Thomas Weber

Angelo Ziletti, Christoph Berns, Oliver Treichel et al.

Millions of unsolicited medical inquiries are received by pharmaceutical companies every year. It has been hypothesized that these inquiries represent a treasure trove of information, potentially giving insight into matters regarding medicinal products and the associated medical treatments. However, due to the large volume and specialized nature of the inquiries, it is difficult to perform timely, recurrent, and comprehensive analyses. Here, we propose a machine learning approach based on natural language processing and unsupervised learning to automatically discover key topics in real-world medical inquiries from customers. This approach does not require ontologies nor annotations. The discovered topics are meaningful and medically relevant, as judged by medical information specialists, thus demonstrating that unsolicited medical inquiries are a source of valuable customer insights. Our work paves the way for the machine-learning-driven analysis of medical inquiries in the pharmaceutical industry, which ultimately aims at improving patient care.

Muhammad Umer Anwaar, Zhiwei Han, Shyam Arumugaswamy et al.

In graph neural networks (GNNs), message passing iteratively aggregates nodes' information from their direct neighbors while neglecting the sequential nature of multi-hop node connections. Such sequential node connections e.g., metapaths, capture critical insights for downstream tasks. Concretely, in recommender systems (RSs), disregarding these insights leads to inadequate distillation of collaborative signals. In this paper, we employ collaborative subgraphs (CSGs) and metapaths to form metapath-aware subgraphs, which explicitly capture sequential semantics in graph structures. We propose meta\textbf{P}ath and \textbf{E}ntity-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{G}raph \textbf{N}eural \textbf{N}etwork (PEAGNN), which trains multilayer GNNs to perform metapath-aware information aggregation on such subgraphs. This aggregated information from different metapaths is then fused using attention mechanism. Finally, PEAGNN gives us the representations for node and subgraph, which can be used to train MLP for predicting score for target user-item pairs. To leverage the local structure of CSGs, we present entity-awareness that acts as a contrastive regularizer on node embedding. Moreover, PEAGNN can be combined with prominent layers such as GAT, GCN and GraphSage. Our empirical evaluation shows that our proposed technique outperforms competitive baselines on several datasets for recommendation tasks. Further analysis demonstrates that PEAGNN also learns meaningful metapath combinations from a given set of metapaths.

Zhiwei Han, Thomas Weber, Stefan Matthes et al.

Machine learning and many of its applications are considered hard to approach due to their complexity and lack of transparency. One mission of human-centric machine learning is to improve algorithm transparency and user satisfaction while ensuring an acceptable task accuracy. In this work, we present an interactive image restoration framework, which exploits both image prior and human painting knowledge in an iterative manner such that they can boost on each other. Additionally, in this system users can repeatedly get feedback of their interactions from the restoration progress. This informs the users about their impact on the restoration results, which leads to better sense of control, which can lead to greater trust and approachability. The positive results of both objective and subjective evaluation indicate that, our interactive approach positively contributes to the approachability of restoration algorithms in terms of algorithm performance and user experience.