Canada

The open streets initiative &quot;opens&quot; streets to pedestrians and bicyclists by closing them to cars and trucks. The initiative, adopted by many cities across North America, increases community space in urban environments. But could open streets also make cities safer and less congested? We study this question by framing the choice of which streets to open as a reinforcement learning problem. In order to simulate the impact of opening streets, we first compare models for predicting vehicle collisions given network and temporal data. We find that a recurrent graph neural network, leveraging the graph structure and the short-term temporal dependence of the data, gives the best predictive performance. Then, with the ability to simulate collisions and traffic, we frame a reinforcement learning problem to find which streets to open. We compare the streets in the open streets initiative to those proposed by a Q-learning algorithm. We find that the streets proposed by the Q-learning algorithm have reliably better outcomes, while streets already selected by the open streets initiative have similar outcomes to randomly selected streets. We present our work as a step toward principally choosing which streets to open for safer and less congested cities. All our code and data are available in the supplementary material.

AAAI 2024

I Open at the Close: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Evaluation of Open Streets Initiatives | VIDEO

mobility driving & flight

optimization of spatio-temporal systems

routing

The open streets initiative "opens" streets to pedestrians and bicyclists by closing them to cars and trucks. The initiative, adopted by many cities across North America, increases community space in urban environments. But could open streets also make cities safer and less congested? We study this question by framing the choice of which streets to open as a reinforcement learning problem. In order to simulate the impact of opening streets, we first compare models for predicting vehicle collisions given network and temporal data. We find that a recurrent graph neural network, leveraging the graph structure and the short-term temporal dependence of the data, gives the best predictive performance. Then, with the ability to simulate collisions and traffic, we frame a reinforcement learning problem to find which streets to open. We compare the streets in the open streets initiative to those proposed by a Q-learning algorithm. We find that the streets proposed by the Q-learning algorithm have reliably better outcomes, while streets already selected by the open streets initiative have similar outcomes to randomly selected streets. We present our work as a step toward principally choosing which streets to open for safer and less congested cities. All our code and data are available in the supplementary material.

technical paper

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/)

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. 

Fairness is becoming a rising concern in machine learning. Recent research has discovered that state-of-the-art models are amplifying social bias by making biased prediction towards some population groups (characterized by sensitive features like race or gender). Such unfair prediction among groups renders trust issues and ethical concerns in machine learning, especially for sensitive fields such as employment, criminal justice, and trust score assessment. In this paper, we introduce a new framework to improve machine learning fairness. The goal of our model is to minimize the influence of sensitive feature from the perspectives of both data input and predictive model. To achieve this goal, we reformulate the data input by eliminating the sensitive information and strengthen model fairness by minimizing the marginal contribution of the sensitive feature. We propose to learn the sensitive-irrelevant input via sampling among features and design an adversarial network to minimize the dependence between the reformulated input and the sensitive information. Empirical results validate that our model achieves comparable or better results than related state-of-the-art methods w.r.t. both fairness metrics and prediction performance.

Adversarial Fairness Network

This paper studies long-term fair machine learning which aims to mitigate group disparity over the long term in sequential decision-making systems. To define long-term fairness, we leverage the temporal causal graph and use the 1-Wasserstein distance between the interventional distributions of different demographic groups at a sufficiently large time step as the quantitative metric. Then, we propose a three-phase learning framework where the decision model is trained on high-fidelity data generated by a deep generative model. We formulate the optimization problem as a performative risk minimization and adopt the repeated gradient descent algorithm for learning. The empirical evaluation shows the efficacy of the proposed method using both synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets.

Long-Term Fair Decision Making through Deep Generative Models | VIDEO

Social media sites have become a popular platform for individuals to seek and share health information. Despite the progress in natural language processing for social media mining, a gap remains in analyzing health-related texts on social discourse in the context of events. Event-driven analysis can offer insights into different facets of healthcare at an individual and collective level, including treatment options, misconceptions, knowledge gaps, etc. This paper presents a paradigm to characterize health-related information-seeking in social discourse through the lens of events. Events here are board categories defined with domain experts that capture the trajectory of the treatment/medication. To illustrate the value of this approach, we analyze Reddit posts regarding medications for Opioid Use Disorder (OUD), a critical global health concern. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to define event categories for characterizing information-seeking in OUD social discourse. Guided by domain experts, we develop TREAT-ISE, a novel multilabel treatment information-seeking event dataset to analyze online discourse on an event-based framework. This dataset contains Reddit posts on information-seeking events related to recovery from OUD, where each post is annotated based on the type of events. We also establish a strong performance benchmark (77.4% F1 score) for the task by employing several machine learning and deep learning classifiers. Finally, we thoroughly investigate the performance and errors of ChatGPT on this task, providing valuable insights into the LLM's capabilities and ongoing characterization efforts.

