Longitudinal EEG power in the first postnatal year differentiates autism outcomes

An aim of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) research is to identify early biomarkers that inform ASD pathophysiology and expedite detection. Brain oscillations captured in electroencephalography (EEG) are thought to be disrupted as core ASD pathophysiology. We leverage longitudinal EEG power measurements from 3 to 36 months of age in infants at low- and high-risk for ASD to test how and when power distinguishes ASD risk and diagnosis by age 3-years. Power trajectories across the first year, second year, or first three years postnatally were submitted to data-driven modeling to differentiate ASD outcomes. Power dynamics during the first postnatal year best differentiate ASD diagnoses. Delta and gamma frequency power trajectories consistently distinguish infants with ASD diagnoses from others. There is also a developmental shift across timescales towards including higher-frequency power to differentiate outcomes. These findings reveal the importance of developmental timing and trajectory in understanding pathophysiology and classifying ASD outcomes.R01 DC010290 - NIDCD NIH HHS; T32 MH112510 - NIMH NIH HHS; U54 HD090255 - NICHD NIH HHSPublished versio

Coupled nonparametric shape priors for segmentation of multiple basal ganglia structures

This paper presents a new method for multiple structure segmentation, using a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation framework, based on prior shape densities involving nonparametric multivariate kernel density estimation of multiple shapes. Our method is motivated by the observation that neighboring or coupling structures in medical images generate configurations and co-dependencies which could potentially aid in segmentation if properly exploited. Our technique allows simultaneous segmentation of multiple objects, where highly contrasted, easy-to-segment structures can help improve the segmentation of weakly contrasted objects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on both synthetic images and real magnetic resonance images (MRI) for segmentation of basal ganglia structures

On compact manifolds admitting indefinite metrics with parallel Weyl tensor

Compact pseudo-Riemannian manifolds that have parallel Weyl tensor without being conformally flat or locally symmetric are known to exist in infinitely many dimensions greater than 4. We prove some general topological properties of such manifolds, namely, vanishing of the Euler characteristic and real Pontryagin classes, and infiniteness of the fundamental group. We also show that, in the Lorentzian case, each of them is at least 5-dimensional and admits a two-fold cover which is a bundle over the circle.Comment: 20 page

Season- and depth-dependent variability of a demersal fish assemblage in a large fjord estuary (Puget Sound, Washington)

Fjord estuaries are common along the northeast Pacific coastline, but little information is available on fish assemblage structure and its spatiotemporal variability. Here, we examined changes in diversity metrics, species biomasses, and biomass spectra (the distribution of biomass across body size classes) over three seasons (fall, winter, summer) and at multiple depths (20 to 160 m) in Puget Sound, Washington, a deep and highly urbanized fjord estuary on the U.S. west coast. Our results indicate that this fish assemblage is dominated by cartilaginous species (spotted ratfish [Hydrolagus colliei] and spiny dogfish [Squalus acanthias]) and therefore differs fundamentally from fish assemblages found in shallower estuaries in the northeast Pacific. Diversity was greatest in shallow waters (80 m) that are more common in Puget Sound and that are dominated by spotted ratf ish and seasonally (fall and summer) by spiny dogfish. Strong depth-dependent variation in the demersal fish assemblage may be a general feature of deep fjord estuaries and indicates pronounced spatial variability in the food web. Future comparisons with less impacted fjords may offer insight into whether cartilaginous species naturally dominate these systems or only do so under conditions related to human-caused ecosystem degradation. Information on species distributions is critical for marine spatial planning and for modeling energy flows in coastal food webs. The data presented here will aid these endeavors and highlight areas for future research in this important yet understudied system

Six Noise Type Military Sound Classifier

Blast noise from military installations often has a negative impact on the quality of life of residents living in nearby communities. This negatively impacts the military's testing \& training capabilities due to restrictions, curfews, or range closures enacted to address noise complaints. In order to more directly manage noise around military installations, accurate noise monitoring has become a necessity. Although most noise monitors are simple sound level meters, more recent ones are capable of discerning blasts from ambient noise with some success. Investigators at the University of Pittsburgh previously developed a more advanced noise classifier that can discern between wind, aircraft, and blast noise, while simultaneously lowering the measurement threshold. Recent work will be presented from the development of a more advanced classifier that identifies additional classes of noise such as machine gun fire, vehicles, and thunder. Additional signal metrics were explored given the increased complexity of the classifier. By broadening the types of noise the system can accurately classify and increasing the number of metrics, a new system was developed with increased blast noise accuracy, decreased number of missed events, and significantly fewer false positives

