Cannabidiol tweet miner: a framework for identifying misinformation In CBD tweets.

As regulations surrounding cannabis continue to develop, the demand for cannabis-based products is on the rise. Despite not producing the psychoactive effects commonly associated with THC, products containing cannabidiol (CBD) have gained immense popularity in recent years as a potential treatment option for a range of conditions, particularly those associated with pain or sleep disorders. However, due to current federal policies, these products have yet to undergo comprehensive safety and efficacy testing. Fortunately, utilizing advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques, data harvested from social networks have been employed to investigate various social trends within healthcare, such as disease tracking and drug surveillance. By leveraging Twitter data, NLP can offer invaluable insights into public perceptions around CBD, as well as the marketing tactics employed by those marketing such loosely-regulated substances to the general public. Given the lack of comprehensive clinical CBD testing, the various health claims made by CBD sellers regarding their products are highly dubious and potentially perilous, as is evident from the ongoing COVID-19 misinformation. It is therefore critically important to efficiently identify unsupportable claims to guide public health policy and action. To this end, we present our proposed framework, the Cannabidiol Tweet Miner (CBD-TM), which utilizes advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques, including text mining and sentiment analysis, to analyze the similarities and differences between commercial and personal tweets that mention CBD. CBD-TM enables us to identify conditions typically associated with commercial CBD advertising, or conditions not associated with positive sentiment, that are also absent from personal conversations. Through our technical contributions, including NLP, text mining, and sentiment analysis, we can effectively uncover areas where the public may be misled by CBD sellers. Since the rise in popularity of CBD, advertisements making bold claims about its benefits have become increasingly prevalent. The COVID-19 pandemic created a new opportunity for sellers to promote and sell products that purportedly treat and/or prevent the virus, with CBD being one of them. Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued multiple warnings to CBD sellers, this type of misinformation still persists. In response, we have extended the CBD-TM framework with an additional layer of tweet classification designed to identify tweets that make potentially misleading claims about CBD\u27s efficacy in treating and/or preventing COVID-19. Our approach harnesses modern NLP algorithms, utilizing a transformer-based language model to establish the semantic relationship between statements extracted from the FDA\u27s website that contain false information and tweets conveying similar false claims. Our technical contributions build upon the impressive performance of deep language models in various natural language processing and understanding tasks. Specifically, we employ transfer learning via pre-trained deep language models, enabling us to achieve improved misinformation identification in tweets, even with relatively small training sets. Furthermore, this extension of CBD-TM can be easily adapted to detect other forms of misinformation. Through our innovative use of NLP techniques and algorithms, we can more effectively identify and combat false and potentially harmful claims related to CBD and COVID-19, as well as other forms of misinformation. As the conversations surrounding CBD on Twitter evolve over time, concept drift can occur, leading to changes in the topics being discussed. We observed significant changes within the CBD Twitter data stream with the emergence of COVID-19, introducing a new medical condition associated with CBD that would not have been discussed in conversations prior to the pandemic. These shifts in conversation introduce concept drift into CBD-TM, which has the potential to negatively impact our tweet classification models. Therefore, it is crucial to identify when such concept drift occurs to maintain the accuracy of our models. To this end, we propose an innovative approach for identifying potential changes within social network streams, allowing us to determine how and when these conversations evolve over time. Our approach leverages a BERT-based topic model, which can effectively capture how conversations related to CBD change over time. By incorporating advanced NLP techniques and algorithms, we are able to better understand the changes in topic that occur within the CBD Twitter data stream, allowing us to more effectively manage concept drift in CBD-TM. Our technical contributions enable us to maintain the accuracy and effectiveness of our tweet classification models, ensuring that we can continue to identify and address potentially harmful misinformation related to CBD

Tracking the Temporal-Evolution of Supernova Bubbles in Numerical Simulations

The study of low-dimensional, noisy manifolds embedded in a higher dimensional space has been extremely useful in many applications, from the chemical analysis of multi-phase flows to simulations of galactic mergers. Building a probabilistic model of the manifolds has helped in describing their essential properties and how they vary in space. However, when the manifold is evolving through time, a joint spatio-temporal modelling is needed, in order to fully comprehend its nature. We propose a first-order Markovian process that propagates the spatial probabilistic model of a manifold at fixed time, to its adjacent temporal stages. The proposed methodology is demonstrated using a particle simulation of an interacting dwarf galaxy to describe the evolution of a cavity generated by a Supernov

