Scruples: A Corpus of Community Ethical Judgments on 32,000 Real-Life Anecdotes

As AI systems become an increasing part of people's everyday lives, it becomes ever more important that they understand people's ethical norms. Motivated by descriptive ethics, a field of study that focuses on people's descriptive judgments rather than theoretical prescriptions on morality, we investigate a novel, data-driven approach to machine ethics. We introduce Scruples, the first large-scale dataset with 625,000 ethical judgments over 32,000 real-life anecdotes. Each anecdote recounts a complex ethical situation, often posing moral dilemmas, paired with a distribution of judgments contributed by the community members. Our dataset presents a major challenge to state-of-the-art neural language models, leaving significant room for improvement. However, when presented with simplified moral situations, the results are considerably more promising, suggesting that neural models can effectively learn simpler ethical building blocks. A key take-away of our empirical analysis is that norms are not always clean-cut; many situations are naturally divisive. We present a new method to estimate the best possible performance on such tasks with inherently diverse label distributions, and explore likelihood functions that separate intrinsic from model uncertainty.Comment: 18 pages, 14 tables, 18 figures. Accepted to AAAI 2021. For associated code and data, see https://github.com/allenai/scruple

ATOMIC: An Atlas of Machine Commonsense for If-Then Reasoning

We present ATOMIC, an atlas of everyday commonsense reasoning, organized through 877k textual descriptions of inferential knowledge. Compared to existing resources that center around taxonomic knowledge, ATOMIC focuses on inferential knowledge organized as typed if-then relations with variables (e.g., "if X pays Y a compliment, then Y will likely return the compliment"). We propose nine if-then relation types to distinguish causes vs. effects, agents vs. themes, voluntary vs. involuntary events, and actions vs. mental states. By generatively training on the rich inferential knowledge described in ATOMIC, we show that neural models can acquire simple commonsense capabilities and reason about previously unseen events. Experimental results demonstrate that multitask models that incorporate the hierarchical structure of if-then relation types lead to more accurate inference compared to models trained in isolation, as measured by both automatic and human evaluation.Comment: AAAI 2019 C

UNICORN on RAINBOW: A Universal Commonsense Reasoning Model on a New Multitask Benchmark

Commonsense AI has long been seen as a near impossible goal -- until recently. Now, research interest has sharply increased with an influx of new benchmarks and models. We propose two new ways to evaluate commonsense models, emphasizing their generality on new tasks and building on diverse, recently introduced benchmarks. First, we propose a new multitask benchmark, RAINBOW, to promote research on commonsense models that generalize well over multiple tasks and datasets. Second, we propose a novel evaluation, the cost equivalent curve, that sheds new insight on how the choice of source datasets, pretrained language models, and transfer learning methods impacts performance and data efficiency. We perform extensive experiments -- over 200 experiments encompassing 4800 models -- and report multiple valuable and sometimes surprising findings, e.g., that transfer almost always leads to better or equivalent performance if following a particular recipe, that QA-based commonsense datasets transfer well with each other, while commonsense knowledge graphs do not, and that perhaps counter-intuitively, larger models benefit more from transfer than smaller ones. Last but not least, we introduce a new universal commonsense reasoning model, UNICORN, that establishes new state-of-the-art performance across 8 popular commonsense benchmarks, aNLI (87.3%), CosmosQA (91.8%), HellaSWAG (93.9%), PIQA (90.1%), SocialIQa (83.2%), WinoGrande (86.6%), CycIC (94.0%) and CommonsenseQA (79.3%).Comment: 27 pages, 19 figures, 34 tables. Accepted to AAAI 2021. For associated code and data see https://github.com/allenai/rainbo

Clinical vignette: Leaching liver lesions: a case of invasive Klebsiella pneumoniae liver abscess syndrome

Klebsiella pneumoniae liver abscesses are becoming more prevalent in the United States and have the ability to spread to several sites via septic embolization. 8-15% of patients have infections at other anatomical sites which is considered invasive K. pneumoniae liver abscess syndrome (IKPLAS). An otherwise healthy 42-year-old Vietnamese man who immigrated to the United States six years prior presented to the emergency department with a nine-day history of back pain. The patient reported his pain worsened acutely just prior to presentation when lifting a heavy object. He also described numbness of the left leg. At presentation, the patient was septic. Because of this, a MRI of the lumbar spine was obtained which demonstrated multiple paraspinal and gluteal region abscesses. A chest CT demonstrated a 2cm right hepatic lobe hypoattenuating lesion suggestive of an abscess as well as multiple pulmonary nodules with peripheral and upper lobe predominance. Blood cultures drawn prior to initiation of antibiotics grew out Klebsiella pneumoniae. Given the patients ethnic background and the organism isolated, the liver lesion was suspected as the primary abscess, with hematogenous dissemination to the lungs, paraspinal and gluteal regions, this being consistent with IKPLAS. The patient underwent drainage of the piriformis muscle abscess which also yielded K. pneumoniae. When cultures returned positive for K. pneumoniae, the antibiotic regimen was narrowed to ceftriaxone based on organism susceptibility. Despite appropriate antibiotic therapy, he went on to develop further abscesses as well osteomyelitis of the L1 and L2 vertebrae. He underwent subsequent abscess drainage after which the patient defervesced and his back pain improved. The patient was eventually discharged on ceftriaxone 2gm every 12 hours and received a total of eight weeks of antibiotics. Invasive Klebsiella pneumoniae liver abscesses syndrome (IKPLAS) is a rare clinical disease entity defined as a liver abscess and disseminated Klebsiella infection. It is often seen in patients of Asian descent and is increasing in prevalence within the United States. IKPLAS is associated with a high degree of morbidity and mortality. It should be considered in septic patients who are found to have liver abscesses and are of Asian descent.\u2