Toward robust deep neural networks

Dans cette thèse, notre objectif est de développer des modèles d’apprentissage robustes et fiables mais précis, en particulier les Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), en présence des exemples anomalies, comme des exemples adversaires et d’échantillons hors distribution –Out-of-Distribution (OOD). Comme la première contribution, nous proposons d’estimer la confiance calibrée pour les exemples adversaires en encourageant la diversité dans un ensemble des CNNs. À cette fin, nous concevons un ensemble de spécialistes diversifiés avec un mécanisme de vote simple et efficace en termes de calcul pour prédire les exemples adversaires avec une faible confiance tout en maintenant la confiance prédicative des échantillons propres élevée. En présence de désaccord dans notre ensemble, nous prouvons qu’une borne supérieure de 0:5 + _0 peut être établie pour la confiance, conduisant à un seuil de détection global fixe de tau = 0; 5. Nous justifions analytiquement le rôle de la diversité dans notre ensemble sur l’atténuation du risque des exemples adversaires à la fois en boîte noire et en boîte blanche. Enfin, nous évaluons empiriquement la robustesse de notre ensemble aux attaques de la boîte noire et de la boîte blanche sur plusieurs données standards. La deuxième contribution vise à aborder la détection d’échantillons OOD à travers un modèle de bout en bout entraîné sur un ensemble OOD approprié. À cette fin, nous abordons la question centrale suivante : comment différencier des différents ensembles de données OOD disponibles par rapport à une tâche de distribution donnée pour sélectionner la plus appropriée, ce qui induit à son tour un modèle calibré avec un taux de détection des ensembles inaperçus de données OOD? Pour répondre à cette question, nous proposons de différencier les ensembles OOD par leur niveau de "protection" des sub-manifolds. Pour mesurer le niveau de protection, nous concevons ensuite trois nouvelles mesures efficaces en termes de calcul à l’aide d’un CNN vanille préformé. Dans une vaste série d’expériences sur les tâches de classification d’image et d’audio, nous démontrons empiriquement la capacité d’un CNN augmenté (A-CNN) et d’un CNN explicitement calibré pour détecter une portion significativement plus grande des exemples OOD. Fait intéressant, nous observons également qu’un tel A-CNN (nommé A-CNN) peut également détecter les adversaires exemples FGS en boîte noire avec des perturbations significatives. En tant que troisième contribution, nous étudions de plus près de la capacité de l’A-CNN sur la détection de types plus larges d’adversaires boîte noire (pas seulement ceux de type FGS). Pour augmenter la capacité d’A-CNN à détecter un plus grand nombre d’adversaires,nous augmentons l’ensemble d’entraînement OOD avec des échantillons interpolés inter-classes. Ensuite, nous démontrons que l’A-CNN, entraîné sur tous ces données, a un taux de détection cohérent sur tous les types des adversaires exemples invisibles. Alors que la entraînement d’un A-CNN sur des adversaires PGD ne conduit pas à un taux de détection stable sur tous les types d’adversaires, en particulier les types inaperçus. Nous évaluons également visuellement l’espace des fonctionnalités et les limites de décision dans l’espace d’entrée d’un CNN vanille et de son homologue augmenté en présence d’adversaires et de ceux qui sont propres. Par un A-CNN correctement formé, nous visons à faire un pas vers un modèle d’apprentissage debout en bout unifié et fiable avec de faibles taux de risque sur les échantillons propres et les échantillons inhabituels, par exemple, les échantillons adversaires et OOD. La dernière contribution est de présenter une application de A-CNN pour l’entraînement d’un détecteur d’objet robuste sur un ensemble de données partiellement étiquetées, en particulier un ensemble de données fusionné. La fusion de divers ensembles de données provenant de contextes similaires mais avec différents ensembles d’objets d’intérêt (OoI) est un moyen peu coûteux de créer un ensemble de données à grande échelle qui couvre un plus large spectre d’OoI. De plus, la fusion d’ensembles de données permet de réaliser un détecteur d’objet unifié, au lieu d’en avoir plusieurs séparés, ce qui entraîne une réduction des coûts de calcul et de temps. Cependant, la fusion d’ensembles de données, en particulier à partir d’un contexte similaire, entraîne de nombreuses instances d’étiquetées manquantes. Dans le but d’entraîner un détecteur d’objet robuste intégré sur un ensemble de données partiellement étiquetées mais à grande échelle, nous proposons un cadre d’entraînement auto-supervisé pour surmonter le problème des instances d’étiquettes manquantes dans les ensembles des données fusionnés. Notre cadre est évalué sur un ensemble de données fusionné avec un taux élevé d’étiquettes manquantes. Les résultats empiriques confirment la viabilité de nos pseudo-étiquettes générées pour améliorer les performances de YOLO, en tant que détecteur d’objet à la pointe de la technologie.In this thesis, our goal is to develop robust and reliable yet accurate learning models, particularly Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), in the presence of adversarial examples and Out-of-Distribution (OOD) samples. As the first contribution, we propose to predict adversarial instances with high uncertainty through encouraging diversity in an ensemble