Power in AI:Inequality Within and Without the Algorithm

The birth of Artificial Intelligence in the 1950s was a birth that did not involve women. Despite female labour being used to solve problems that machines would one day automate, women remained unseen, their voices limited. Today, inequality is still rife. Bias, discrimination, and harm are algorithmically perpetuated and amplified. AI is technocratic, with multinationals in the US and China leading development, and the global South being left behind. Even within Silicon Valley, the environment is hostile towards women: from the products being created to the people calling for ethical and responsible development, women are losing out. This chapter explores the layers of imbalance in gender, race, and power in AI, from the beginnings of the discipline to the present day, from the development environment to the algorithms themselves, and highlights the challenges that need to be faced to move towards a more equitable landscape

Building expert systems: cognitive emulation.

Chapter 1 briefly introduces the concept of cognitive emulation, and outlines its current status. Chapter 2 reviews psychological research on human expert thinking. First, the study of expert thinking is placed in the context of modern cognitive psychology. Next, the principal methods and techniques employed by psychologists examining expert cognition are examined. The remainder of the chapter is given over to a review of the published literature on the nature and development of human expertise. Chapter 3 reviews the main arguments for and against cognitive emulation in expert system design. The tentative conclusion reached is that a significant degree of emulation is inevitable, but that a pure, unselective strategy of emulation is neither realistic nor desirable. Chapter 4 examines the prospects for cognitive emulation from a more pragmatic angle. Several factors are identified that represent constraints on the usefulness of a cognitive approach. However, a second set of factors is identified which should facilitate an emulation strategy - especially in the longer term. Some guidance is given on when to seriously consider adopting an emulation strategy. Chapter 5 presents a critical survey of expert system research that has already addressed the emulation issue. Six basic approaches to cognitive emulation are distinguished and evaluated. This helps draw out in more detail the implications of an emulation strategy for knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation and system architecture. The chapter concludes by discussing the issues that arise when different approaches to emulation are combined. Some guidance is offered on how this might be achieved. Chapter 6 summarizes the main themes and issues to have emerged, the design advice contained in the thesis, and the original contributions made by the thesis

Characterization of Neuromuscular Disorders Using Quantitative Electromyographic Techniques

This thesis presents a multifaceted effort to develop a system that allows electrodiagnostic clinicians to perform a quantitative analysis of needle detected electromyographic (EMG) signals for characterization of neuromuscular disorders. Currently, the most widely adopted practise for evaluation of patients with suspected neuromuscular disorders is based on qualitative visual and auditory assessment of EMG signals. The resulting characterizations from this qualitative assessment are criticized for being subjective and highly dependent on the skill and experience of the examiner. The proposed system can be decomposed functionally into three stages: (1) extracting relevant information from the EMG signals, (2) representing the extracted information in formats suitable for qualitative, semi-quantitative and quantitative assessment, and (3) supporting the clinical decision, i.e., characterizing the examined muscle by estimating the likelihood of it being affected by a specific category of neuromuscular disorders. The main contribution of the thesis to the extraction stage is the development of an automated decomposition algorithm specifically tailored for characterization of neuromuscular disorders. The algorithm focuses on identifying as many representative motor unit potential trains as possible in times comparable to the times needed to complete a qualitative assessment. The identified trains are shown to reliably capture important aspects of the motor unit potential morphology and morphological stability. With regards to the representation stage, the thesis proposes ten new quantitative EMG features that are shown to be discriminative among the different disease categories. Along with eight traditional features, the features can be grouped into subsets, where each subset reflects a different aspect of the underlying motor unit structure and/or function. A muscle characterization obtained using a feature set in which every relevant aspect is included using the most representative feature is more structured, simple, and generalizable. All the investigated features are clinically relevant. An examiner can easily validate their values by visual inspection; interpret them from an anatomical, physiological, and pathological basis; and is aware of their limitations and dependence on the acquisition setup. The second main contribution to the representation stage is the evaluation of the possibility of detecting neurogenic disorders using a newly proposed set of quantitative features describing the firing patterns of the identified motor units. The last contribution to the representation stage is the development of novel methods that allow an examiner to detect contributions from fibres close to the detection surface of a needle electrode and to track them across a motor unit potential train. The work in this thesis related to the decision support stage aims at improving existing methods for obtaining transparent muscle characterization. Transparent methods do not only estimate the likelihood of the muscle being affected by a specific disorder, but also induce a set of rules explaining the likelihood estimates. The results presented in this thesis show that remodelling the characterization problem using an appropriate binarization mapping can overcome the decrease in accuracy associated with quantizing features, which is used to induce transparency rules. To attain the above mentioned objectives, different signal processing and machine learning methods are utilized and extended. This includes spectral clustering, Savitzky-Golay filtering, dynamic time warping, support vector machines, classification based on event association rules and Gaussian mixture models. The performance of the proposed methods has been evaluated with four different sets of examined limb muscles (342 muscles in total). Also, it has been evaluated using simulated EMG signals calculated using physiologically and anatomically sound models. A system capable of achieving the aforementioned objectives is expected to promote further clinical adoption of quantitative electromyographic techniques. These techniques have potential advantages over existing qualitative assessments including resolving equivocal cases, formalizing communication and evaluating prognosis

Agora: A Knowledge Marketplace for Machine Learning

More and more data are becoming part of people\u27s lives. With the popularization of technologies like sensors, and the Internet of Things, data gathering is becoming possible and accessible for users. With these data in hand, users should be able to extract insights from them, and they want results as soon as possible. Average users have little or no experience in data analytics and machine learning and are not great observers who can collect enough data to build their own machine learning models. With large quantities of similar data being generated around the world and many machine learning models being used, it should be possible to use additional data and existing models to create accurate machine learning models for these users. This thesis proposes Agora, a Web-based marketplace where users can share their data and machine learning models with other users with small datasets and little experience. This thesis includes an overview of all the components that make up Agora, as well as details of two of its main components: Hephaestus and Sibyl. Hephaestus is a domain adaptation method for multi-feature regression models with seasonal adjustment, which can improve predictions for small datasets using information from additional datasets. Hephaestus works in the pre- and post- processing phases, making it possible to work with any standard machine learning algorithm. As a case study, we built predictive models using the proposed method to predict school energy consumption with only one month of data, improving accuracy to the same level as if 12 months of data were being used. Sibyl is a flexible, scalable and non-blocking machine learning as a service, which facilitates the creation of multiple predictive models and running them at the same time. As a case study, we implemented Sibyl equipped with three machine learning algorithms to show the flexibility of adding new algorithms. We also executed three models at the same time to demonstrate that they can run without interference from another model. The results obtained in this research demonstrates the concept of Agora. Users can share the same platform to provide or consume knowledge and create multiple concurrent machine learning models

Towards Fault Diagnosis in Reconfigurable Robot

東京電機大学201