Min-Je Choi

Bum Chul Kwon, Min-Je Choi, Joanne Taery Kim et al.

We have recently seen many successful applications of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) on electronic medical records (EMRs), which contain histories of patients' diagnoses, medications, and other various events, in order to predict the current and future states of patients. Despite the strong performance of RNNs, it is often challenging for users to understand why the model makes a particular prediction. Such black-box nature of RNNs can impede its wide adoption in clinical practice. Furthermore, we have no established methods to interactively leverage users' domain expertise and prior knowledge as inputs for steering the model. Therefore, our design study aims to provide a visual analytics solution to increase interpretability and interactivity of RNNs via a joint effort of medical experts, artificial intelligence scientists, and visual analytics researchers. Following the iterative design process between the experts, we design, implement, and evaluate a visual analytics tool called RetainVis, which couples a newly improved, interpretable and interactive RNN-based model called RetainEX and visualizations for users' exploration of EMR data in the context of prediction tasks. Our study shows the effective use of RetainVis for gaining insights into how individual medical codes contribute to making risk predictions, using EMRs of patients with heart failure and cataract symptoms. Our study also demonstrates how we made substantial changes to the state-of-the-art RNN model called RETAIN in order to make use of temporal information and increase interactivity. This study will provide a useful guideline for researchers that aim to design an interpretable and interactive visual analytics tool for RNNs.

Min-je Choi, Sehun Jeong, Hakjoo Oh et al.

Detecting buffer overruns from a source code is one of the most common and yet challenging tasks in program analysis. Current approaches have mainly relied on rigid rules and handcrafted features devised by a few experts, limiting themselves in terms of flexible applicability and robustness due to diverse bug patterns and characteristics existing in sophisticated real-world software programs. In this paper, we propose a novel, data-driven approach that is completely end-to-end without requiring any hand-crafted features, thus free from any program language-specific structural limitations. In particular, our approach leverages a recently proposed neural network model called memory networks that have shown the state-of-the-art performances mainly in question-answering tasks. Our experimental results using source codes demonstrate that our proposed model is capable of accurately detecting simple buffer overruns. We also present in-depth analyses on how a memory network can learn to understand the semantics in programming languages solely from raw source codes, such as tracing variables of interest, identifying numerical values, and performing their quantitative comparisons.