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1. The Deep Learning Epilepsy Detection Challenge: Design, Implementation, and Test of a New Crowd-Sourced AI Challenge Ecosystem

   Kiral, Isabell ; Roy, Subhrajit ; Mummert, Todd ; Braz, Alan ; Tsay, Jason ; Tang, Jianbin ; Asif, Umar ; Schaffter, Thomas ; Mehmet, Eren ; Picone, Joseph ; et al ( April 2019 , Challenges in Machine Learning Competitions for All (CiML))

   The DeepLearningEpilepsyDetectionChallenge: design, implementation, andtestofanewcrowd-sourced AIchallengeecosystem Isabell Kiral*, Subhrajit Roy*, Todd Mummert*, Alan Braz*, Jason Tsay, Jianbin Tang, Umar Asif, Thomas Schaffter, Eren Mehmet, The IBM Epilepsy Consortium◊ , Joseph Picone, Iyad Obeid, Bruno De Assis Marques, Stefan Maetschke, Rania Khalaf†, Michal Rosen-Zvi† , Gustavo Stolovitzky† , Mahtab Mirmomeni† , Stefan Harrer† * These authors contributed equally to this work † Corresponding authors: rkhalaf@us.ibm.com, rosen@il.ibm.com, gustavo@us.ibm.com, mahtabm@au1.ibm.com, sharrer@au.ibm.com ◊ Members of the IBM Epilepsy Consortium are listed in the Acknowledgements section J. Picone and I. Obeid are with Temple University, USA. T. Schaffter is with Sage Bionetworks, USA. E. Mehmet is with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. All other authors are with IBM Research in USA, Israel and Australia. Introduction This decade has seen an ever-growing number of scientific fields benefitting from the advances in machine learning technology and tooling. More recently, this trend reached the medical domain, with applications reaching from cancer diagnosis [1] to the development of brain-machine-interfaces [2]. While Kaggle has pioneered the crowd-sourcing of machine learning challenges to incentivise data scientists from around the world to advance algorithm and model design, the increasing complexity of problem statements demands of participants to be expert datamore »scientists, deeply knowledgeable in at least one other scientific domain, and competent software engineers with access to large compute resources. People who match this description are few and far between, unfortunately leading to a shrinking pool of possible participants and a loss of experts dedicating their time to solving important problems. Participation is even further restricted in the context of any challenge run on confidential use cases or with sensitive data. Recently, we designed and ran a deep learning challenge to crowd-source the development of an automated labelling system for brain recordings, aiming to advance epilepsy research. A focus of this challenge, run internally in IBM, was the development of a platform that lowers the barrier of entry and therefore mitigates the risk of excluding interested parties from participating. The challenge: enabling wide participation With the goal to run a challenge that mobilises the largest possible pool of participants from IBM (global), we designed a use case around previous work in epileptic seizure prediction [3]. In this “Deep Learning Epilepsy Detection Challenge”, participants were asked to develop an automatic labelling system to reduce the time a clinician would need to diagnose patients with epilepsy. Labelled training and blind validation data for the challenge were generously provided by Temple University Hospital (TUH) [4]. TUH also devised a novel scoring metric for the detection of seizures that was used as basis for algorithm evaluation [5]. In order to provide an experience with a low barrier of entry, we designed a generalisable challenge platform under the following principles: 1. No participant should need to have in-depth knowledge of the specific domain. (i.e. no participant should need to be a neuroscientist or epileptologist.) 2. No participant should need to be an expert data scientist. 3. No participant should need more than basic programming knowledge. (i.e. no participant should need to learn how to process fringe data formats and stream data efficiently.) 4. No participant should need to provide their own computing resources. In addition to the above, our platform should further • guide participants through the entire process from sign-up to model submission, • facilitate collaboration, and • provide instant feedback to the participants through data visualisation and intermediate online leaderboards. The platform The architecture of the platform that was designed and developed is shown in Figure 1. The entire system consists of a number of interacting components. (1) A web portal serves as the entry point to challenge participation, providing challenge information, such as timelines and challenge rules, and scientific background. The portal also facilitated the formation of teams and provided participants with an intermediate leaderboard of submitted results and a final leaderboard at the end of the challenge. (2) IBM Watson Studio [6] is the umbrella term for a number of services