of CNNs. To this end, we devise an ensemble of diverse specialists along with a simple and computationally efficient voting mechanism to predict the adversarial examples with low confidence while keeping the predictive confidence of the clean samples high. In the presence of high entropy in our ensemble, we prove that the predictive confidence can be upper-bounded, leading to have a globally fixed threshold over the predictive confidence for identifying adversaries. We analytically justify the role of diversity in our ensemble on mitigating the risk of both black-box and white-box adversarial examples. Finally, we empirically assess the robustness of our ensemble to the black-box and the white-box attacks on several benchmark datasets.The second contribution aims to address the detection of OOD samples through an end-to-end model trained on an appropriate OOD set. To this end, we address the following central question: how to differentiate many available OOD sets w.r.t. a given in distribution task to select the most appropriate one, which in turn induces a model with a high detection rate of unseen OOD sets? To answer this question, we hypothesize that the “protection” level of in-distribution sub-manifolds by each OOD set can be a good possible property to differentiate OOD sets. To measure the protection level, we then design three novel, simple, and cost-effective metrics using a pre-trained vanilla CNN. In an extensive series of experiments on image and audio classification tasks, we empirically demonstrate the abilityof an Augmented-CNN (A-CNN) and an explicitly-calibrated CNN for detecting a significantly larger portion of unseen OOD samples, if they are trained on the most protective OOD set. Interestingly, we also observe that the A-CNN trained on the most protective OOD set (calledA-CNN) can also detect the black-box Fast Gradient Sign (FGS) adversarial examples. As the third contribution, we investigate more closely the capacity of the A-CNN on the detection of wider types of black-box adversaries. To increase the capability of A-CNN to detect a larger number of adversaries, we augment its OOD training set with some inter-class interpolated samples. Then, we demonstrate that the A-CNN trained on the most protective OOD set along with the interpolated samples has a consistent detection rate on all types of unseen adversarial examples. Where as training an A-CNN on Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) adversaries does not lead to a stable detection rate on all types of adversaries, particularly the unseen types. We also visually assess the feature space and the decision boundaries in the input space of a vanilla CNN and its augmented counterpart in the presence of adversaries and the clean ones. By a properly trained A-CNN, we aim to take a step toward a unified and reliable end-to-end learning model with small risk rates on both clean samples and the unusual ones, e.g. adversarial and OOD samples.The last contribution is to show a use-case of A-CNN for training a robust object detector on a partially-labeled dataset, particularly a merged dataset. Merging various datasets from similar contexts but with different sets of Object of Interest (OoI) is an inexpensive way to craft a large-scale dataset which covers a larger spectrum of OoIs. Moreover, merging datasets allows achieving a unified object detector, instead of having several separate ones, resultingin the reduction of computational and time costs. However, merging datasets, especially from a similar context, causes many missing-label instances. With the goal of training an integrated robust object detector on a partially-labeled but large-scale dataset, we propose a self-supervised training framework to overcome the issue of missing-label instances in the merged datasets. Our framework is evaluated on a merged dataset with a high missing-label rate. The empirical results confirm the viability of our generated pseudo-labels to enhance the performance of YOLO, as the current (to date) state-of-the-art object detector

Information Metrics (iMetrics): A Research Specialty with a Socio-Cognitive Identity?

"Bibliometrics", "scientometrics", "informetrics", and "webometrics" can all be considered as manifestations of a single research area with similar objectives and methods, which we call "information metrics" or iMetrics. This study explores the cognitive and social distinctness of iMetrics with respect to the general information science (IS), focusing on a core of researchers, shared vocabulary and literature/knowledge base. Our analysis investigates the similarities and differences between four document sets. The document sets are drawn from three core journals for iMetrics research (Scientometrics, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, and Journal of Informetrics). We split JASIST into document sets containing iMetrics and general IS articles. The volume of publications in this representation of the specialty has increased rapidly during the last decade. A core of researchers that predominantly focus on iMetrics topics can thus be identified. This core group has developed a shared vocabulary as exhibited in high similarity of title words and one that shares a knowledge base. The research front of this field moves faster than the research front of information science in general, bringing it closer to Price's dream.Comment: Accepted for publication in Scientometric