Canada

Rental assistance programs provide individuals with financial assistance to prevent housing instabilities caused by evictions and avert homelessness. Since these programs operate under resource constraints, they must decide who to prioritize. Typically, funding is distributed by a reactive allocation process that does not systematically consider risk of future homelessness. We partnered with Anonymous County (PA) to explore a proactive and preventative allocation approach that prioritizes individuals facing eviction based on their risk of future homelessness. Our ML models, trained on state and county administrative data accurately identify at-risk individuals, outperforming simpler prioritization approaches by at least 20% while meeting our equity and fairness goals across race and gender. Furthermore, our approach would reach 28% of individuals who are overlooked by the current process and end up homeless. Beyond improvements to the rental assistance program in Anonymous County, this study can inform the development of evidence-based decision support tools in similar contexts, including lessons about data needs, model design, evaluation, and field validation.

AAAI 2024

Preventing Eviction-Caused Homelessness through ML-Informed Distribution of Rental Assistance

ml applications

bias and fairness

social good

Join us for CogSci2022! Our 44th Annual Conference will be centered around the theme of diversity, with an accompanying range of keynotes and invited speakers who themselves highlight the diversity of our field. Our three symposia are Cognition across Diverse Populations, Cognition within Diverse Societies, and Global Challenges for Cognitive Science. The conference is being offered in a fully hybrid environment for onsite and online attendees.
 
 [**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Cogsci-2022-PAAG-Detailed-July-12final-1.pdf)
 [**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/DeArmond-CogSci2022-program-v113-final.pdf)

This conference requires a registration to attend. Please use the link below to secure your ticket. The website will be available to all registered attendees on July 25th. 

[Register to Attend](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/registration/)

Registration Is Required

CogSci 2022

The 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society highlighted research on the theme Cognitive Diversity in addition to the full breadth and diversity of research topics offered by the society’s membership. 





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.

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. 

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow natural language instructions with human-level fluency suggests many opportunities in healthcare to reduce administrative burden and improve quality of care. However, evaluating LLMs on realistic text generation tasks for healthcare remains challenging. Existing question answering datasets for electronic health record (EHR) data fail to capture the complexity of information needs and documentation burdens experienced by clinicians. To address these challenges, we introduce MedAlign, a benchmark dataset of 983 natural language instructions for EHR data. MedAlign is curated by 15 clinicians (7 specialities), includes clinician-written reference responses for 303 instructions, and provides 276 longitudinal EHRs for grounding instruction-response pairs. We used MedAlign to evaluate 6 general domain LLMs, having clinicians rank the accuracy and quality of each LLM response. We found high error rates, ranging from 35% (GPT-4) to 68% (MPT-7B-Instruct), and 8.3% drop in accuracy moving from 32k to 2k context lengths for GPT-4. Finally, we report correlations between clinician rankings and automated natural language generation metrics as a way to rank LLMs without human review. We make MedAlign available under a research data use agreement to enable LLM evaluations on tasks aligned with clinician needs and preferences.

MedAlign: A Clinician-Generated Dataset for Instruction Following with Electronic Medical Records

Fingerprint authentication is a popular security mechanism for smartphones and laptops. However, its adoption in web and cloud environments has been limited due to privacy concerns over storing and processing biometric data on servers. This paper introduces Blind-Touch, a novel machine learning-based fingerprint authentication system that leverages homomorphic encryption to address these privacy concerns. Homomorphic encryption allows for computations on encrypted data without decrypting it. Therefore, Blind-Touch can keep fingerprint data encrypted on the server while performing machine learning operations. Blind-Touch integrates three techniques to address the computational challenges of using homomorphic encryption for machine learning: (1) A distributed machine learning architecture that divides inference tasks between the client and server, thereby reducing encrypted computations on the server; (2) A data compression method that reduces client-server communication costs; and (3) A cluster architecture that improves scalability with the number of registered users. Blind-Touch achieves high accuracy on two benchmark fingerprint datasets, with a 93.6% F1-score for the PolyU dataset and a 98.2% F1-score for the SOKOTO dataset. Moreover, Blind-Touch can match a fingerprint among 5,000 in about 0.65 seconds. With its privacy-focused design, high accuracy, and efficiency, Blind-Touch is a promising alternative to conventional fingerprint authentication for web and cloud applications.