offered by IBM. Upon creation of a user account through the web portal, an IBM Watson Studio account was automatically created for each participant that allowed users access to IBM's Data Science Experience (DSX), the analytics engine Watson Machine Learning (WML), and IBM's Cloud Object Storage (COS) [7], all of which will be described in more detail in further sections. (3) The user interface and starter kit were hosted on IBM's Data Science Experience platform (DSX) and formed the main component for designing and testing models during the challenge. DSX allows for real-time collaboration on shared notebooks between team members. A starter kit in the form of a Python notebook, supporting the popular deep learning libraries TensorFLow [8] and PyTorch [9], was provided to all teams to guide them through the challenge process. Upon instantiation, the starter kit loaded necessary python libraries and custom functions for the invisible integration with COS and WML. In dedicated spots in the notebook, participants could write custom pre-processing code, machine learning models, and post-processing algorithms. The starter kit provided instant feedback about participants' custom routines through data visualisations. Using the notebook only, teams were able to run the code on WML, making use of a compute cluster of IBM's resources. The starter kit also enabled submission of the final code to a data storage to which only the challenge team had access. (4) Watson Machine Learning provided access to shared compute resources (GPUs). Code was bundled up automatically in the starter kit and deployed to and run on WML. WML in turn had access to shared storage from which it requested recorded data and to which it stored the participant's code and trained models. (5) IBM's Cloud Object Storage held the data for this challenge. Using the starter kit, participants could investigate their results as well as data samples in order to better design custom algorithms. (6) Utility Functions were loaded into the starter kit at instantiation. This set of functions included code to pre-process data into a more common format, to optimise streaming through the use of the NutsFlow and NutsML libraries [10], and to provide seamless access to the all IBM services used. Not captured in the diagram is the final code evaluation, which was conducted in an automated way as soon as code was submitted though the starter kit, minimising the burden on the challenge organising team. Figure 1: High-level architecture of the challenge platform Measuring success The competitive phase of the "Deep Learning Epilepsy Detection Challenge" ran for 6 months. Twenty-five teams, with a total number of 87 scientists and software engineers from 14 global locations participated. All participants made use of the starter kit we provided and ran algorithms on IBM's infrastructure WML. Seven teams persisted until the end of the challenge and submitted final solutions. The best performing solutions reached seizure detection performances which allow to reduce hundred-fold the time eliptologists need to annotate continuous EEG recordings. Thus, we expect the developed algorithms to aid in the diagnosis of epilepsy by significantly shortening manual labelling time. Detailed results are currently in preparation for publication. Equally important to solving the scientific challenge, however, was to understand whether we managed to encourage participation from non-expert data scientists. Figure 2: Primary occupation as reported by challenge participants Out of the 40 participants for whom we have occupational information, 23 reported Data Science or AI as their main job description, 11 reported being a Software Engineer, and 2 people had expertise in Neuroscience. Figure 2 shows that participants had a variety of specialisations, including some that are in no way related to data science, software engineering, or neuroscience. No participant had deep knowledge and experience in data science, software engineering and neuroscience. Conclusion Given the growing complexity of data science problems and increasing dataset sizes, in order to solve these problems, it is imperative to enable collaboration between people with differences in expertise with a focus on inclusiveness and having a low barrier of entry. We designed, implemented, and tested a challenge platform to address exactly this. Using our platform, we ran a deep-learning challenge for epileptic seizure detection. 87 IBM employees from several business units including but not limited to IBM Research with a variety of skills, including sales and design, participated in this highly technical challenge.« less
2. Detecting Cyber Attacks in Smart Grids Using Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection and Deep Representation Learning

   https://doi.org/10.3390/info12080328  

   Qi, Ruobin ; Rasband, Craig ; Zheng, Jun ; Longoria, Raul ( August 2021 , Information)

