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In recent years, there has been a rise in the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The diagnosis of ASD requires behavioral observation and standardized testing completed by highly trained experts. Early intervention for ASD can begin as early as 1–2 years of age, but ASD diagnoses are not typically made until ages 2–5 years, thus delaying the start of intervention. There is an urgent need for non-invasive biomarkers to detect ASD in infancy. While previous research using physiological recordings has focused on brain-based biomarkers of ASD, this study investigated the potential of electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings as an ASD biomarker in 3–6-month-old infants. We recorded the heart activity of infants at typical and elevated familial likelihood for ASD during naturalistic interactions with objects and caregivers. After obtaining the ECG signals, features such as heart rate variability (HRV) and sympathetic and parasympathetic activities were extracted. Then we evaluated the effectiveness of multiple machine learning classifiers for classifying ASD likelihood. Our findings support our hypothesis that infant ECG signals contain important information about ASD familial likelihood. Amongthe various machine learning algorithms tested, KNN performed best according to sensitivity (0.70 ± 0.117), F1-score (0.689 ± 0.124), precision (0.717 ± 0.128), accuracy (0.70 ± 0.117, p-value = 0.02), and ROC (0.686 ± 0.122, p-value = 0.06). These results suggest that ECG signals contain relevant information about the likelihood of an infant developing ASD. Future studies should consider the potential of information contained in ECG, and other indices of autonomic control, for the development of biomarkers of ASD in infancy.

Knowledge-based entity prediction (KEP) is a novel task that aims to improve machine perception in autonomous systems. KEP leverages relational knowledge from heterogeneous sources in predicting potentially unrecognized entities. In this paper, we provide a formal definition of KEP as a knowledge completion task. Three potential solutions are then introduced, which employ several machine learning and data mining techniques. Finally, the applicability of KEP is demonstrated on two autonomous systems from different domains; namely, autonomous driving and smart manufacturing. We argue that in complex real-world systems, the use of KEP would significantly improve machine perception while pushing the current technology one step closer to achieving full autonomy., 6 pages, 4 figures, in IEEE Intelligent Systems, 2022

Enterprises are increasingly using social media forums to engage with their customer online- a phenomenon known as Social Customer Relation Management (Social CRM). In this context, it is important for an enterprise to identify “influential authors” and engage with them on a priority basis. We present a study towards finding influential authors on Twitter forums where an implicit network based on user interactions is created and analyzed. Furthermore, author profile features and user interaction features are combined in a decision tree classification model for finding influential authors. A novel objective evaluation criterion is used for evaluating various features and modeling techniques. We compare our methods with other approaches that use either only the formal connections or only the author profile features and show a significant improvement in the classification accuracy over these baselines as well as over using Klout score.

The problem of automatic extraction of sentiment expressions from informal text, as in microblogs such as tweets is a recent area of investigation. Compared to formal text, such as in product reviews or news articles, one of the key challenges lies in the wide diversity and informal nature of sentiment expressions that cannot be trivially enumerated or captured using predefined lexical patterns. In this work, we present an optimization-based approach to automatically extract sentiment expressions for a given target (e.g., movie, or person) from a corpus of unlabeled tweets. Specifically, we make three contributions: (i) we recognize a diverse and richer set of sentiment-bearing expressions in tweets, including formal and slang words/phrases, not limited to pre-specified syntactic patterns; (ii) instead of associating sentiment with an entire tweet, we assess the target-dependent polarity of each sentiment expression. The polarity of sentiment expression is determined by the nature of its target; (iii) we provide a novel formulation of assigning polarity to a sentiment expression as a constrained optimization problem over the tweet corpus. Experiments conducted on two domains, tweets mentioning movie and person entities, show that our approach improves accuracy in comparison with several baseline methods, and that the improvement becomes more prominent with increasing corpus sizes.