Blind-Touch: Homomorphic Encryption-Based Distributed Neural Network Inference for Privacy-Preserving Fingerprint Authentication | VIDEO

With the widespread adoption of IoT, wearable devices, and sensors, time series data from human subjects are significantly increasing in the healthcare domain. Due to the laborious nature of manual annotation in time series data and the requirement for human experts, self-supervised learning methods are attempted to alleviate the limited label situations. While existing self-supervised methods have been successful to achieve comparable performance to the fully supervised methods, there are still some limitations that need to be addressed, considering the nature of time series data from human subjects: In real-world clinical settings, data labels (e.g., sleep stages) are usually annotated by subject-level, and there is a substantial variation in patterns between subjects. Thus, a model should be designed to deal with not only the label scarcity but also subject-wise nature of data to ensure high performance in real-world scenarios. To mitigate these issues, we propose a novel self-supervised learning framework for human subject time series data: Subject-Aware Time Series Clustering (SA-TSC). In the unsupervised representation learning phase, SA-TSC adopts a subject-wise learning strategy rather than instance-wise learning which randomly samples data instances from different subjects within the batch during training. Specifically, we generate subject-graphs with our graph construction method based on Gumbel-Softmax and perform graph spectral clustering on each subject-graph. In addition, we utilize graph neural networks to capture dependencies between channels and design our own graph learning module motivated from self-supervised loss. Experimental results show the outstanding performance of our SA-TSC with the limited & subject-wise label setting, leading to its high applicability to the healthcare industry. The code is available at: https://github.com/DILAB-HYU/SA-TSC

Self-Supervised Framework Based on Subject-Wise Clustering for Human Subject Time Series Data

Hate speech (HS) is a growing concern in many parts of
the world, including India, where it has led to numerous instances of violence and discrimination. The development of
effective counter-narratives (CNs) is a critical step in combating hate speech, but there is a lack of research in this
area, especially in non-English languages. In this paper, we
introduce a new dataset, IndicCONAN, of counter-narratives
against hate speech in Hindi and Indian English. We propose a scalable human-in-the-loop approach for generating counter-narratives by an auto-regressive language model
through machine generation - human correction cycle, where
the model uses augmented data from previous cycles to generate new training samples. These newly generated samples
are then reviewed and edited by annotators, leading to further
model refnement. The dataset consists of over 2,500 exam- ˜
ples of counter-narratives each in both English and Hindi corresponding to various hate speeches in the Indian context. We
also present a framework for generating CNs conditioned on
specifc CN type with a mean perplexity of 3.85 for English
and 3.70 for Hindi, a mean toxicity score of 0.04 for English
and 0.06 for Hindi, and a mean diversity of 0.08 for English
and 0.14 for Hindi. Our dataset and framework provide valuable resources for researchers and practitioners working to
combat hate speech in the Indian context.

IndicCONAN: A Multilingual Dataset for Combating Hate Speech in Indian Context

Diffusion models have shown their effectiveness in generation tasks by well-approximating the underlying probability distribution. However, diffusion models are known to suffer from an amplified inherent bias from the training data in terms of fairness. While the sampling process of diffusion models can be controlled by conditional guidance, previous works have attempted to find empirical guidance to achieve quantitative fairness. 
To address this limitation, we propose a fairness-aware sampling method called \textit{attribute switching} mechanism for diffusion models. Without additional training, the proposed sampling can obfuscate sensitive attributes in generated data without relying on classifiers.
We mathematically prove and experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on two key aspects: (i) the generation of fair data and (ii) the preservation of the utility of the generated data.

Fair Sampling in Diffusion Models through Switching Mechanism

The rise of AI-based and autonomous systems is raising concerns and apprehension due to potential negative repercussions arising from their behavior or decisions. These systems must be designed to comply with the human contexts in which they will operate. To this extent, Townsend et al. (2022) introduce the concept of SLEEC (social, legal, ethical, empathetic, or cultural) rules that aim to facilitate the formulation, verification, and enforcement of the rules AI-based and autonomous systems should obey. They lay out a methodology to elicit them and to let philosophers, lawyers, domain experts, and others to formulate them in natural language. To enable their effective use in AI systems, it is necessary to translate these rules systematically into a formal language that supports automated reasoning. In this study, we first conduct a linguistic analysis of the SLEEC rules pattern, which justifies the translation of SLEEC rules into classical logic. Then we investigate the computational complexity of reasoning about SLEEC rules and show how logical programming frameworks can be employed to implement SLEEC rules in practical scenarios. the result is a readily applicable strategy for implementing AI systems that conform to norms expressed as SLEEC rules.

