Papers

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.

poster session 1 @ red 6, poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 1, poster session 9

Implementations of artificial intelligence (AI) based on deep learning (DL) have proven to be highly successful in many domains, from biomedical imaging to natural language processing, but are still rarely applied in the space industry, particularly for onboard learning of planetary surfaces. In this project, we discuss the utility and limitations of DL, enhanced with topological footprints of the sensed objects, for multi-class classification of planetary surface patterns, in conjunction with tactile and embedded sensing in rover exploratory missions. We consider a Topological Convolutional Network (TCN) model with a persistence-based attention mechanism for supervised classification of various landforms. We study TCN's performance on the Barefoot surface pattern dataset, a novel surface pressure dataset from a prototype tactile rover wheel, known as the Barefoot Rover tactile wheel. Multi-class pattern recognition in the Barefoot data has neither been ever tackled before with DL nor assessed with topological methods. We provide insights into advantages and restrictions of topological DL as the early-stage concept for onboard learning and planetary exploration.

poster session 1 @ red 6, poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 1, poster session 9

In 2020, the White House released the “Call to Action to the Tech Community on New Machine Readable COVID-19 Dataset,” 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.

poster session 4 @ red 6, poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 4, poster session 9

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.

poster session 1 @ red 6, poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 1, poster session 9

Wind energy is an important source of renewable and sustainable energy and therefore an elementary component of any future energy supply. However, the operation of large wind farms places high demands on reliability and is often impacted by high maintenance and repair costs in the event of a failure. A frequency converter is one of the most important components of each wind turbine, which ensures that the frequency of the generated energy synchronises with the grid frequency and thus enables the flow of energy into the power grid. The detection of anomalies in these devices is complex due to the high frequency and multidimensionality of different sensor information from the energy control units and requires fault patterns to be discovered and detected in large time series. In this paper, we show how state-of-the-art self-supervised-learning techniques, namely LSTM autoencoders, can be successfully applied to real-world data. We describe the extensions we have made to deal with the often very noisy sensors and describe the construction of the training data set. The trained system was first tested and evaluated on synthetic data and subsequently on a large real-world data set. In both cases, it was shown that outliers can be reliably identified using our presented approach.

poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 7 @ red 6, poster session 9, poster session 7

Finding or tracking the location of an object accurately is a crucial problem in defense applications, robotics and computer vision. Radars fall into the spectrum of high-end defense sensors or systems upon which the security and surveillance of the entire world depends. There has been a lot of focus on the topic of Multi Sensor Tracking in recent years, with radars as the sensors. The Indian Air Force uses a Multi Sensor Tracking (MST) system to detect flights pan India, developed and supported by BEL(Bharat Electronics Limited), a defense agency we are working with. In this paper, we describe our Machine Learning approach, which is built on top of the existing system, the Air force uses. For purposes of this work, we trained our models on about 13 million anonymized real Multi Sensor tracking data points provided by radars performing tracking activity across the Indian air space. The approach has shown an increase in the accuracy of tracking by 5 percent from 91 to 96. The model and the corresponding code were transitioned to BEL, which has been tested in their simulation environment with a plan to take forward for ground testing. Our approach comprises of 3 steps: (a) We train a Neural Network model and a CatBoost model and ensemble them using a Logistic Regression model to predict one type of error, namely Splitting error, which can help to improve the accuracy of tracking. (b) We again train a Neural Network model and a CatBoost model and ensemble them using a different Logistic Regression model to predict the second type of error, namely Merging error, which can further improve the accuracy of tracking. (c) We use cosine similarity to find the nearest neighbour and correct the data points, predicted to have Splitting/Merging errors, by predicting the original global track of these data points.

poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 7 @ red 6, poster session 9, poster session 7

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.

poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 7 @ red 6, poster session 9, poster session 7

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.

poster session 1 @ red 6, poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 1, poster session 9

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.

poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 7 @ red 6, poster session 9, poster session 7

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.

poster session 4 @ red 6, poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 4, poster session 9

