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In this paper, we present a novel Artificial Intelligence (AI) -empowered system that enhances large language models and other machine learning tools with rules to provide primary care diagnostic advice to patients. Specifically, we introduce a novel methodology, represented through a process diagram, which allows the definition of generative AI processes and functions with a focus on the rule-augmented approach. Our methodology separates various components of the generative AI process as blocks that can be used to generate an implementation data flow diagram. Building upon this framework, we utilize the concept of a dialogue process as a theoretical foundation. This is specifically applied to the interactions between a user and an AI-empowered software program, which is called "Med|Primary AI assistant" (Alpha Version at the time of writing), and provides symptom analysis and medical advice in the form of suggested diagnostics. By leveraging current advancements in natural language processing, a novel approach is proposed to define a blueprint of domain-specific knowledge and a context for instantiated advice generation. Our approach not only encompasses the interaction domain, but it also delves into specific content that is relevant to the user, offering a tailored and effective AI–user interaction experience within a medical context. Lastly, using an evaluation process based on rules, defined by context and dialogue theory, we outline an algorithmic approach to measure content and responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Intelligent Decision Technologies (IDT) Journal is a scholarly publication that focuses on the theory and application of intelligent technologies and systems for decision making. It was founded in 2007 by Professors Gloria Phillips-Wren and Lakhmi C. Jain to address the need for real-world decision support systems. The journal has gained popularity over the years and now receives over 800 submissions annually. It covers various topics related to intelligent decision support, such as artificial intelligence and data processing. The current editors-in-chief are Professors George A. Tsihrintzis, Gloria Phillips-Wren, and Lakhmi C. Jain. The text provides information about the journal's recognition, the number of submitted and published papers, special collections and issues, and future plans. It also acknowledges the contributions of associate editors and encourages readers to explore the journal's website for more information and to consider submitting their research work. The editors hope that readers will find the journal useful and inspiring. [Extracted from the article]

This paper presents a novel development methodology for artificial intelligence (AI) analytics in energy management that focuses on tailored explainability to overcome the "black box" issue associated with AI analytics. Our approach addresses the fact that any given analytic service is to be used by different stakeholders, with different backgrounds, preferences, abilities, skills, and goals. Our methodology is aligned with the explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) paradigm and aims to enhance the interpretability of AI-empowered decision support systems (DSSs). Specifically, a clustering-based approach is adopted to customize the depth of explainability based on the specific needs of different user groups. This approach improves the accuracy and effectiveness of energy management analytics while promoting transparency and trust in the decision-making process. The methodology is structured around an iterative development lifecycle for an intelligent decision support system and includes several steps, such as stakeholder identification, an empirical study on usability and explainability, user clustering analysis, and the implementation of an XAI framework. The XAI framework comprises XAI clusters and local and global XAI, which facilitate higher adoption rates of the AI system and ensure responsible and safe deployment. The methodology is tested on a stacked neural network for an analytics service, which estimates energy savings from renovations, and aims to increase adoption rates and benefit the circular economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial Intelligence research is presenting phenomenal progress in two directions: (i) new theories and methodologies, and (ii) applications that expand traditional domains with innovative interventions. As indicated by recent reports, this progress has created a disequilibrium, where demand for scientists with skills in Artificial Intelligence is not fulfilled, a trend that will intensify further in the years to come. A potential solution to this shortage of specialised workforce may come from encouraging more women to get educated and follow a career in one of the Artificial Intelligence areas. This special collection of invited papers is dedicated to all women researchers and practitioners in Artificial Intelligence and coincides with the March 8, 2023 International Women's Day. Moreover, it has two specific goals: (i) to inspire more women to study and practice Artificial Intelligence through presentation of recognized women researchers who can act as role models, and (ii) to highlight some streamlined research areas of Artificial Intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neuro-symbolic approaches combine neural and symbolic methods. This paper explores aspects regarding the reasoning mechanisms of two neuro-symbolic approaches, that is, neurules and connectionist expert systems. Both provide reasoning and explanation facilities. Neurules are a type of neuro-symbolic rules tightly integrating the neural and symbolic components, giving pre-eminence to the symbolic component. Connectionist expert systems give pre-eminence to the connectionist component. This paper explores reasoning aspects about neurules and connectionist expert systems that have not been previously addressed. As far as neurules are concerned, an aspect playing a role in conflict resolution (i.e., order of neurules) is explored. Experimental results show an improvement in reasoning efficiency. As far as connectionist expert systems are concerned, variations of the reasoning mechanism are explored. Experimental results are presented for them as well showing that one of the variations generally performs better than the others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy communities can support the energy transition, by engaging citizens through collective energy actions and generate positive economic, social and environmental outcomes. Renewable Energy Sources (RES) are gaining increasing share in the electricity mix as the economy decarbonises, with Photovoltaic (PV) plants to becoming more efficient and affordable. By incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, innovative applications can be developed to provide added value to energy communities. In this context, the scope of this paper is to compare Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) algorithms for the prediction