Computer Science

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being hailed as the latest example of a General Purpose Technology that could transform productivity and help tackle important societal challenges. This outcome is however not guaranteed: a myopic focus on short-term benefits could lock AI into technologies that turn out to be sub-optimal in the longer-run. Recent controversies about the dominance of deep learning methods and private labs in AI research suggest that the field may be getting narrower, but the evidence base is lacking. We seek to address this gap with an analysis of the thematic diversity of AI research in arXiv, a widely used pre-prints site. Having identified 110,000 AI papers in this corpus, we use hierarchical topic modelling to estimate the thematic composition of AI research, and this composition to calculate various metrics of research diversity. Our analysis suggests that diversity in AI research has stagnated in recent years, and that AI research involving private sector organisations tends to be less diverse than research in academia. This appears to be driven by a small number of prolific and narrowly-focused technology companies. Diversity in academia is bolstered by smaller institutions and research groups that may have less incentives to race and lower levels of collaboration with the private sector. We also find that private sector AI researchers tend to specialise in data and computationally intensive deep learning methods at the expense of research involving other (symbolic and statistical) AI methods, and of research that considers the societal and ethical implications of AI or applies it in domains like health. Our results suggest that there may be a rationale for policy action to prevent a premature narrowing of AI research that could reduce its societal benefits, but we note the incentive, information and scale hurdles standing in the way of such interventions.

A novel evolutionary algorithm called learner performance based behavior algorithm (LPB) is proposed in this article. The basic inspiration of LPB originates from the process of accepting graduated learners from high school in different departments at university. In addition, the changes those learners should do in their studying behaviors to improve their study level at university. The most important stages of optimization; exploitation and exploration are outlined by designing the process of accepting graduated learners from high school to university and the procedure of improving the learner's studying behavior at university to improve the level of their study. To show the accuracy of the proposed algorithm, it is evaluated against a number of test functions, such as traditional benchmark functions, CEC-C06 2019 test functions, and a real-world case study problem. The results of the proposed algorithm are then compared to the DA, GA, and PSO. The proposed algorithm produced superior results in most of the cases and comparative in some others. It is proved that the algorithm has a great ability to deal with the large optimization problems comparing to the DA, GA, and PSO. The overall results proved the ability of LPB in improving the initial population and converging towards the global optima. Moreover, the results of the proposed work are proved statistically.

We report the development of an open-source, hardware-based contact tracer, made from readily available parts, costing less than $20USD. This work was motivated by the need for a technology-assisted contact tracer that avoids privacy issues found with those involving a mobile phone. Contact tracing is done here without the use of a mobile phone or an app at all. Instead, contact tracing is implemented using Bluetooth Low Energy on an ESP32 micro-controller. The ESP32 is used to both advertise and receive health information to others in close proximity, forming a strictly peer-to-peer contact tracer. The contact tracer can be assembled by an individual and configured use within minutes.

We give an overview of the practice and science of call center workforce planning, where we evaluate the commonly used methods by their quality and the theory by its applicability. As such this paper is useful for developers and consultants interested in the background and advanced methodology of workforce management, and for researchers interested in practically relevant science.

As the worldwide population gets increasingly aged, in-home telemedicine and mobile-health solutions represent promising services to promote active and independent aging and to contribute to a paradigm shift towards patient-centric healthcare. In this work, we present ACTA (Advanced Cognitive Training for Aging), a prototype mobile-health solution to provide advanced cognitive training for senior citizens with mild cognitive impairments. We disclose here the conceptualization of ACTA as the integration of two promising rehabilitation strategies: the "Nudge theory", from the cognitive domain, and the neurofeedback, from the neuroscience domain. Moreover, in ACTA we exploit the most advanced machine learning techniques to deliver customized and fully adaptive support to the elderly, while training in an ecological environment. ACTA represents the next-step beyond SENIOR, an earlier mobile-health project for cognitive training based on Nudge theory, currently ongoing in Lombardy Region. Beyond SENIOR, ACTA represents a highly-usable, accessible, low-cost, new-generation mobile-health solution to promote independent aging and effective motor-cognitive training support, while empowering the elderly in their own aging.

