1,988 research outputs found

    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum

    Conceive and Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives of American Privacy and Reproductive Politics

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    Law and literature share a foundation in narrative. The literary turn in legal scholarship recognizes that the law itself is a form of narrative, one that simultaneously reflects socio-cultural norms and creates social and political regulations with a complex matrix of power. Cultural narratives from the 1950s to the mid-1970s pertaining to reproductive politics, domesticity, and national identity both produce and are productive of legal rulings that govern and restrict private acts of sexuality and speech. The Supreme Court used cases concerning sex and reproduction to enumerate, explicate, and complicate the right to privacy, which appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights yet formed perhaps the most crucial legal issue of the second half of the twentieth century. But with the Court’s continuous “refinement” and clarification of the right to privacy, the Court has demonstrated how privacy is a Lyotardian differend which, in dividing the inside from the outside, dismantles the logic of both through deconstruction of the margin. Law-determining rulings protecting this right demonstrate a logical impossibility: the Court has made privacy a “right” in such a way that the conditions for exercising it are subject to state surveillance. To be a subject of the law is to relinquish privacy, and privacy requires that the individual subject him/herself to the law by placing the right to privacy within the public domain. Rules-governed practices are entangled in ways both inextricable and unresolvable with notions of privacy. Legal narratives of the right to privacy, therefore, provide a genealogy of failed supplementation, consistent with an array of cultural narratives reflected in contemporaneous literature, film, drama, and political discourse. The Supreme Court’s continual “refinements” of privacy expose the tenuousness of the authority upon which it is based, with the female body positioned as the site of contradiction upon which narratives of domesticity, sexuality, and subjectivity are made legible

    Mining Butterflies in Streaming Graphs

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    This thesis introduces two main-memory systems sGrapp and sGradd for performing the fundamental analytic tasks of biclique counting and concept drift detection over a streaming graph. A data-driven heuristic is used to architect the systems. To this end, initially, the growth patterns of bipartite streaming graphs are mined and the emergence principles of streaming motifs are discovered. Next, the discovered principles are (a) explained by a graph generator called sGrow; and (b) utilized to establish the requirements for efficient, effective, explainable, and interpretable management and processing of streams. sGrow is used to benchmark stream analytics, particularly in the case of concept drift detection. sGrow displays robust realization of streaming growth patterns independent of initial conditions, scale and temporal characteristics, and model configurations. Extensive evaluations confirm the simultaneous effectiveness and efficiency of sGrapp and sGradd. sGrapp achieves mean absolute percentage error up to 0.05/0.14 for the cumulative butterfly count in streaming graphs with uniform/non-uniform temporal distribution and a processing throughput of 1.5 million data records per second. The throughput and estimation error of sGrapp are 160x higher and 0.02x lower than baselines. sGradd demonstrates an improving performance over time, achieves zero false detection rates when there is not any drift and when drift is already detected, and detects sequential drifts in zero to a few seconds after their occurrence regardless of drift intervals

    On the Utility of Representation Learning Algorithms for Myoelectric Interfacing

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    Electrical activity produced by muscles during voluntary movement is a reflection of the firing patterns of relevant motor neurons and, by extension, the latent motor intent driving the movement. Once transduced via electromyography (EMG) and converted into digital form, this activity can be processed to provide an estimate of the original motor intent and is as such a feasible basis for non-invasive efferent neural interfacing. EMG-based motor intent decoding has so far received the most attention in the field of upper-limb prosthetics, where alternative means of interfacing are scarce and the utility of better control apparent. Whereas myoelectric prostheses have been available since the 1960s, available EMG control interfaces still lag behind the mechanical capabilities of the artificial limbs they are intended to steer—a gap at least partially due to limitations in current methods for translating EMG into appropriate motion commands. As the relationship between EMG signals and concurrent effector kinematics is highly non-linear and apparently stochastic, finding ways to accurately extract and combine relevant information from across electrode sites is still an active area of inquiry.This dissertation comprises an introduction and eight papers that explore issues afflicting the status quo of myoelectric decoding and possible solutions, all related through their use of learning algorithms and deep Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models. Paper I presents a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for multi-label movement decoding of high-density surface EMG (HD-sEMG) signals. Inspired by the successful use of CNNs in Paper I and the work of others, Paper II presents a method for automatic design of CNN architectures for use in myocontrol. Paper III introduces an ANN architecture with an appertaining training framework from which simultaneous and proportional control emerges. Paper Iv introduce a dataset of HD-sEMG signals for use with learning algorithms. Paper v applies a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) model to decode finger forces from intramuscular EMG. Paper vI introduces a Transformer model for myoelectric interfacing that do not need additional training data to function with previously unseen users. Paper vII compares the performance of a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network to that of classical pattern recognition algorithms. Lastly, paper vIII describes a framework for synthesizing EMG from multi-articulate gestures intended to reduce training burden

