United States

More than US$ 27 billion is estimated to have been paid-out in farm support in USA alone since 1991 in response to climate change impacts on agriculture, with costs likely continuing to rise. With the wider adoption of precision agriculture - an agriculture management strategy that involves gathering, processing and analyzing temporal, spatial and individual data - in both developed and developing countries, there is an increasing opportunity to harness accumulating, shareable, big data using artificial intelligence (AI) methods, collected from weather stations, field sensor networks, Internet-of-Things devices, unmanned aerial vehicles, and earth observational satellites. This requires smart algorithms tailored to agricultural data types, integrated into digital solutions that are viable, flexible, and scalable for wide deployment for a wide variety of agricultural users and decision-makers. We discuss a novel AI approach that addresses the real-world problem of developing a viable solution for reliably, timely, and cost-effectively forecasting crop status across large agricultural regions using Earth observational information in near-real-time. Our approach is based on extracting time-conditioned topological features which characterize complex spatio-temporal dependencies between crop production regions and integrating such topological signatures into Long Short Term Memory (LSTM). We discuss utility and limitations of the resulting zigzag persistence-based LSTM (ZZTop-LSTM) as a new tool for developing more informed crop insurance rate-making and accurate tracking of changing risk exposures and vulnerabilities within insurance risk areas.

AAAI 2022

Learning Space-Time Crop Yield Patterns with Zigzag Persistence-Based LSTM: Toward More Reliable Digital Agriculture Insurance

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-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
AAAI is providing you with a conference planner, which you can use to help organize your itinerary of activities. This includes talks to attend in person, talks to attend remotely, breaks with colleagues and your site seeing activities. To access this conference planner, please go to [https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io](https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io).

In order to access this site, you need to register. If you haven't already, please register [here](https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-23/registration/).


AAAI 2023

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.

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. 

Formal response organizations perform rapid damage assessments after natural and human-induced disasters to measure the extent of damage to infrastructures such as roads, bridges, and buildings. This time-critical task, when performed using traditional approaches such as experts surveying the disaster areas, poses serious challenges and delays response. This paper presents an AI-based system that leverages citizen science to collect damage images reported on social media and perform rapid damage assessment in real-time. Several image processing models in the system tackle non-trivial challenges posed by social media as a data source, such as high-volume of redundant and irrelevant content. The system determines the severity of damage using a state-of-the-art computer vision model. Together with a response organization in the US, we deployed the system to identify damage reports during a major real-world disaster. We observe that almost 42% of the images are unique, 28% relevant, and more importantly, only 10% of them contain either mild or severe damage. Experts from our partner organization provided feedback on the system's mistakes, which we used to perform additional experiments to retrain the models. Consequently, the retrained models based on expert feedback on the target domain data helped us achieve significant performance improvements.

AI for Disaster Rapid Damage Assessment from Microblogs

In this paper, we address a crucial problem in fashion e-commerce (with respect to customer experience, as well as revenue): color variants identification, i.e., identifying fashion products that match exactly in their design (or style), but only to differ in their color. We propose a generic framework, that leverages deep visual Representation Learning at its heart, to address this problem for our fashion e-commerce platform. Our framework could be trained with supervisory signals in the form of triplets, that are obtained manually. However, it is infeasible to obtain manual annotations for the entire huge collection of data usually present in fashion e-commerce platforms, such as ours, while capturing all the difficult corner cases. But, to our rescue, interestingly we observed that this crucial problem in fashion e-commerce could also be solved by simple color jitter based image augmentation, that recently became widely popular in the contrastive Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) literature, that seeks to learn visual representations without using manual labels. This naturally led to a question in our mind: Could we leverage SSL in our use-case, and still obtain comparable performance to our supervised framework? The answer is, Yes! because, color variant fashion objects are nothing but manifestations of a style, in different colors, and a model trained to be invariant to the color (with, or without supervision), should be able to recognize this! This is what the paper further demonstrates, both qualitatively, and quantitatively, while evaluating a couple of state-of-the-art SSL techniques, and also proposing a novel method.

A Tale of Color Variants: Representation and Self-Supervised Learning in Fashion E-commerce

The deployment of vaccines across the US provides significant defense against serious illness and death from COVID-19.  Over 70% of vaccine-eligible Americans are at least partially vaccinated, but there are pockets of the population that are under-vaccinated, such as in rural areas and some demographic groups (e.g. age, race, ethnicity). These pockets are extremely susceptible to the Delta variant, exacerbating the healthcare crisis and increasing the risk of new variants. In this paper, we describe a data-driven model that provides real-time support to Virginia public health officials by recommending mobile vaccination site placement in order to target under-vaccinated populations.  Our strategy uses fine-grained mobility data, along with US Census and vaccination uptake data, to identify locations that are most likely to be visited by unvaccinated individuals. We further extend our model to choose locations that maximize vaccine uptake among hesitant groups. We show that the top recommended sites vary substantially across some demographics, demonstrating the value of developing customized recommendation models that integrate fine-grained, heterogeneous data sources. We also validate our recommendations by analyzing the success rates of deployed vaccine sites, and show that sites placed closer to our recommended areas administered higher numbers of doses. Our model is the first of its kind to consider evolving mobility patterns in real-time for suggesting placement strategies customized for different targeted demographic groups.