We propose to build directly upon our longstanding, prior r&d in AI/machine ethics in order to attempt to make real the blue-sky idea of AI that can thwart mass shootings, by bringing to bear its ethical reasoning. The r&d in question is overtly and avowedly logicist in form, and since we are hardly the only ones who have established a firm foundation in the attempt to imbue AI's with their own ethical sensibility, the pursuit of our proposal by those in different methodological camps should, we believe, be considered as well. We seek herein to make our vision at least somewhat concrete by anchoring our exposition to two simulations, one in which the AI saves the lives of innocents by locking out a malevolent human's gun, and a second in which this malevolent agent is allowed by the AI to be neutralized by law enforcement. Along the way, some objections are anticipated, and rebutted.

Despite interest in communicating ethical problems and social contexts within the undergraduate curriculum to advance Public Interest Technology (PIT) goals, interventions at the graduate level remain largely unexplored. This may be due to the conflicting ways through which distinct Artificial Intelligence (AI) research tracks conceive of their interface with social contexts. In this paper we track the historical emergence of sociotechnical inquiry in three distinct subfields of AI research: AI Safety, Fair Machine Learning (Fair ML) and Human-in-the-Loop (HIL) Autonomy. We show that for each subfield, perceptions of PIT stem from the particular dangers faced by past integration of technical systems within a normative social order. We further interrogate how these histories dictate the response of each subfield to conceptual traps, as defined in the Science and Technology Studies literature. Finally, through a comparative analysis of these currently siloed fields, we present a roadmap for a unified approach to sociotechnical graduate pedagogy in AI.

Legal argumentation is a vital cornerstone of justice, underpinning an adversarial form of law, and extensive research has attempted to augment or undertake legal argumentation via the use of computer-based automation including Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) have especially furthered the capabilities of leveraging AI for aiding legal professionals, doing so in ways that are modeled here as CARE, namely Crafting, Assessing, Refining, and Engaging in legal argumentation. In addition to AI-enabled legal argumentation serving to augment human-based lawyering, an aspirational goal of this multi-disciplinary field consists of ultimately achieving autonomously effected human-equivalent legal argumentation. As such, an innovative meta-approach is proposed to apply the Levels of Autonomy (LoA) of AI Legal Reasoning (AILR) to the maturation of AI and Legal Argumentation (AILA), proffering a new means of gauging progress in this ever-evolving and rigorously sought domain.

Autism spectrum disorder is a developmental disorder characterized by significant social, communication, and behavioral challenges. Individuals diagnosed with autism, intellectual, and developmental disabilities (AUIDD) typically require long-term care and targeted treatment and teaching. Effective treatment of AUIDD relies on efficient and careful behavioral observations done by trained applied behavioral analysts (ABAs). However, this process overburdens ABAs by requiring the clinicians to collect and analyze data, identify the problem behaviors, conduct pattern analysis to categorize and predict categorical outcomes, hypothesize responsiveness to treatments, and detect the effects of treatment plans. Successful integration of digital technologies into clinical decision-making pipelines and the advancements in automated decision-making using Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms highlights the importance of augmenting teaching and treatments using novel algorithms and high-fidelity sensors. In this article, we present an AI-Augmented Learning and Applied Behavior Analytics (AI-ABA) platform to provide personalized treatment and learning plans to AUIDD individuals. By defining systematic experiments along with automated data collection and analysis, AI-ABA can promote self-regulative behavior using reinforcement-based augmented or virtual reality and other mobile platforms. Thus, AI-ABA could assist clinicians to focus on making precise data-driven decisions and increase the quality of individualized interventions for individuals with AUIDD.

An Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) has been shown to improve students' learning outcomes by providing a personalized curriculum that addresses individual needs of every student. However, despite the effectiveness and efficiency that ITS brings to students' learning process, most of the studies in ITS research have conducted less effort to design the interface of ITS that promotes students' interest in learning, motivation and engagement by making better use of AI features. In this paper, we explore AI-driven design for the interface of ITS describing diagnostic feedback for students' problem-solving process and investigate its impacts on their engagement. We propose several interface designs powered by different AI components and empirically evaluate their impacts on student engagement through Santa, an active mobile ITS. Controlled A/B tests conducted on more than 20K students in the wild show that AI-driven interface design improves the factors of engagement by up to 25.13%.