COBE's search for structure in the Big Bang

The launch of Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) and the definition of Earth Observing System (EOS) are two of the major events at NASA-Goddard. The three experiments contained in COBE (Differential Microwave Radiometer (DMR), Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS), and Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment (DIRBE)) are very important in measuring the big bang. DMR measures the isotropy of the cosmic background (direction of the radiation). FIRAS looks at the spectrum over the whole sky, searching for deviations, and DIRBE operates in the infrared part of the spectrum gathering evidence of the earliest galaxy formation. By special techniques, the radiation coming from the solar system will be distinguished from that of extragalactic origin. Unique graphics will be used to represent the temperature of the emitting material. A cosmic event will be modeled of such importance that it will affect cosmological theory for generations to come. EOS will monitor changes in the Earth's geophysics during a whole solar color cycle

Discovering core terms for effective short text clustering

This thesis aims to address the current limitations in short texts clustering and provides a systematic framework that includes three novel methods to effectively measure similarity of two short texts, efficiently group short texts, and dynamically cluster short text streams

Towards Real-World Data Streams for Deep Continual Learning

Continual Learning deals with Artificial Intelligent agents striving to learn from an ever-ending stream of data. Recently, Deep Continual Learning focused on the design of new strategies to endow Artificial Neural Networks with the ability to learn continuously without forgetting previous knowledge. In fact, the learning process of any Artificial Neural Network model is well-known to lack the sufficient stability to preserve existing knowledge when learning new information. This phenomenon, called catastrophic forgetting or simply forgetting, is considered one of the main obstacles for the design of effective Continual Learning agents. However, existing strategies designed to mitigate forgetting have been evaluated on a restricted set of Continual Learning scenarios. The most used one is, by far, the Class-Incremental scenario applied on object detection tasks. Even though it drove interest in Continual Learning, Class-Incremental scenarios strongly constraint the properties of the data stream, thus limiting its ability to model real-world environments. The core of this thesis concerns the introduction of three Continual Learning data streams, whose design is centered around specific real-world environments properties. First, we propose the Class- Incremental with Repetition scenario, which builds a data stream including both the introduction of new concepts and the repetition of previous ones. Repetition is naturally present in many environments and it constitutes an important source of information. Second, we formalize the Continual Pre-Training scenario, which leverages a data stream of unstructured knowledge to keep a pre-trained model updated over time. One important objective of this scenario is to study how to continuously build general, robust representations that does not strongly depend on the specific task to be solved. This is a fundamental property of real-world agents, which build cross-task knowledge and then adapts it to specific needs. Third, we study Continual Learning scenarios where data streams are composed by temporally-correlated data. Temporal correlation is ubiquitous and lies at the foundation of most environments we, as humans, experience during our life. We leverage Recurrent Neural Networks as our main model, due to their intrinsic ability to model temporal correlations. We discovered that, when applied to recurrent models, Continual Learning strategies behave in an unexpected manner. This highlights the limits of the current experimental validation, mostly focused on Computer Vision tasks. Ultimately, the introduction of new data streams contributed to deepen our understanding of how Artificial Neural Networks learn continuously. We discover that forgetting strongly depends on the properties of the data stream and we observed large changes from one data stream to another. Moreover, when forgetting is mild, we were able to effectively mitigate it with simple strategies, or even without any specific ones. Loosening the focus on forgetting allows us to turn our attention to other interesting problems, outlined in this thesis, like (i) separation between continual representation learning and quick adaptation to novel tasks, (ii) robustness to unbalanced data streams and (iii) ability to continuously learn temporal correlations. These objectives currently defy existing strategies and will likely represent the next challenge for Continual Learning research

Life Among the Machines: James Joyce\u27s Ulysses and Early Twentieth-Century Technology

This project investigates the cultural impact of the various technological innovations that appeared around the turn of the twentieth century, and how modernism contends with the increasing presence of technology in everyday life. It focuses on the work of James Joyce, whose attitudes toward technology differ significantly from many of his contemporaries, and on his novel Ulysses, which takes place in metropolitan Dublin and features many of the everyday technologies of the early twentieth century. The first chapter examines the relationship between technology and the vitalist theories of Henri Bergson and Hans Driesch, arguing that the popularity these theories enjoyed arose from anxieties about the eroding barrier between the human and the machine. The principal characters in Joyce’s novel stand on opposite sides of the vitalist debate. The second chapter describes how the gramophone troubled traditional associations between the voice and the living breath as the guarantor of the presence of an authentic, living speaker. It looks at how various inventions provided metaphors for, and promoted belief in, supernatural phenomena like telepathy and metapersonal memory, arguing that Joyce’s understanding of the “uncanny” side of technology leads him to satirize such enthusiasms in Ulysses. The third chapter opens by considering the gendering of mass culture as opposed to high art, and looks at the role pornography plays both in Ulysses and in the reception of Joyce’s novel. It investigates how mechanical reproduction complicated the traditional associations between women, nature, and technology, and how these complications prompted a turn toward more physical and vitalistic conceptions of masculinity

Research and technology, 1992

Selected research and technology activities at Ames Research Center, including the Moffett Field site and the Dryden Flight Research Facility, are summarized. These activities exemplify the Center's varied and productive research efforts for 1992