Characterizing Information Seeking Events in Health-Related Social Discourse | VIDEO

The aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic saw more severe outcomes for racial minority groups and economically-deprived communities. Such disparities can be explained by several factors, including unequal access to healthcare, as well as the inability of low income groups to reduce their mobility due to work or social obligations. Moreover, senior citizens were found to be more susceptible to severe symptoms, largely due to age-related health reasons. Adapting vaccine distribution strategies to consider a range of demographics is therefore essential to address these disparities. In this study, we propose a novel approach that utilizes influence maximization (IM) on mobility networks to develop vaccination strategies which incorporate demographic fairness. By considering factors such as race, social status, age, and associated risk factors, we aim to optimize vaccine distribution to achieve various fairness definitions for one or more protected attributes at a time. Through extensive experiments conducted on Covid-19 spread in three major metropolitan areas across the United States, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in reducing disease transmission and promoting fairness in vaccination distribution.

Promoting Fair Vaccination Strategies through Influence Maximization: A Case Study on COVID-19 Spread

Human trafficking (HT) for forced sexual exploitation, often described as modern-day slavery, is a pervasive problem that affects millions of people worldwide. Perpetrators of this crime post advertisements (ads) on behalf of their victims on adult service websites (ASW). These websites typically contain hundreds of thousands of ads including those posted by independent escorts, massage parlor agencies and spammers (fake ads). Detecting suspicious activity in these ads is difficult and developing data-driven methods is challenging due to the  hard-to-label, complex and sensitive nature of the data. 

In this paper, we propose T-Net, which unlike previous solutions, formulates this problem as weakly supervised classification. Since it takes several months to years to investigate a case and obtain a single definitive label, we design domain-specific signals or indicators that provide weak labels. T-Net also looks into connections between ads and models the problem as a graph learning task instead of classifying ads independently. We show that T-Net outperforms all baselines on a real-world dataset of ads by 7% average weighted F1 score. Given that this data contains personally identifiable information, we also present a realistic data generator and provide the first publicly available dataset in this domain which may be leveraged by the wider research community.

T-NET: Weakly Supervised Graph Learning for Combatting Human Trafficking

Water distribution systems (WDS) are an integral part of critical infrastructure which is pivotal to urban development. As 70% of the world's population will likely live in urban environments in 2050, efficient simulation and planning tools for WDS play a crucial role in reaching UN's sustainable developmental goal (SDG) 6 - "Clean water and sanitation for all". In this realm, we propose a novel and efficient machine learning emulator, more precisely, a physics-informed deep learning (DL) model, for hydraulic state estimation in WDS. Using a recursive approach, our model only needs a few graph convolutional neural network (GCN) layers and employs an innovative algorithm based on message passing. Unlike conventional machine learning tasks, the model uses hydraulic principles to infer two additional hydraulic state features in the process of reconstructing the available ground truth feature in an unsupervised manner. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first DL approach to emulate the popular hydraulic simulator EPANET, utilizing no additional information. Like most DL models and unlike the hydraulic simulator, our model demonstrates vastly faster emulation times that do not increase drastically with the size of the WDS. Moreover, we achieve high accuracy on the ground truth and very similar results compared to the hydraulic simulator as demonstrated through experiments on five real-world WDS datasets.

Physics-Informed Graph Neural Networks for Water Distribution Systems

After a person is arrested and charged with a crime, they may be released on bail and required to participate in a community supervision program while awaiting trial. These 'pre-trial programs' are common throughout the United States, but very little research has demonstrated their effectiveness. Researchers have emphasized the need for more rigorous program evaluation methods, which we introduce in this article. We describe a program evaluation pipeline that uses recent interpretable machine learning techniques for observational causal inference, and demonstrate these techniques in a study of a pre-trial program in Durham, North Carolina. Our findings show no evidence that the program either significantly increased or decreased the probability of new criminal charges. If these findings replicate, the criminal-legal system needs to either improve pre-trial programs or consider alternatives to them. The simplest option is to release low-risk individuals back into the community without subjecting them to any restrictions or conditions. Another option is to assign individuals to pre-trial programs that incentivize pro-social behavior.  We believe that the techniques introduced here can provide researchers the rigorous tools they need to evaluate these programs.