Smart manufacturing or Industry 4.0, a trend initiated a decade ago, aims to revolutionize traditional manufacturing using technology driven approaches. Modern digital technologies such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Big Data analytics, augmented/virtual reality, and artificial intelligence (AI) are the key enablers of new smart manufacturing approaches. The digital twin is an emerging concept whereby a digital replica can be built of any physical object. Digital twins are becoming mainstream; many organizations have started to rely on digital twins to monitor, analyze, and simulate physical assets and processes.

As Named Entity Recognition (NER) has been essential in identifying critical elements of unstructured content, generic NER tools remain limited in recognizing entities specific to a domain, such as drug use and public health. For such high-impact areas, accurately capturing relevant entities at a more granular level is critical, as this information influences real-world processes. On the other hand, training NER models for a specific domain without handcrafted features requires an extensive amount of labeled data, which is expensive in human effort and time. In this study, we employ distant supervision utilizing a domain-specific ontology to reduce the need for human labor and train models incorporating domain-specific (e.g., drug use) external knowledge to recognize domain specific entities. We capture entities related the drug use and their trends in government epidemiology reports, with an improvement of 8% in F1-score.

As Named Entity Recognition (NER) has been essential in identifying critical elements of unstructured content, generic NER tools remain limited in recognizing entities specific to a domain, such as drug use and public health. For such high-impact areas, accurately capturing relevant entities at a more granular level is critical, as this information influences real-world processes. On the other hand, training NER models for a specific domain without handcrafted features requires an extensive amount of labeled data, which is expensive in human effort and time. In this study, we employ distant supervision utilizing a domain-specific ontology to reduce the need for human labor and train models incorporating domain-specific (e.g., drug use) external knowledge to recognize domain specific entities. We capture entities related the drug use and their trends in government epidemiology reports, with an improvement of 8% in F1-score.

The development of an ontology facilitates the organization of the variety of concepts used to describe different terms in different resources. The proposed ontology will facilitate the study of cardiothoracic surgical education and data analytics in electronic medical records (EMR) with the standard vocabulary.

The development of an ontology facilitates the organization of the variety of concepts used to describe different terms in different resources. The proposed ontology will facilitate the study of cardiothoracic surgical education and data analytics in electronic medical records (EMR) with the standard vocabulary.

The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus construction process mainly relies on lexical algorithms and manual expert curation for integrating over 200 biomedical vocabularies. A lexical-based learning model (LexLM) was developed to predict synonymy among Metathesaurus terms and largely outperforms a rule-based approach (RBA) that approximates the current construction process. However, the LexLM has the potential for being improved further because it only uses lexical information from the source vocabularies, while the RBA also takes advantage of contextual information. We investigate the role of multiple types of contextual information available to the UMLS editors, namely source synonymy (SS), source semantic group (SG), and source hierarchical relations (HR), for the UMLS vocabulary alignment (UVA) problem. In this paper, we develop multiple variants of context-enriched learning models (ConLMs) by adding to the LexLM the types of contextual information listed above. We represent these context types in context-enriched knowledge graphs (ConKGs) with four variants ConSS, ConSG, ConHR, and ConAll. We train these ConKG embeddings using seven KG embedding techniques. We create the ConLMs by concatenating the ConKG embedding vectors with the word embedding vectors from the LexLM. We evaluate the performance of the ConLMs using the UVA generalization test datasets with hundreds of millions of pairs. Our extensive experiments show a significant performance improvement from the ConLMs over the LexLM, namely +5.0% in precision (93.75%), +0.69% in recall (93.23%), +2.88% in F1 (93.49%) for the best ConLM. Our experiments also show that the ConAll variant including the three context types takes more time, but does not always perform better than other variants with a single context type. Finally, our experiments show that the pairs of terms with high lexical similarity benefit most from adding contextual information, namely +6.56% in precision (94.97%), +2.13% in recall (93.23%), +4.35% in F1 (94.09%) for the best ConLM. The pairs with lower degrees of lexical similarity also show performance improvement with +0.85% in F1 (96%) for low similarity and +1.31% in F1 (96.34%) for no similarity. These results demonstrate the importance of using contextual information in the UVA problem.

Synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonists (SCRAs) are a new class of compounds with profound psychoactive effects and potential toxicity. This study characterizes patterns in SCRA abuse using qualitative interviews with individuals receiving medical toxicology consultation. Patients with suspected exposure to a new psychoactive substance were interviewed by medical toxicologists upon presentation for acute care. Investigators collected clinical and qualitative data including knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and practices related to psychoactive substance use. Responses were categorized by identifying themes, and statistics were generated to describe patterns of use. Overall, 69% (86) of the 124 cases of novel psychoactive substance use entered into the registry were associated with exposure to SCRAs. Most patients (68.8%) had used SCRAs at least once before the presenting episode. 47.7% considered SCRAs to be very easy to obtain, and 44.2% reported paying for the substances while 32.6% acquired it for free. Nearly half (48.8%) of patients reported their primary reason for use was to get high; a small proportion used SCRAs to avoid testing positive on drug screening (6.9%) or as an alternative to marijuana (4.6%). Findings suggest an independent and stable culture is developing around the use of SCRAs separate from their appeal as an "undetectable" alternative to marijuana.

We present a theoretically motivated design perspective, challenges, and applications of next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) systems. We envision systems with greater capabilities for meaningful human interaction, including socially adaptive behavior that incorporates personalization and sensitivity to social context and intentionality. Personalized knowledge graphs combining generic, common-sense, and domain-specific knowledge with both sociocultural values and norms and individual cognitive models provide a foundation for building humanity-inspired AI systems.

Analyzing gender is critical to study mental health (MH) support in CVD (cardiovascular disease). The existing studies on using social media for extracting MH symptoms consider symptom detection and tend to ignore user context, disease, or gender. The current study aims to design and evaluate a system to capture how MH symptoms associated with CVD are expressed differently with the gender on social media. We observe that the reliable detection of MH symptoms expressed by persons with heart disease in user posts is challenging because of the co-existence of (dis)similar MH symptoms in one post and due to variation in the description of symptoms based on gender. We collect a corpus of 150k items (posts and comments) annotated using the subreddit labels and transfer learning approaches. We propose GeM, a novel task-adaptive multi-task learning approach to identify the MH symptoms in CVD patients based on gender. Specifically, we adopt a knowledge-assisted RoBERTa based bi-encoder model to capture CVD-related MH symptoms. Moreover, it enhances the reliability for differentiating the gender language in MH symptoms when compared to the state-of-art language models. Our model achieves high (statistically significant) performance and predicts four labels of MH issues and two gender labels, which outperforms RoBERTa, improving the recall by 2.14% on the symptom identification task and by 2.55% on the gender identification task.

Asthma is a personalized, and multi-trigger respiratory condition which requires continuous monitoring and management of symptoms and medication adherence. We developed kHealth: Knowledge-enabled Digital Healthcare Framework to monitor and manage the asthma symptoms, medication adherence, lung function, daily activity, sleep quality, indoor, and outdoor environmental triggers of pediatric asthma patients. The kHealth framework collects up to 1852 data points per patient per day. It is practically impossible for the clinicians, parents, and the patient to analyze this vast amount of multimodal data collected from the kHealth framework. In this chapter, we describe the personalized scores, clinically relevant asthma categorization using digital phenotype score, actionable insights, and potential intervention strategies for better pediatric asthma management.

Humans use causality and hypothetical retrospection in their daily decision-making, planning, and understanding of life events. The human mind, while retrospecting a given situation, think about questions such as "What was the cause of the given situation?", "What would be the effect of my action?", or "Which action led to this effect?". It develops a causal model of the world, which learns with fewer data points, makes inferences, and contemplates counterfactual scenarios. The unseen, unknown, scenarios are known as counterfactuals. AI algorithms use a representation based on knowledge graphs (KG) to represent the concepts of time, space, and facts. A KG is a graphical data model which captures the semantic relationships between entities such as events, objects, or concepts. The existing KGs represent causal relationships extracted from texts based on linguistic patterns of noun phrases for causes and effects as in ConceptNet and WordNet. The current causality representation in KGs makes it challenging to support counterfactual reasoning. A richer representation of causality in AI systems using a KG-based approach is needed for better explainability, and support for intervention and counterfactuals reasoning, leading to improved understanding of AI systems by humans. The causality representation requires a higher representation framework to define the context, the causal information, and the causal effects. The proposed Causal Knowledge Graph (CausalKG) framework, leverages recent progress of causality and KG towards explainability. CausalKG intends to address the lack of a domain adaptable causal model and represent the complex causal relations using the hyper-relational graph representation in the KG. We show that the CausalKG's interventional and counterfactual reasoning can be used by the AI system for the domain explainability.

