Zhou Yang

Zhou Yang, Vinay Jayachandra Reddy, Rashmi Kesidi et al.

It is widely acknowledged that addiction relapse is highly associated with spatial-temporal factors such as some specific places or time periods. Current studies suggest that those factors can be utilized for better relapse interventions, however, there is no relapse prevention application that makes use of those factors. In this paper, we introduce a mobile app called "Addict Free", which records user profiles, tracks relapse history and summarizes recovering statistics to help users better understand their recovering situations. Also, this app builds a relapse recovering community, which allows users to ask for advice and encouragement, and share relapse prevention experience. Moreover, machine learning algorithms that ingest spatial and temporal factors are utilized to predict relapse, based on which helpful addiction diversion activities are recommended by a recovering recommendation algorithm. By interacting with users, this app targets at providing smart suggestions that aim to stop relapse, especially for alcohol and tobacco addiction users.

Long Nguyen, Jia Zhen, Zhe Lin et al.

Understanding and accurately predicting within-field spatial variability of crop yield play a key role in site-specific management of crop inputs such as irrigation water and fertilizer for optimized crop production. However, such a task is challenged by the complex interaction between crop growth and environmental and managerial factors, such as climate, soil conditions, tillage, and irrigation. In this paper, we present a novel Spatial-temporal Multi-Task Learning algorithms for within-field crop yield prediction in west Texas from 2001 to 2003. This algorithm integrates multiple heterogeneous data sources to learn different features simultaneously, and to aggregate spatial-temporal features by introducing a weighted regularizer to the loss functions. Our comprehensive experimental results consistently outperform the results of other conventional methods, and suggest a promising approach, which improves the landscape of crop prediction research fields.

Zhou Yang, Long Nguyen, Fang Jin

Opioid addiction is a severe public health threat in the U.S, causing massive deaths and many social problems. Accurate relapse prediction is of practical importance for recovering patients since relapse prediction promotes timely relapse preventions that help patients stay clean. In this paper, we introduce a Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) model to predict the addiction relapses based on sentiment images and social influences. Experimental results on real social media data from Reddit.com demonstrate that the GAN model delivers a better performance than comparable alternative techniques. The sentiment images generated by the model show that relapse is closely connected with two emotions `joy' and `negative'. This work is one of the first attempts to predict relapses using massive social media data and generative adversarial nets. The proposed method, combined with knowledge of social media mining, has the potential to revolutionize the practice of opioid addiction prevention and treatment.

Long Nguyen, Zhou Yang, Jiazhen Zhu et al.

A crucial and time-sensitive task when any disaster occurs is to rescue victims and distribute resources to the right groups and locations. This task is challenging in populated urban areas, due to the huge burst of help requests generated in a very short period. To improve the efficiency of the emergency response in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, we propose a heuristic multi-agent reinforcement learning scheduling algorithm, named as ResQ, which can effectively schedule the rapid deployment of volunteers to rescue victims in dynamic settings. The core concept is to quickly identify victims and volunteers from social network data and then schedule rescue parties with an adaptive learning algorithm. This framework performs two key functions: 1) identify trapped victims and rescue volunteers, and 2) optimize the volunteers' rescue strategy in a complex time-sensitive environment. The proposed ResQ algorithm can speed up the training processes through a heuristic function which reduces the state-action space by identifying the set of particular actions over others. Experimental results showed that the proposed heuristic multi-agent reinforcement learning based scheduling outperforms several state-of-art methods, in terms of both reward rate and response times.