A.C.M. Fong

Taban Eslami, Vahid Mirjalili, Alvis Fong et al.

Mental disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are heterogeneous disorders that are notoriously difficult to diagnose, especially in children. The current psychiatric diagnostic process is based purely on the behavioural observation of symptomology (DSM-5/ICD-10) and may be prone to over-prescribing of drugs due to misdiagnosis. In order to move the field towards more quantitative fashion, we need advanced and scalable machine learning infrastructure that will allow us to identify reliable biomarkers of mental health disorders. In this paper, we propose a framework called ASD-DiagNet for classifying subjects with ASD from healthy subjects by using only fMRI data. We designed and implemented a joint learning procedure using an autoencoder and a single layer perceptron which results in improved quality of extracted features and optimized parameters for the model. Further, we designed and implemented a data augmentation strategy, based on linear interpolation on available feature vectors, that allows us to produce synthetic datasets needed for training of machine learning models. The proposed approach is evaluated on a public dataset provided by Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange including 1035 subjects coming from 17 different brain imaging centers. Our machine learning model outperforms other state of the art methods from 13 imaging centers with increase in classification accuracy up to 20% with maximum accuracy of 80%. The machine learning technique presented in this paper, in addition to yielding better quality, gives enormous advantages in terms of execution time (40 minutes vs. 6 hours on other methods). The implemented code is available as GPL license on GitHub portal of our lab (https://github.com/pcdslab/ASD-DiagNet).

Sirwe Saeedi, Aliakbar Panahi, Seyran Saeedi et al.

In this paper, we investigate a commonsense inference task that unifies natural language understanding and commonsense reasoning. We describe our attempt at SemEval-2020 Task 4 competition: Commonsense Validation and Explanation (ComVE) challenge. We discuss several state-of-the-art deep learning architectures for this challenge. Our system uses prepared labeled textual datasets that were manually curated for three different natural language inference subtasks. The goal of the first subtask is to test whether a model can distinguish between natural language statements that make sense and those that do not make sense. We compare the performance of several language models and fine-tuned classifiers. Then, we propose a method inspired by question/answering tasks to treat a classification problem as a multiple choice question task to boost the performance of our experimental results (96.06%), which is significantly better than the baseline. For the second subtask, which is to select the reason why a statement does not make sense, we stand within the first six teams (93.7%) among 27 participants with very competitive results. Our result for last subtask of generating reason against the nonsense statement shows many potentials for future researches as we applied the most powerful generative model of language (GPT-2) with 6.1732 BLEU score among first four teams.

Basheer Qolomany, Ala Al-Fuqaha, Ajay Gupta et al.

Future buildings will offer new convenience, comfort, and efficiency possibilities to their residents. Changes will occur to the way people live as technology involves into people's lives and information processing is fully integrated into their daily living activities and objects. The future expectation of smart buildings includes making the residents' experience as easy and comfortable as possible. The massive streaming data generated and captured by smart building appliances and devices contains valuable information that needs to be mined to facilitate timely actions and better decision making. Machine learning and big data analytics will undoubtedly play a critical role to enable the delivery of such smart services. In this paper, we survey the area of smart building with a special focus on the role of techniques from machine learning and big data analytics. This survey also reviews the current trends and challenges faced in the development of smart building services.