Data-Driven Real-Time Strategic Placement of Mobile Vaccine Distribution Sites

In 2020, the White House released the â€œCall to Action to the Tech Community on New Machine Readable COVID-19 Dataset,â€ wherein artificial intelligence experts are asked to collect data and develop text mining techniques that can help the science community answer high-priority scientific questions related to COVID-19. The Allen Institute for AI and collaborators announced the availability of a rapidly growing open dataset of publications, the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19). As the pace of research accelerates, biomedical scientists struggle to stay current. To expedite their investigations, scientists leverage hypothesis generation systems, which can automatically inspect published papers to discover novel implicit connections. We present automated general purpose hypothesis generation systems AGATHA-C and AGATHA-GP for COVID-19 research. The systems are based on the graph mining and transformer models. The systems are massively validated using retrospective information rediscovery and proactive analysis involving human-in-the-loop expert analysis. Both systems achieve high-quality predictions across domains in fast computational time and are released to the broad scientific community to accelerate biomedical research. In addition, by performing the domain expert curated study, we show that the systems are able to discover ongoing research findings such as the relationship between COVID-19 and oxytocin hormone.
All code, details, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/IlyaTyagin/AGATHA-C-GP.

Accelerating COVID-19 Research with Graph Mining and Transformer-Based Learning

As artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms become  increasingly  prevalent  in  society,  multiple  stakeholders are calling for these algorithms to provide explanations. At  the  same  time,  these  stakeholders,  whether  they  be  affected  citizens,  government  regulators,  domain  experts,  or system developers, have different explanation needs. To address these needs, in 2019, we created AI Explainability 360, an open source software toolkit featuring ten  diverse  and  state-of-the-art  explainability  methods  and two  evaluation  metrics.  This  paper  examines  the  impact  of the toolkit with several case studies, statistics, and community feedback. The different ways in which users have experienced AI Explainability 360 have resulted in multiple types of impact and improvements in multiple metrics, highlighted by the adoption of the toolkit by the independent LF AI & Data Foundation. The paper also describes the flexible design of the toolkit, examples of its use, and the significant educational material and documentation available to its users.

AI Explainability 360: Impact and Design

Pattern mining is an essential part of knowledge discovery and data analytics. It is a powerful paradigm, especially when combined with constraint reasoning. In this paper, we present Seq2Pat, a constraint-based sequential pattern mining tool with a high-level declarative user interface. The library finds patterns that frequently occur in large sequence databases subject to constraints. We highlight key benefits that are desirable, especially in industrial settings where scalability, explainability, rapid experimentation, reusability, and reproducibility are of great interest. We then showcase an automated feature extraction process powered by Seq2Pat to discover high-level insights and boost downstream machine learning models for customer intent prediction.

Seq2Pat: Sequence-to-Pattern Generation for Constraint-Based Sequential Pattern Mining

Interactive AI (IAI) systems are increasingly popular as the human-centered AI design paradigm is gaining strong traction. However, evaluating IAI systems, a key step in building such systems, is particularly challenging, as their output highly depends on the performed user actions. Developers often have to rely on limited and mostly qualitative data from ad-hoc user testing to assess and improve their systems. In this paper, we present InteractEva; a systematic evaluation framework for IAI systems. We also describe how we have applied InteractEva to evaluate a commercial IAI system, leading to both quality improvements and better data-driven design decisions.

A Simulation-Based Evaluation Framework for Interactive AI Systems and Its Application

Vision transformers (ViTs) have been an alternative design paradigm to convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, the training of ViTs is much harder than CNNs, as it is sensitive to the training parameters, such as learning rate, optimizer and warmup epoch. The reasons for training difficulty are empirically analysed in the paper Early Convolutions Help Transformers See Better, and the authors conjecture that the issue lies with the patchify-stem of ViT models. In this paper, we further investigate this problem and extend the above conclusion: only early convolutions do not help for stable training, but the scaled ReLU operation in the convolutional stem (conv-stem) matters. We verify, both theoretically and empirically, that scaled ReLU in conv-stem not only improves training stabilization, but also increases the diversity of patch tokens, thus boosting peak performance with a large margin via adding few parameters and flops. In addition, extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that previous ViTs are far from being well trained, further showing that ViTs have great potential to be a better substitute of CNNs.

Scaled ReLU Matters for Training Vision Transformers

We consider an application of combinatorial search to the optimization of topologies in series-parallel networks. We propose a recursive search over the space of decomposition trees, in which partial solutions are obtained by exploring k-way partitionings of expandable nodes. We present two complementary pruning techniques that bound the value of intermediate solutions from above and below, applying monotonic operations to the contents of unresolved leaves. We also develop a means to exploit the convexity of our objective function, so as to prevent the redundant recomputation of subcircuit configurations. Finally, we evaluate our approach on a parameterized benchmark suite of electrical circuits, demonstrating over an order of magnitude improvement in performance as compared to a baseline implementation.

Search Strategies for Topological Network Optimization

Recent non-local self-attention methods have proven to be effective in capturing long-range dependencies for semantic segmentation. These methods usually form a similarity map of R^(CxC) (by compressing spatial dimensions) or R^(HWxHW) (by compressing channels) to describe the feature relations along either channel or spatial dimensions, where C is the number of channels, H and W are the spatial dimensions of the input feature map. However, such practices tend to condense feature dependencies along the other dimensions, hence causing attention missing, which might lead to inferior results for small/thin categories or inconsistent segmentation inside large objects. To address this problem, we propose a new approach, namely Fully Attentional Network (FLANet), to encode both spatial and channel attentions in a single similarity map while maintaining high computational efficiency. Specifically, for each channel map, our FLANet can harvest feature responses from all other channel maps, and the associated spatial positions as well, through a novel fully attentional module. Our new method has achieved state-of-the-art performance on three challenging semantic segmentation datasets, i.e., 83.6%, 46.99%, and 88.5% on the Cityscapes test set, the ADE20K validation set, and the PASCAL VOC test set, respectively.

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