by leveraging publicly available data (which introduces no extra monetary cost to the mobile clinics), our AI-based method achieves 26.4% - 51.8% lower Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) than the historical average-based estimation (which is presently employed by mobile clinics like The Family Van). Our algorithm makes it possible for mobile clinics to plan proactively, rather than reactively, as what has been doing.

Using Public Data to Predict Demand for Mobile Health Clinics

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) play a key role in identifying the cause of an issue and preforming remediation steps to resolve it. After an issue is reported, SREs come together in a virtual room (collaboration platform) to triage the issue. While doing so, they leave behind a wealth of information, in the form of conversations, which can be used later for triaging similar issues. However, usability of these conversations offer challenges due to them being and scarcity of conversation utterance label. This paper presents a novel approach for issue artefact extraction from noisy conversations with minimal labelled data. We propose a combination of unsupervised and supervised models with minimal human intervention that leverages domain knowledge to predict artefacts for a small amount of conversation data and use that for fine-tuning an already pre-trained language model for artefact prediction on a large amount of conversation data. Experimental results on our dataset show that the proposed ensemble of the unsupervised and supervised models is better than using either one of them individually. We also present a deployment case study of the proposed artefact prediction.

Picking Pearl from Seabed: Extracting Artefacts from Noisy Issue Triaging Collaborative Conversations for Hybrid Cloud Services

Driver's anxiety about the remaining driving range of electric vehicles (EVs) has been quite improved by mounting a high-capacity battery pack. However, when EVs need to be charged, the drivers still feel uncomfortable if inaccurate range prediction is provided because the inaccuracy makes it difficult to decide when and where to charge EV. In this paper, to mitigate the EV range anxiety, a new machine learning (ML) method to enhance range prediction accuracy is proposed in a practical way. For continuously obtaining the recent traffic conditions ahead, input features indicating the near-future vehicle dynamics are connected to a long short-term memory (LSTM) network, which can consecutively utilize a relation of neighboring data, and then the output features of the LSTM network with another input features consisting of energy-related vehicle system states become another input layer for deep learning network (DNN). The proposed LSTM-DNN mixture model is trained by exploiting the driving data of about 160,000 km and the following test performance shows that the model retains the range prediction accuracy of 2 ~ 3 km in a time window of 40 min. The test results indicate that the LSTM-DNN range prediction model is able to make a far-sighted range prediction while considering varying map and traffic information to a destination.

A Machine Learning Method for EV Range Prediction with Updates on Route Information and Traffic Conditions

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a non-invasive imaging modality that is a cornerstone of diagnostic radiology. Clinical MRI scans capture a single image to highlight a single tissue property. The intensity difference between different regions of this image shows disease states that a radiologist can interpret. Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF) is a recently proposed novel MRI technique. MRF allows the capture of multiple MR images in a single scan. This enables clinicians to analyze multiple tissue properties, potentially increasing the sensitivity of diagnosis and also allowing for the diagnosis of novel diseases. However, it is more challenging to analyze MRF images, because MRF produces much larger and noisier data than MRI. In this paper, we show how AI techniques can help solve this problem. Using a hybrid search strategy combining simulated annealing with pattern search, we show it is possible to tractably reconstruct multiple tissue properties from a single MRF image. This is a key step towards the deployment of MRF for radiological diagnosis.

Inferring Multiple Tissue Properties from Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting Images

With increasing world population and expanded use of forests as cohabited regions, interactions and conflicts with wildlife are increasing, leading to large scale loss of  lives (animal and human) and livelihoods (economic). While community knowledge is valuable, forest officials and conservation organisations can greatly benefit from predictive analysis of human-wildlife conflict, leading to targeted interventions that can potentially help save lives and livelihoods. However, the problem of prediction is a complex socio-technical problem in the context of limited data in low-resource regions. 
    
Identifying the right features to make accurate predictions of conflicts at the required spatial granularity using a sparse conflict training dataset is the key challenge that we address in this paper. Specifically, we do an illustrative case study on human-wildlife conflicts in the Bramhapuri Forest Division in Chandrapur, Maharashtra, India. Most existing work has considered human wildlife conflicts in protected areas and to the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort at prediction of human-wildlife conflicts in unprotected areas and using those predictions for deploying interventions on the ground.

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