Recent work uses a Siamese Network, initialized with BioWordVec embeddings (distributed word embeddings), for predicting synonymy among biomedical terms to automate a part of the UMLS (Unified Medical Language System) Metathesaurus construction process. We evaluate the use of contextualized word embeddings extracted from nine different biomedical BERT-based models for synonymy prediction in the UMLS by replacing BioWordVec embeddings with embeddings extracted from each biomedical BERT model using different feature extraction methods. Surprisingly, we find that Siamese Networks initialized with BioWordVec embeddings still outperform the Siamese Networks initialized with embedding extracted from biomedical BERT model.

Conversational Agents (CAs) powered with deep language models (DLMs) have shown tremendous promise in the domain of mental health. Prominently, the CAs have been used to provide informational or therapeutic services to patients. However, the utility of CAs to assist in mental health triaging has not been explored in the existing work as it requires a controlled generation of follow-up questions (FQs), which are often initiated and guided by the mental health professionals (MHPs) in clinical settings. In the context of depression, our experiments show that DLMs coupled with process knowledge in a mental health questionnaire generate 12.54% and 9.37% better FQs based on similarity and longest common subsequence matches to questions in the PHQ-9 dataset respectively, when compared with DLMs without process knowledge support. Despite coupling with process knowledge, we find that DLMs are still prone to hallucination, i.e., generating redundant, irrelevant, and unsafe FQs. We demonstrate the challenge of using existing datasets to train a DLM for generating FQs that adhere to clinical process knowledge. To address this limitation, we prepared an extended PHQ-9 based dataset, PRIMATE, in collaboration with MHPs. PRIMATE contains annotations regarding whether a particular question in the PHQ-9 dataset has already been answered in the user's initial description of the mental health condition. We used PRIMATE to train a DLM in a supervised setting to identify which of the PHQ-9 questions can be answered directly from the user's post and which ones would require more information from the user. Using performance analysis based on MCC scores, we show that PRIMATE is appropriate for identifying questions in PHQ-9 that could guide generative DLMs towards controlled FQ generation suitable for aiding triaging. Dataset created as a part of this research: https://github.com/primate-mh/Primate2022

Scene understanding is a key technical challenge within the autonomous driving domain. It requires a deep semantic understanding of the entities and relations found within complex physical and social environments that is both accurate and complete. In practice, this can be accomplished by representing entities in a scene and their relations as a knowledge graph (KG). This scene knowledge graph may then be utilized for the task of entity prediction, leading to improved scene understanding. In this paper, we will define and formalize this problem as Knowledge-based Entity Prediction (KEP). KEP aims to improve scene understanding by predicting potentially unrecognized entities by leveraging heterogeneous, high-level semantic knowledge of driving scenes. An innovative neuro-symbolic solution for KEP is presented, based on knowledge-infused learning, which 1) introduces a dataset agnostic ontology to describe driving scenes, 2) uses an expressive, holistic representation of scenes with knowledge graphs, and 3) proposes an effective, non-standard mapping of the KEP problem to the problem of link prediction (LP) using knowledge-graph embeddings (KGE). Using real, complex and high-quality data from urban driving scenes, we demonstrate its effectiveness by showing that the missing entities may be predicted with high precision (0.87 Hits@1) while significantly outperforming the non-semantic/rule-based baselines.

