Synthetic Text Generation with Differential Privacy: A Simple and Practical Recipe

Privacy concerns have attracted increasing attention in data-driven products due to the tendency of machine learning models to memorize sensitive training data. Generating synthetic versions of such data with a formal privacy guarantee, such as differential privacy (DP), provides a promising path to mitigating these privacy concerns, but previous approaches in this direction have typically failed to produce synthetic data of high quality. In this work, we show that a simple and practical recipe in the text domain is effective: simply fine-tuning a pretrained generative language model with DP enables the model to generate useful synthetic text with strong privacy protection. Through extensive empirical analyses on both benchmark and private customer data, we demonstrate that our method produces synthetic text that is competitive in terms of utility with its non-private counterpart, meanwhile providing strong protection against potential privacy leakages.Comment: ACL 2023 Main Conference (Honorable Mention

Food Insecurity and Lived Experience of Students (FILES)

This paper provides evidence of the impact of Covid-19 on higher education students’ levels of food security and lived experiences. We surveyed higher education students, attending three universities in the UK and one in the USA, from 1st April to 30th April 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic and after universities closed the majority of their buildings and ceased campus-based teaching. A total of 1,234 surveys were returned. The preliminary findings show that nearly 35% of students surveyed reported low or very low levels of food security and 41% of students were worried that their food would run out. We also found high levels of poor mental health and well-being; and mental health was associated with level of food security. The best predictor of the level of food security was students’ living arrangements during the Covid-19 pandemic. Students who were living on their own or with other students were more likely to experience low or very low levels of food insecurity compared to those students living with family members. The financial data collected show that many students relied on employment as their main source of income, and students are very worried about their current financial security. Furthermore, we found a relatively high reliance on ultra-processed foods as the main food type in students’ diets. The data from open-ended questions lend further support to the quantitative findings reported and provide further insight into students’ lived experiences. Finally, this paper concludes with key recommendations for policy makers, universities and student unions. (Submitted to the Education Select Committee Inquiry on The impact of COVID-19 on education and children’s services, 03 June 2020) FILES is a research collaboration involving a number of academics and student union officers from across England, Northern Ireland and the USA. The group’s key objective is to research food insecurity and lived experiences of students in Higher Education. Food insecurity has been explored in other populations, but no evidence has been presented that examines food insecurity and lived experiences of students in higher education following Covid-19 lockdown. Authors: Professor Greta Defeyter, Professor Paul Stretesky, Dr Mike Long, Dr Sinéad Furey, Dr Christian Reynolds, Dr Alyson Dodds, Dr Debbie Porteous, Dr Emily Mann, Mrs Christine Stretesky, Ms Anna Kemp, Mr James Fox, Mr Andrew McAnalle

Self-reported benefits from successive bilateral cochlear implantation in post-lingually deafened adults: randomised controlled trial. Beneficios auto-reportados en la implantación coclear bilateral consecutiva en adultos ensordecidos postlingüísticos: prueba aleatoria controlada

Adult users of unilateral Nucleus CI24 cochlear implants with the SPEAK processing strategy were randomised either to receive a second identical implant in the contralateral ear immediately, or to wait 12 months while they acted as controls for late-emerging benefits of the first implant. Twenty four subjects, twelve from each group, completed the study. Receipt of a second implant led to improvements in self-reported abilities in spatial hearing, quality of hearing, and hearing for speech, but to generally non-significant changes in measures of quality of life. Multivariate analyses showed that positive changes in quality of life were associated with improvements in hearing, but were offset by negative changes associated with worsening tinnitus. Even in a best-case scenario, in which no worsening of tinnitus was assumed to occur, the gain in quality of life was too small to achieve an acceptable cost-effectiveness ratio. The most promising strategies for improving the cost-effectiveness of bilateral implantation are to increase effectiveness through enhanced signal processing in binaural processors, and to reduce the cost of implant hardware

Criteria of candidacy for unilateral cochlear implantation in postlingually deafened adults I: Theory and measures of effectiveness

Objectives: The objectives of this study were to distinguish the equivalent-effectiveness, health-economic, and actuarial approaches to specifying criteria of candidacy for medical interventions; to apply the equivalent-effectiveness approach to unilateral cochlear implantation for postlingually deafened adults; and to determine whether the criterion should take age at implantation and duration of profound deafness into account. Design: The study was designed as a prospective cohort study in 13 hospitals with four groups of severely-profoundly hearing-impaired subjects distinguished by their preoperative ability to identify words in sentences when aided acoustically. The groups represent a progressive relaxation of criteria of candidacy: Group I (N = 134) scored 0% correct without lipreading and did not improve their lipreading score significantly when aided; group II (N = 93) scored 0% without lipreading but did improve their lipreading score significantly when aided; group III (N = 53) scored 0% without lipreading when the to-be-implanted ear was aided but between 1% and ~50% when the other ear was aided. Group IV (N = 31) scored between 1% and ~50% without lipreading when the to-be-implanted ear was aided. Measures of speech intelligibility, health utility, and otologically relevant quality of life were obtained before surgery and 9 mo after surgery from each subject. Measures of effectiveness were calculated as the difference between 9-mo and preoperative scores. Results: Effectiveness differed only slightly between groups. Effectiveness was not strongly associated with age at the time of implantation. Greater effectiveness was associated with implantation in the ear with the shorter duration of profound deafness. Cochlear implantation was least effective when the preoperative audiological status of the better-hearing ear was good and the duration of profound deafness of the implanted ear was long. As a result, effectiveness was not significant for the subsets of groups III and IV, who were given implants in ears that had been profoundly deaf for more than 30 yr. Conclusions: The effectiveness of cochlear implantation differs little between groups of candidates who score zero with acoustic hearing aids before surgery and groups who score up to ~50% correct, thereby justifying a relaxation of the criterion of candidacy to embrace some members of the latter groups. The criterion should be based not only on preoperative speech intelligibility but also on duration of profound deafness in the to-be-implanted ear