Evaluating Pre-trial Programs Using Interpretable Machine Learning Matching Algorithms for Causal Inference

Street-level bureaucrats interact directly with people on behalf of government agencies to perform a wide range of functions, including, for example, administering social services and policing. A key feature of street-level bureaucracy is that the civil servants, while tasked with implementing agency policy, are also granted significant discretion in how they choose to apply that policy in individual cases. Using that discretion could be beneficial, as it allows for exceptions to policies based on human interactions and evaluations, but it could also allow biases and inequities to seep into important domains of societal resource allocation. In this paper, we use machine learning techniques to understand street-level bureaucrats' behavior. We leverage a rich dataset that combines demographic and other information on households with information on which homelessness interventions they were assigned during a period when assignments were not formulaic. We find that  caseworker decisions in this time are highly predictable overall, and some, but not all of this predictivity can be captured by simple decision rules. We theorize that the decisions not captured by the simple decision rules can be considered applications of caseworker discretion. These discretionary decisions are far from random in both the characteristics of such households and in terms of the outcomes of the decisions. Caseworkers typically only apply discretion to households that would be considered less vulnerable. When they do apply discretion to assign households to more intensive interventions, the marginal benefits to those households are significantly higher than would be expected if the households were chosen at random; there is no similar reduction in marginal benefit to households that are discretionarily allocated less intensive interventions, suggesting that caseworkers are using their knowledge and experience to improve outcomes for households experiencing homelessness.

Discretionary Trees: Understanding Street-Level Bureaucracy via Machine Learning

Public libraries are an essential social resource. We ask: are urban library systems providing equitable service to all residents, in terms of the books they have access to and check out? If not, what causes disparities: heterogeneous book collections, resident behavior and access, and/or operational policies? Existing methods leverage only system-level outcome data (such as overall checkouts per branch), and so cannot distinguish between these factors. As a result, it is difficult to use their results to guide interventions to increase equitable access. We propose a Bayesian framework to characterize book checkout behavior across multiple branches of a library system, learning heterogeneous book popularity, overall branch demand, and usage of the online hold system, while controlling for book availability. In collaboration with the New York Public Library, we apply our framework to granular data consisting of over 400,000 checkouts during 2022, and find substantial spatial and socio-economic disparities. We show that these disparities are largely driven by disparate use of the online holds system, which allows library patrons to receive books from any other branch. This system thus leads to a large outflow of popular books from branches in lower income neighborhoods to those in high income ones. Finally, we illustrate the use of our model and insights to quantify the impact of potential interventions, such as changing how books are internally routed between branches to fulfill hold requests.

Identifying and Addressing Disparities in Public Libraries with Bayesian Latent Variable Modeling

Decision-makers often observe the occurrence of events through a reporting process. City governments, for example, rely on resident reports to find and then resolve urban infrastructural problems such as fallen street trees, flooded basements, or rat infestations. Without additional assumptions, there is no way to distinguish events that occur but are not reported from events that truly did not occur--a fundamental problem in settings with positive-unlabeled data. Because disparities in reporting rates correlate with resident demographics, addressing incidents only on the basis of reports leads to systematic neglect in neighborhoods that are less likely to report events. We show how to overcome this challenge by leveraging the fact that events are spatially correlated. Our framework uses a Bayesian spatial latent variable model to infer event occurrence probabilities and applies it to storm-induced flooding reports in New York City, further pooling results across multiple storms. We show that a model accounting for under-reporting and spatial correlation predicts future reports more accurately than other models, and further induces a more equitable set of inspections: its allocations better reflect the population and provide equitable service to non-white, less traditionally educated, and lower-income residents. This finding reflects heterogeneous reporting behavior learned by the model: reporting rates are higher in Census tracts with higher populations, proportions of white residents, and proportions of owner-occupied households. Our work lays the groundwork for more equitable proactive government services, even with disparate reporting behavior.

I Open at the Close: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Evaluation of Open Streets Initiatives | VIDEO

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