of short-term production in a solar plant under an energy cooperative operation. Three different cases are considered, based on the data used as inputs for forecasting purposes. Lagged inputs are used to assess the historical data needed, and the algorithms' accuracy is tested for the next hour's PV production forecast. The comparative analysis between the proposed algorithms demonstrates the most accurate algorithm in each case, depending on the available data. For the highest performing algorithm, its performance accuracy in further forecasting horizons (3 hours, 6 hours and 24 hours) is also tested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Animal Vehicle Collision (AVC) is relatively an evolving source of fatality resulting in the deficit of wildlife conservancy along with carnage. It's a globally distressing and disturbing experience that causes monetary damage, injury, and human-animal mortality. Roadkill has always been atop the research domain and serendipitously provided heterogeneous solutions for collision mitigation and prevention. Despite the abundant solution availability, this research throws a new spotlight on wildlife-vehicle collision mitigation using highly efficient artificial intelligence during nighttime hours. This study focuses mainly on arousal mechanisms of the "Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG)" intelligent system with extracted thermography image features, which are then processed by a trained, convolutional neural network (1D-CNN). The above computer vision – deep learning-based alert system has an accuracy between 94%, and 96% on the arousal mechanisms with the empowered real-time data set utilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reliable and rapid non-invasive testing has become essential for COVID-19 diagnosis and tracking statistics. Recent studies motivate the use of modern machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) tools that utilize features of coughing sounds for COVID-19 diagnosis. In this paper, we describe system designs that we developed for COVID-19 cough detection with the long-term objective of embedding them in a testing device. More specifically, we use log-mel spectrogram features extracted from the coughing audio signal and design a series of customized deep learning algorithms to develop fast and automated diagnosis tools for COVID-19 detection. We first explore the use of a deep neural network with fully connected layers. Additionally, we investigate prospects of efficient implementation by examining the impact on the detection performance by pruning the fully connected neural network based on the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) optimization process. In general, pruned neural networks have been shown to provide similar performance gains to that of unpruned networks with reduced computational complexity in a variety of signal processing applications. Finally, we investigate the use of convolutional neural network architectures and in particular the VGG-13 architecture which we tune specifically for this application. Our results show that a unique ensembling of the VGG-13 architecture trained using a combination of binary cross entropy and focal losses with data augmentation significantly outperforms the fully connected networks and other recently proposed baselines on the DiCOVA 2021 COVID-19 cough audio dataset. Our customized VGG-13 model achieves an average validation AUROC of 82.23% and a test AUROC of 78.3% at a sensitivity of 80.49%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biomarkers are measurements of biological variables that can determine a state of health. They consist of measuring a single variable or a combination of variables related to the state of health that these variables represent. Biomarkers can provide an early warning of a health problem in relation to an individual patient or group of patients, and thus trigger actions and lead to interventions. Nutritional biomarkers measure the biological consequences of one's diet. In our recent work, we have used machine learning to predict weight, metabolic syndrome and blood pressure, using blood-exam-based biomarkers. In the current work, we use extreme value theory to examine the significance of outliers in health data, with a focus on diet and the standard biochemistry profile. Specifically, we show that, using extreme value analysis and by applying a systemisation of the process, health trends can be predicted, and thus, health interventions can be (at least partially) automated. For that purpose, public access datasets have been used, which were retrieved from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The NHANES is a program of studies designed to assess the health and nutritional status of the population in the United States. In total, about 70,000 datapoints were analysed, covering about a decade's worth of observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The significant proliferation of AI-empowered systems and machine learning (ML) across various examined domains underscores the vital necessity for comprehensive and customised explainability frameworks to lead to usable and trustworthy systems. Especially in the medical domain, where validation of methodologies and outcomes is as important as the adoption rate of such systems, the requirements of the depth and the level of abstraction of the explainability are particularly important and necessitate a systemic approach to ensure a proper definition. Explainability and interpretability are important usability and trustworthiness properties of AI-empowered systems and, as such, constitute important factors for technology acceptance. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for explainability requirements in AI-empowered systems using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). This framework employs targeted ML (hierarchical clustering, k-means or other) to acquire a user model for personalised, multi-layered explainability. Our novel framework integrates a rule-based system, which guides the degree of trustworthiness to be achieved based on user perception and AI literacy level. We test this methodology in the case of AI-empowered medical systems to (1) assess and quantify the doctors' abilities and familiarisation with technology and AI, (2) generate layers of personalised explainability based on user ability and user needs in terms of trustworthiness and (3) provide the necessary environment for transparency and validation. To assess and quantify the doctors' abilities we have considered Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine (REALM) a tool commonly used in the medical domain to bridge the communication gap between patients and doctors. • Framework for personalised explainability in Artificial intelligence, based on Levels. • Levels refer to AI literacy level and level of abstraction. • Behavioural models were used that measure perception towards an innovation. • Framework is evaluated and implemented in an AI-empowered medical application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]