Benjamin Sanders

Nick DiSanto, Gavin Harding, Ethan Martinez et al.

While skin cancer detection has been a valuable deep learning application for years, its evaluation has often neglected the context in which testing images are assessed. Traditional melanoma classifiers assume that their testing environments are comparable to the structured images they are trained on. This paper challenges this notion and argues that mole size, a critical attribute in professional dermatology, can be misleading in automated melanoma detection. While malignant melanomas tend to be larger than benign melanomas, relying solely on size can be unreliable and even harmful when contextual scaling of images is not possible. To address this issue, this implementation proposes a custom model that performs various data augmentation procedures to prevent overfitting to incorrect parameters and simulate real-world usage of melanoma detection applications. Multiple custom models employing different forms of data augmentation are implemented to highlight the most significant features of mole classifiers. These implementations emphasize the importance of considering user unpredictability when deploying such applications. The caution required when manually modifying data is acknowledged, as it can result in data loss and biased conclusions. Additionally, the significance of data augmentation in both the dermatology and deep learning communities is considered.

Nick DiSanto, Anthony Corso, Benjamin Sanders et al.

While transformers have pioneered attention-driven architectures as a cornerstone of language modeling, their dependence on explicitly contextual information underscores limitations in their abilities to tacitly learn overarching textual themes. This study challenges the heuristic paradigm of performance benchmarking by investigating social media data as a source of distributed patterns. In stark contrast to networks that rely on capturing complex long-term dependencies, models of online data inherently lack structure and are forced to detect latent structures in the aggregate. To properly represent these abstract relationships, this research dissects empirical social media corpora into their elemental components, analyzing over two billion tweets across population-dense locations. We create Bag-of-Word embedding specific to each city and compare their respective representations. This finds that even amidst noisy data, geographic location has a considerable influence on online communication, and that hidden insights can be uncovered without the crutch of advanced algorithms. This evidence presents valuable geospatial implications in social science and challenges the notion that intricate models are prerequisites for pattern recognition in natural language. This aligns with the evolving landscape that questions the embrace of absolute interpretability over abstract understanding and bridges the divide between sophisticated frameworks and intangible relationships.