   Smart grids integrate advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs) into traditional power grids for more efficient and resilient power delivery and management, but also introduce new security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by adversaries to launch cyber attacks, causing severe consequences such as massive blackout and infrastructure damages. Existing machine learning-based methods for detecting cyber attacks in smart grids are mostly based on supervised learning, which need the instances of both normal and attack events for training. In addition, supervised learning requires that the training dataset includes representative instances of various types of attack events to train a good model, which is sometimes hard if not impossible. This paper presents a new method for detecting cyber attacks in smart grids using PMU data, which is based on semi-supervised anomaly detection and deep representation learning. Semi-supervised anomaly detection only employs the instances of normal events to train detection models, making it suitable for finding unknown attack events. A number of popular semi-supervised anomaly detection algorithms were investigated in our study using publicly available power system cyber attack datasets to identify the best-performing ones. The performance comparison with popular supervised algorithms demonstrates that semi-supervised algorithms are more capable of finding attack eventsmore »than supervised algorithms. Our results also show that the performance of semi-supervised anomaly detection algorithms can be further improved by augmenting with deep representation learning.« less
3. An Unsupervised Approach to Discover Media Frames

   Lai, Sha ; Jiang, Yanru ; Guo, Lei ; Betke, Margrit ; Ishwar, Prakash ; Wijaya ; Derry Tanti ( June 2022 , Proceedings of The LREC 2022 workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences)

   Media framing refers to highlighting certain aspect of an issue in the news to promote a particular interpretation to the audience. Supervised learning has often been used to recognize frames in news articles, requiring a known pool of frames for a particular issue, which must be identified by communication researchers through thorough manual content analysis. In this work, we devise an unsupervised learning approach to discover the frames in news articles automatically. Given a set of news articles for a given issue, e.g., gun violence, our method first extracts frame elements from these articles using related Wikipedia articles and the Wikipedia category system. It then uses a community detection approach to identify frames from these frame elements. We discuss the effectiveness of our approach by comparing the frames it generates in an unsupervised manner to the domain-expert-derived frames for the issue of gun violence, for which a supervised learning model for frame recognition exists.
4. Using Machine Learning to Aid in Data Classification: Classifying Occupation Compatibility with Highly Automated Vehicles

   https://doi.org/10.1177/1064804620923193  

   Kamaraj, Amudha V. ; Lee, John D. ( April 2021 , Ergonomics in Design: The Quarterly of Human Factors Applications)

   Data classification is central to human factors research, and manual data classification is tedious and error prone. Supervised learning enables analysts to train an algorithm by manually classifying a few cases and then have that algorithm classify many cases. However, algorithms often fail to leverage human insight. To address this, we augment supervised learning with unsupervised learning and data visualization. Unsupervised learning highlights potential classification errors, explains the underlying classification, and identifies additional cases that merit manual classification. We illustrate this using the Occupational Information Network database to classify occupations as having tasks that might be performed in an automated vehicle.
5. Arrays of (locality-sensitive) Count Estimators (ACE): Anomaly Detection on the Edge

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3178876.3186056  

   Luo, Chen ; Shrivastava, Anshumali ( January 2018 , Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference)

   Anomaly detection is one of the frequent and important subroutines deployed in large-scale data processing applications. Even being a well-studied topic, existing techniques for unsupervised anomaly detection require storing significant amounts of data, which is prohibitive from memory, latency and privacy perspectives, especially for small mobile devices which has ultra-low memory budget and limited computational power. In this paper, we propose ACE (Arrays of (locality-sensitive) Count Estimators) algorithm that can be 60x faster than most state-of-the-art unsupervised anomaly detection algorithms. In addition, ACE has appealing privacy properties. Our experiments show that ACE algorithm has significantly smaller memory footprints (∠ 4MB in our experiments) which can exploit Level 3 cache of any modern processor. At the core of the ACE algorithm, there is a novel statistical estimator which is derived from the sampling view of Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH). This view is significantly different and efficient than the widely popular view of LSH for near-neighbor search. We show the superiority of ACE algorithm over 11 popular baselines on 3 benchmark datasets, including the KDD-Cup99 data which is the largest available public benchmark comprising of more than half a million entries with ground truth anomaly labels.