Social, Legal, Ethical, Empathetic, and Cultural Rules: Compilation and Reasoning

In the digital age, cybercrimes, particularly cyber harassment, have become pressing issues, targeting vulnerable individuals like children, teenagers, and women. Understanding the experiences and needs of the victims is crucial for effective support and intervention. Online conversations between victims and virtual harassment counselors (chatbots) offer valuable insights into cyber harassment manifestations (CHMs) and determinants (CHDs). However, the distinction between CHMs and CHDs remains unclear. This research is the first to introduce concrete definitions for CHMs and CHDs, investigating their distinction through automated methods to enable efficient cyber-harassment dialogue comprehension. We present a novel dataset, Cyber-MaD that contains Cyber harassment dialogues manually annotated with Manifestations and Determinants. Additionally, we design an Emotion-informed Contextual Dual Attention Convolution Transformer (EmoConDuCT) framework to extract CHMs and CHDs from cyber harassment dialogues. The framework primarily: a). exploits inherent emotion features in the input via adjective-noun pairs modeled through an autoencoder, b). utilizes a novel Contextual Dual Attention Convolution Transformer to learn contextual information, and, c). employs a demarcation module that leverages task-specific emotional knowledge and a discriminator loss function to differentiate manifestations and determinants. EmoConDuCT outperforms the state-of-the-art systems on the Cyber-MaD corpus, showcasing its potential in the extraction of CHMs and CHDs. Furthermore, its robustness is demonstrated on the emotion cause extraction task using the CARES_CEASE-v2.0 dataset of suicide notes, confirming its efficacy in diverse cause extraction objectives. This research sheds light on cyber harassment comprehension, paving the way for improved support and intervention strategies.

Benchmarking Cyber Harassment Dialogue Comprehension through Emotion-Informed Manifestations-Determinants Demarcation

Multi-label classification is an arduous problem given the complication in label correlation. Whilst sharing a common goal with contrastive learning in utilizing correlations for representation learning, how to better leverage label information remains challenging. 
Previous endeavors include extracting label-level presentations or mapping labels to an embedding space, overlooking the correlation between multiple labels. 
It exhibits a great ambiguity in determining positive samples with different extent of label overlap between samples and integrating such relations in loss functions. 
In our work, we propose Multi-Label Supervised Contrastive learning (MulSupCon) with a novel contrastive loss function to adjust weights based on how much overlap one sample shares with the anchor. 
By analyzing gradients, we explain why our method performs better under multi-label circumstances. 
To evaluate, we conduct direct classification and transfer learning on several multi-label datasets, including widely-used image datasets such as MS-COCO and NUS-WIDE.
Validation indicates that our method outperforms the traditional multi-label classification method and shows a competitive performance when comparing to other existing approaches.

Multi-Label Supervised Contrastive Learning

Despite meaningful progress over the past few decades, advances in the self-driving industry have plateaued. Traditional approaches are incredibly labor- and capital-intensive, relying on hand-engineered systems and millions of real-world testing miles. Generative AI offers the much-needed new path to unlocking autonomous vehicles at scale and changing the way these systems work. In this lecture, Waabi CEO and Founder Raquel Urtasun will discuss how leveraging generative AI will evolve the way autonomous driving systems are developed and trained, resulting in faster, safer, and more scalable deployment of transformative self-driving technology worldwide.

Accelerating AVs with the Next Generation of Generative AI

The capabilities, autonomy, and efficiency of software and physical agents have increased remarkably in recent times. However, the rapid advancement of these intelligent systems presents significant challenges for humans when they need to interact, coordinate, or collaborate with them. Intelligent advising agents providing guidance to people in such situations can enhance their decision-making and alleviate cognitive load. Alongside identifying valuable advice, these assisting agents must also deliver explanations to convince humans that the provided advice is advantageous and trustworthy. In the presentation, we will highlight the challenges that emerge when humans need to collaborate with drones, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent systems for negotiation and mediation. Additionally, we will introduce several approaches for developing assisting agents aimed at enhancing human performance and satisfaction.

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