Our current health applications do not adequately take into account contextual and personalized knowledge about patients. In order to design “Personalized Coach for Healthcare” applications to manage chronic diseases, there is a need to create a Personalized Healthcare Knowledge Graph (PHKG) that takes into consideration a patient’s health condition (personalized knowledge) and enriches that with contextualized knowledge from environmental sensors and Web of Data (e.g., symptoms and treatments for diseases). To develop PHKG, aggregating knowledge from various heterogeneous sources such as the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, clinical notes, and Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) is necessary. In this paper, we explain the challenges of collecting, managing, analyzing, and integrating patients’ health data from various sources in order to synthesize and deduce meaningful information embodying the vision of the Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom (DIKW) pyramid. Furthermore, we sketch a solution that combines: 1) IoT data analytics, and 2) explicit knowledge and illustrate it using three chronic disease use cases – asthma, obesity, and Parkinson’s.

Knowledge representation as expert system rules or using frames and variety of logics, played a key role in capturing explicit knowledge during the hay days of AI in the past century. Such knowledge, aligned with planning and reasoning are part of what we refer to as Symbolic AI. The resurgent AI of this century in the form of Statistical AI has benefitted from massive data and computing. On some tasks, deep learning methods have even exceeded human performance levels. This gave the false sense that data alone is enough, and explicit knowledge is not needed. But as we start chasing machine intelligence that is comparable with human intelligence, there is an increasing realization that we cannot do without explicit knowledge. Neuroscience (role of long-term memory, strong interactions between different specialized regions of data on tasks such as multimodal sensing), cognitive science (bottom brain versus top brain, perception versus cognition), brain-inspired computing, behavioral economics (system 1 versus system 2), and other disciplines point to need for furthering AI to neuro-symbolic AI (i.e., hybrid of Statistical AI and Symbolic AI, also referred to as the third wave of AI). As we make this progress, the role of explicit knowledge becomes more evident. I will specifically look at our endeavor to support human-like intelligence, our desire for AI systems to interact with humans naturally, and our need to explain the path and reasons for AI systems’ workings. Nevertheless, the variety of knowledge needed to support understanding and intelligence is varied and complex. Using the example of progressing from NLP to NLU, I will demonstrate the dimensions of explicit knowledge, which may include, linguistic, language syntax, common sense, general (world model), specialized (e.g., geographic), and domain-specific (e.g., mental health) knowledge. I will also argue that despite this complexity, such knowledge can be scalability created and maintained (even dynamically or continually). Finally, I will describe our work on knowledge-infused learning as an example strategy for fusing statistical and symbolic AI in a variety of ways.

We report the implementation of a deep convolutional neural network to train a high-resolution room-temperature CdZnTeSe based gamma ray spectrometer for accurate and precise determination of gamma ray energies for radioisotope identification. The prototype learned spectrometer consists of a NI PCI 5122 fast digitizer connected to a pre-amplifier to recognize spectral features in a sequence of data. We used simulated preamplifier pulses that resemble actual data for various gamma photon energies to train a CNN on the equivalent of 90 seconds worth of data and validated it on 10 seconds worth of simulated data.

Suicide is the 10(th) leading cause of death in the US and the 2(nd) leading cause of death among teenagers. Clinical and psychosocial factors contribute to suicide risk (SRFs), although documentation and self-expression of such factors in EHRs and social networks vary. This study investigates the degree of variance across EHRs and social networks. We performed subjective analysis of SRFs, such as self-harm, bullying, impulsivity, family violence/discord, using >13.8 Million clinical notes on 123,703 patients with mental health conditions. We clustered clinical notes using semantic embeddings under a set of SRFs. Likewise, we clustered 2180 suicidal users on r/SuicideWatch (~30,000 posts) and performed comparative analysis. Top-3 SRFs documented in EHRs were depressive feelings (24.3%), psychological disorders (21.1%), drug abuse (18.2%). In r/SuicideWatch, gun-ownership (17.3%), self-harm (14.6%), bullying (13.2%) were Top-3 SRFs. Mentions of Family violence, racial discrimination, and other important SRFs contributing to suicide risk were missing from both platforms.