Predictive maintenance systems have the potential to significantly reduce costs for maintaining aircraft fleets as well as provide improved safety by detecting maintenance issues before they come severe. However, the development of such systems has been limited due to a lack of publicly labeled multivariate time series (MTS) sensor data. MTS classification has advanced greatly over the past decade, but there is a lack of sufficiently challenging benchmarks for new methods. This work introduces the NGAFID Maintenance Classification (NGAFID-MC) dataset as a novel benchmark in terms of difficulty, number of samples, and sequence length. NGAFID-MC consists of over 7,500 labeled flights, representing over 11,500 hours of per second flight data recorder readings of 23 sensor parameters. Using this benchmark, we demonstrate that Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) methods are not well suited for capturing temporally distant relationships and propose a new architecture called Convolutional Multiheaded Self Attention (Conv-MHSA) that achieves greater classification performance at greater computational efficiency. We also demonstrate that image inspired augmentations of cutout, mixup, and cutmix, can be used to reduce overfitting and improve generalization in MTS classification. Our best trained models have been incorporated back into the NGAFID to allow users to potentially detect flights that require maintenance as well as provide feedback to further expand and refine the NGAFID-MC dataset.

poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 7 @ red 6, poster session 9, poster session 7

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.

poster session 4 @ red 6, poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 4, poster session 9

The CO2 capture efficiency in solvent-based carbon capture systems (CCSs) critically depends on the gas-solvent interfacial area (IA), making maximization of IA a foundational challenge in CCS design. While the IA associated with a particular CCS design can be estimated via a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation, using CFD to derive the IAs associated with numerous CCS designs is prohibitively costly. Fortunately, previous works such as Deep Fluids (DF) (Kim et al., 2019) show that large simulation speedups are achievable by replacing CFD simulators with neural network (NN) surrogates that faithfully mimic the CFD simulation process. This raises the possibility of a fast, accurate replacement for a CFD simulator and therefore efficient approximation of the IAs required by CCS design optimization. Thus, here, we build on the DF approach to develop surrogates that can successfully be applied to our complex carbon-capture CFD simulations. Our optimized DF-style surrogates produce large speedups (4000x) while obtaining IA relative errors as low as 4% on unseen CCS configurations that lie within the range of training configurations. This hints at the promise of NN surrogates for our CCS design optimization problem. Nonetheless, DF has inherent limitations with respect to CCS design (e.g., limited transferability of trained models to new CCS packings). We conclude with ideas to address these challenges.

poster session 1 @ red 6, poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 1, poster session 9

The cost of developing new drugs is estimated at billions of dollars per year. Identification of new molecules for drugs involves scanning existing bio-medical literature for relevant information. As the potential drug molecule is novel, retrieval of relevant information using a simple direct search is less likely to be productive. Identifying relevant papers is therefore a more complex and challenging task, which requires searching for information on molecules with similar characteristics to the novel drug. In this paper, we present the novel task of ranking documents based on novel molecule queries. Given a chemical molecular structure, we wish to rank medical papers that will contribute to a researcher's understanding of the novel molecule drug potential. We present a set of ranking algorithms and molecular embeddings to address the task. An extensive evaluation of the algorithms is performed over the molecular embeddings, studying their performance on a benchmark retrieval corpus, which we share with the community. Additionally, we introduce a heterogeneous edge-labeled graph embedding approach to address the molecule ranking task. Our evaluation shows that the proposed embedding model can significantly improve molecule ranking methods. The system is currently deployed in a targeted drug delivery and personalized medicine research laboratory.

poster session 4 @ red 6, poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 4, poster session 9

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.

poster session 4 @ red 6, poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 4, poster session 9

We approach the task of network congestion control in datacenters using Reinforcement Learning (RL). Successful congestion control algorithms can dramatically improve latency and overall network throughput. Until today, no such learning-based algorithms have shown practical potential in this domain. Evidently, the most popular recent deployments rely on rule-based heuristics that are tested on a predetermined set of benchmarks. Consequently, these heuristics do not generalize well to newly-seen scenarios. Contrarily, we devise an RL-based algorithm with the aim of generalizing to different configurations of real-world datacenter networks. We overcome challenges such as partial-observability, non-stationarity, and multi-objectiveness. We further propose a policy gradient algorithm that leverages the analytical structure of the reward function to approximate its derivative and improve stability. We show that these challenges prevent standard RL algorithms from operating within this domain. Our experiments, conducted on a realistic simulator that emulates communication networks' behavior, show that our method exhibits improved performance concurrently on the multiple considered metrics compared to the popular algorithms deployed today in real datacenters. Our algorithm is being productized to replace heuristics in some of the largest datacenters in the world.

poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 7 @ red 6, poster session 9, poster session 7

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 ∼2,200 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.