    Distributed Indexing Schemes for k-Dominant Skyline Analytics on Uncertain Edge-IoT Data

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    Skyline queries typically search a Pareto-optimal set from a given data set to solve the corresponding multiobjective optimization problem. As the number of criteria increases, the skyline presumes excessive data items, which yield a meaningless result. To address this curse of dimensionality, we proposed a k-dominant skyline in which the number of skyline members was reduced by relaxing the restriction on the number of dimensions, considering the uncertainty of data. Specifically, each data item was associated with a probability of appearance, which represented the probability of becoming a member of the k-dominant skyline. As data items appear continuously in data streams, the corresponding k-dominant skyline may vary with time. Therefore, an effective and rapid mechanism of updating the k-dominant skyline becomes crucial. Herein, we proposed two time-efficient schemes, Middle Indexing (MI) and All Indexing (AI), for k-dominant skyline in distributed edge-computing environments, where irrelevant data items can be effectively excluded from the compute to reduce the processing duration. Furthermore, the proposed schemes were validated with extensive experimental simulations. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed MI and AI schemes reduced the computation time by approximately 13% and 56%, respectively, compared with the existing method.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, 12 tables, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computin

    A review of technical factors to consider when designing neural networks for semantic segmentation of Earth Observation imagery

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    Semantic segmentation (classification) of Earth Observation imagery is a crucial task in remote sensing. This paper presents a comprehensive review of technical factors to consider when designing neural networks for this purpose. The review focuses on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and transformer models, discussing prominent design patterns for these ANN families and their implications for semantic segmentation. Common pre-processing techniques for ensuring optimal data preparation are also covered. These include methods for image normalization and chipping, as well as strategies for addressing data imbalance in training samples, and techniques for overcoming limited data, including augmentation techniques, transfer learning, and domain adaptation. By encompassing both the technical aspects of neural network design and the data-related considerations, this review provides researchers and practitioners with a comprehensive and up-to-date understanding of the factors involved in designing effective neural networks for semantic segmentation of Earth Observation imagery.Comment: 145 pages with 32 figure

    Current Challenges in the Application of Algorithms in Multi-institutional Clinical Settings

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    The Coronavirus disease pandemic has highlighted the importance of artificial intelligence in multi-institutional clinical settings. Particularly in situations where the healthcare system is overloaded, and a lot of data is generated, artificial intelligence has great potential to provide automated solutions and to unlock the untapped potential of acquired data. This includes the areas of care, logistics, and diagnosis. For example, automated decision support applications could tremendously help physicians in their daily clinical routine. Especially in radiology and oncology, the exponential growth of imaging data, triggered by a rising number of patients, leads to a permanent overload of the healthcare system, making the use of artificial intelligence inevitable. However, the efficient and advantageous application of artificial intelligence in multi-institutional clinical settings faces several challenges, such as accountability and regulation hurdles, implementation challenges, and fairness considerations. This work focuses on the implementation challenges, which include the following questions: How to ensure well-curated and standardized data, how do algorithms from other domains perform on multi-institutional medical datasets, and how to train more robust and generalizable models? Also, questions of how to interpret results and whether there exist correlations between the performance of the models and the characteristics of the underlying data are part of the work. Therefore, besides presenting a technical solution for manual data annotation and tagging for medical images, a real-world federated learning implementation for image segmentation is introduced. Experiments on a multi-institutional prostate magnetic resonance imaging dataset showcase that models trained by federated learning can achieve similar performance to training on pooled data. Furthermore, Natural Language Processing algorithms with the tasks of semantic textual similarity, text classification, and text summarization are applied to multi-institutional, structured and free-text, oncology reports. The results show that performance gains are achieved by customizing state-of-the-art algorithms to the peculiarities of the medical datasets, such as the occurrence of medications, numbers, or dates. In addition, performance influences are observed depending on the characteristics of the data, such as lexical complexity. The generated results, human baselines, and retrospective human evaluations demonstrate that artificial intelligence algorithms have great potential for use in clinical settings. However, due to the difficulty of processing domain-specific data, there still exists a performance gap between the algorithms and the medical experts. In the future, it is therefore essential to improve the interoperability and standardization of data, as well as to continue working on algorithms to perform well on medical, possibly, domain-shifted data from multiple clinical centers

