Human participants in AI research: Ethics and transparency in practice

In recent years, research involving human participants has been critical to advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), particularly in the areas of conversational, human-compatible, and cooperative AI. For example, around 12% and 6% of publications at recent AAAI and NeurIPS conferences indicate the collection of original human data, respectively. Yet AI and ML researchers lack guidelines for ethical, transparent research practices with human participants. Fewer than one out of every four of these AAAI and NeurIPS papers provide details of ethical review, the collection of informed consent, or participant compensation. This paper aims to bridge this gap by exploring normative similarities and differences between AI research and related fields that involve human participants. Though psychology, human-computer interaction, and other adjacent fields offer historic lessons and helpful insights, AI research raises several specific concerns\unicode{x2014}namely, participatory design, crowdsourced dataset development, and an expansive role of corporations\unicode{x2014}that necessitate a contextual ethics framework. To address these concerns, this paper outlines a set of guidelines for ethical and transparent practice with human participants in AI and ML research. These guidelines can be found in Section 4 on pp. 4\unicode{x2013}7

Phenotype Extraction: Estimation and Biometrical Genetic Analysis of Individual Dynamics

Within-person data can exhibit a virtually limitless variety of statistical patterns, but it can be difficult to distinguish meaningful features from statistical artifacts. Studies of complex traits have previously used genetic signals like twin-based heritability to distinguish between the two. This dissertation is a collection of studies applying state-space modeling to conceptualize and estimate novel phenotypic constructs for use in psychiatric research and further biometrical genetic analysis. The aims are to: (1) relate control theoretic concepts to health-related phenotypes; (2) design statistical models that formally define those phenotypes; (3) estimate individual phenotypic values from time series data; (4) consider hierarchical methods for biometrical genetic analysis of individual phenotypic variation

The Importance of Inclusive Spaces in Social Skills Development: Drawing on the LGBTQ Educational and Disability Studies in Education Frameworks

This manuscript highlights a major finding from a larger study conducted in the United States that used phenomenological interviews with adults with autism who typed to communicate. Participants shared their United States educational experiences before and after learning to type. This finding focused on how disability studies in education and the development of inclusive spaces, such as those designed for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, and queer or questioning (LGBTQ) students, may change the way in which educators support students with autism in developing and sustaining natural and meaningful friendships. Thus, this paper examined the social experiences of one participant who had an inclusive education from preschool through college graduation, and whose experience with participation in a social club, described as an acceptance coalition for the LGBTQ community, can influence the way in which educators provide support for building relationships with peers beginning in the elementary school setting

Adaptive Synaptic Failure Enables Sampling from Posterior Predictive Distributions in the Brain

Bayesian interpretations of neural processing require that biological mechanisms represent and operate upon probability distributions in accordance with Bayes' theorem. Many have speculated that synaptic failure constitutes a mechanism of variational, i.e., approximate, Bayesian inference in the brain. Whereas models have previously used synaptic failure to sample over uncertainty in model parameters, we demonstrate that by adapting transmission probabilities to learned network weights, synaptic failure can sample not only over model uncertainty, but complete posterior predictive distributions as well. Our results potentially explain the brain's ability to perform probabilistic searches and to approximate complex integrals. These operations are involved in numerous calculations, including likelihood evaluation and state value estimation for complex planning.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2111.0978

Recent Paleoanthropological Excavations of In Situ Deposits at Makapansgat, South Africa – A First Report

The Makapansgat Limeworks is a significant Pliocene site both for its sample of 35 hominin fossils as well as its wealth of fossil fauna. The lithological and paleontological successions reveal local environmental changes that are important for understanding the context of hominin evolution in southern Africa. Yet most of the site’s fossils were found in dumps left behind by quarry operations, and the paleoecological interpretations rest upon debatable assumptions about the original fossil provenience. We have recently initiated systematic paleoanthropological excavations at Makapansgat to recover well provenanced fossils in order to: 1) assess whether faunal successions are discernable in the Makapansgat sequence; 2) assist environmental interpretations of the site; 3) and potentially recover the oldest hominins in South Africa, roughly coincident with Australopithecus afarensis in East Africa. This paper presents a summary of our current paleoenvironmental research at the Limeworks and preliminary results of ongoing in situ excavations

Synthesis, structure and anti-fungal activity of dimeric Ag(I) complexes containing bis-imidazole ligands

Five Ag(I) complexes containing the ligands bis(imidazol-2-yl)methane (2-BIM) and its derivatives were prepared and [Ag2(2-BIM)2](ClO4)2 and [Ag2(2-BIM(Bz)OH)2](ClO4)2 EtOH were characterised using X-ray crystallography. In each dimer the two Ag(I) ions are two-coordinate and there are small but definite argentophilic Ag-Ag (d10-d10) interactions. All of the complexes display anti-fungal activity when tested in vitro against the fungal pathogen Candida albicans