poster session 1 @ red 6, poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 1, poster session 9

Various types of machine learning techniques are available for analyzing electronic health records (EHRs). For predictive tasks, most existing methods either explicitly or implicitly divide these time-series datasets into predetermined observation and prediction windows. Patients have different lengths of medical history and the desired predictions (for purposes such as diagnosis or treatment) are required at different times in the future. In this paper, we propose a method that uses a sequence-to-sequence generator model to transfer an input sequence of EHR data to a sequence of user-defined target labels, providing the end-users with ``flexible'' observation and prediction windows to define. We use adversarial and semi-supervised approaches in our design, where the sequence-to-sequence model acts as a generator and a discriminator distinguishes between the actual (observed) and generated labels. We evaluate our models through an extensive series of experiments using two large EHR datasets from adult and pediatric populations. In an obesity predicting case study, we show that our model can achieve superior results in flexible-window prediction tasks, after being trained once and even with large missing rates on the input EHR data. Moreover, using a number of attention analysis experiments, we show that the proposed model can effectively learn more relevant features in different prediction tasks.

poster session 4 @ red 6, poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 4, poster session 9

Machine learning based image classification algorithms, such as deep neural network approaches, will be increasingly employed in critical settings such as quality control in industry, where transparency and comprehensibility of decisions are crucial. Therefore, we aim to extend the defect detection task towards an interactive human-in-the-loop approach that allows us to integrate rich background knowledge and the inference of complex relationships going beyond traditional purely data-driven approaches. We propose an approach for an interactive support system for classifications in an industrial quality control setting that combines the advantages of both (explainable) knowledge-driven and data-driven machine learning methods, in particular inductive logic programming and convolutional neural networks, with human expertise and control. The resulting system can assist domain experts with decisions, provide transparent explanations for results, and integrate feedback from users; thus reducing workload for humans while both respecting their expertise and without removing their agency or accountability.

poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 7 @ red 6, poster session 9, poster session 7

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a promising technology to transform the healthcare industry. Due to the highly sensitive nature of patient data, federated learning (FL) is often leveraged to build models for smart healthcare applications. Existing deployed FL frameworks cannot address the key issues of varying data quality and heterogeneous data distributions across multiple institutions in this sector. In this paper, we report our experience developing and deploying the Contribution-Aware Federated Learning (CAFL) framework for smart healthcare. It provides an efficient and accurate approach to fairly evaluate FL participants' contribution to model performance without exposing their private data, and improves the FL model training protocol to allow the best performing intermediate models to be distributed to participants for FL training. Since its deployment in Yidu Cloud Technology Inc. in March 2021, CAFL has served 8 well-established medical institutions in China to build healthcare decision support models. It can perform contribution evaluations 2.84 times faster than the best existing approach, and has improved the average accuracy of the resulting models by 2.62% compared to the previous system (which is significant in industrial settings). To our knowledge, it is the first contribution-aware federated learning successfully deployed in the healthcare industry.

poster session 4 @ red 6, poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 4, poster session 9

Predictive VM (Virtual Machine) auto-scaling is a promising technique to optimize cloud applications’ operating costs and performance. Understanding the job arrival rate is crucial for accurately predicting future changes in cloud workloads and proactively provisioning and de-provisioning VMs for hosting the applications. However, developing a model that accurately predicts cloud workload changes is extremely challenging due to the dynamic nature of cloud workloads. Long- Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) models have been developed for cloud workload prediction. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art LSTM model leverages recurrences to predict, which naturally adds complexity and increases the inference overhead as input sequences grow longer. To develop a cloud workload prediction model with high accuracy and low inference overhead, this work presents a novel time-series forecasting model called WGAN-gp Transformer, inspired by the Transformer network and improved Wasserstein-GANs. The proposed method adopts a Transformer network as a generator and a multi-layer perceptron as a critic. The extensive evaluations with real-world workload traces show WGAN- gp Transformer achieves 5× faster inference time with up to 5.1% higher prediction accuracy against the state-of-the-art. We also apply WGAN-gp Transformer to auto-scaling mechanisms on Google cloud platforms, and the WGAN-gp Transformer-based auto-scaling mechanism outperforms the LSTM-based mechanism by significantly reducing VM over-provisioning and under-provisioning rates.

poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 7 @ red 6, poster session 9, poster session 7

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.

poster session 4 @ red 6, poster session 9 @ red 6, poster session 4, poster session 9