    Digital agriculture: research, development and innovation in production chains.

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    Digital transformation in the field towards sustainable and smart agriculture. Digital agriculture: definitions and technologies. Agroenvironmental modeling and the digital transformation of agriculture. Geotechnologies in digital agriculture. Scientific computing in agriculture. Computer vision applied to agriculture. Technologies developed in precision agriculture. Information engineering: contributions to digital agriculture. DIPN: a dictionary of the internal proteins nanoenvironments and their potential for transformation into agricultural assets. Applications of bioinformatics in agriculture. Genomics applied to climate change: biotechnology for digital agriculture. Innovation ecosystem in agriculture: Embrapa?s evolution and contributions. The law related to the digitization of agriculture. Innovating communication in the age of digital agriculture. Driving forces for Brazilian agriculture in the next decade: implications for digital agriculture. Challenges, trends and opportunities in digital agriculture in Brazil

    Measuring the impact of COVID-19 on hospital care pathways

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    Care pathways in hospitals around the world reported significant disruption during the recent COVID-19 pandemic but measuring the actual impact is more problematic. Process mining can be useful for hospital management to measure the conformance of real-life care to what might be considered normal operations. In this study, we aim to demonstrate that process mining can be used to investigate process changes associated with complex disruptive events. We studied perturbations to accident and emergency (A &E) and maternity pathways in a UK public hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic. Co-incidentally the hospital had implemented a Command Centre approach for patient-flow management affording an opportunity to study both the planned improvement and the disruption due to the pandemic. Our study proposes and demonstrates a method for measuring and investigating the impact of such planned and unplanned disruptions affecting hospital care pathways. We found that during the pandemic, both A &E and maternity pathways had measurable reductions in the mean length of stay and a measurable drop in the percentage of pathways conforming to normative models. There were no distinctive patterns of monthly mean values of length of stay nor conformance throughout the phases of the installation of the hospital’s new Command Centre approach. Due to a deficit in the available A &E data, the findings for A &E pathways could not be interpreted

    Development of Quantitative Bone SPECT Analysis Methods for Metastatic Bone Disease

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    Prostate cancer is one of the most prevalent types of cancer in males in the United States. Bone is a common site of metastases for metastatic prostate cancer. However, bone metastases are often considered “unmeasurable” using standard anatomic imaging and the RECIST 1.1 criteria. As a result, response to therapy is often suboptimally evaluated by visual interpretation of planar bone scintigraphy with response criteria related to the presence or absence of new lesions. With the commercial availability of quantitative single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) methods, it is now feasible to establish quantitative metrics of therapy response by skeletal metastases. Quantitative bone SPECT (QBSPECT) may provide the ability to estimate bone lesion uptake, volume, and the number of lesions more accurately than planar imaging. However, the accuracy of activity quantification in QBSPECT relies heavily on the precision with which bone metastases and bone structures are delineated. In this research, we aim at developing automated image segmentation methods for fast and accurate delineation of bone and bone metastases in QBSPECT. To begin, we developed registration methods to generate a dataset of realistic and anatomically-varying computerized phantoms for use in QBSPECT simulations. Using these simulations, we develop supervised computer-automated segmentation methods to minimize intra- and inter-observer variations in delineating bone metastases. This project provides accurate segmentation techniques for QBSPECT and paves the way for the development of QBSPECT methods for assessing bone metastases’ therapy response
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