Ecological constraint mapping: understanding uutcome-limiting bottlenecks for improved environmental decision-making in marine and coastal environments

Despite genuine attempts, the history of marine and coastal ecosystem management is littered with examples of poor environmental, social and financial outcomes. Marine ecosystems are largely populated by species with open populations, and feature ecological processes that are driven by multiple, interwoven, dynamic causes and effects. This complexity limits the acquisition of relevant knowledge of habitat characteristics, species utilisation and ecosystem dynamics. The consequence of this lack of knowledge is uncertainty about the link between action taken and outcome achieved. Such uncertainty risks misdirected human and financial investment, and sometimes may even lead to perverse outcomes. Technological advances offer new data acquisition opportunities, but the diversity and complexity of the biological and ecological information needed to reduce uncertainty means the increase in knowledge will be slow unless it is undertaken in a structured and focussed way. We introduce “Ecological Constraint Mapping” – an approach that takes a “supply chain” point of view and focusses on identifying the principal factors that constrain life-history outcomes (success/productivity/resilience/fitness) for marine and coastal species, and ultimately the quality and resilience of the ecosystems they are components of, and the life-history supporting processes and values ecosystems provide. By providing a framework for the efficient development of actionable knowledge, Ecological Constraint Mapping can facilitate a move from paradigm-based to knowledge-informed decision-making on ecological issues. It is suitable for developing optimal solutions to a wide range of conservation and management problems, providing an organised framework that aligns with current perspectives on the complex nature of marine and coastal systems

Helicobacter pylori-induced inhibition of vascular endothelial cell functions: a role for VacA-dependent nitric oxide reduction

Epidemiological and clinical studies provide compelling support for a causal relationship between Helicobacter pylori infection and endothelial dysfunction, leading to vascular diseases. However, clear biochemical evidence for this association is limited. In the present study, we have conducted a comprehensive investigation of endothelial injury in bovine aortic endothelial cells (BAECs) induced by H. pylori-conditioned medium (HPCM) prepared from H. pylori 60190 [vacuolating cytotoxin A (Vac(+))]. BAECs were treated with either unconditioned media, HPCM (0-25% vol/vol), or Escherichia coli-conditioned media for 24 h, and cell functions were monitored. Vac(+) HPCM significantly decreased BAEC proliferation, tube formation, and migration (by up to 44%, 65%, and 28%, respectively). Posttreatment, we also observed sporadic zonnula occludens-1 immunolocalization along the cell-cell border, and increased BAEC permeability to FD40 Dextran, indicating barrier reduction. These effects were blocked by 5-nitro-2-(3-phenylpropylamino)benzoic acid (VacA inhibitor) and were not observed with conditioned media prepared from either VacA-deleted H. pylori or E. coli. The cellular mechanism mediating these events was also considered. Vac(+) HPCM (but not Vac(-)) reduced nitric oxide (NO) by \u3e50%, whereas S-nitroso-N-acetylpenicillamine, an NO donor, recovered all Vac(+) HPCM-dependent effects on cell functions. We further demonstrated that laminar shear stress, an endothelial NO synthase/NO stimulus in vivo, could also recover the Vac(+) HPCM-induced decreases in BAEC functions. This study shows, for the first time, a significant proatherogenic effect of H. pylori-secreted factors on a range of vascular endothelial dysfunction markers. Specifically, the VacA-dependent reduction in endothelial NO is indicated in these events. The atheroprotective impact of laminar shear stress in this context is also evident

The incidence and prevalence of inflammatory bowel disease in UK primary care: a retrospective cohort study of the IQVIA Medical Research Database

Background: Our knowledge of the incidence and prevalence of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is uncertain. Recent studies reported an increase in prevalence. However, they excluded a high proportion of ambiguous cases from general practice. Estimates are needed to inform health care providers who plan the provision of services for IBD patients. We aimed to estimate the IBD incidence and prevalence in UK general practice. Methods: We undertook a retrospective cohort study of routine electronic health records from the IQVIA Medical Research Database covering 14 million patients. Adult patients from 2006 to 2016 were included. IBD was defined as an IBD related Read code or record of IBD specific medication. Annual incidence and 12-month period prevalence were calculated. Results: The prevalence of IBD increased between 2006 and 2016 from 106.2 (95% CI 105.2–107.3) to 142.1 (95% CI 140.7–143.5) IBD cases per 10,000 patients which is a 33.8% increase. Incidence varied across the years. The incidence across the full study period was 69.5 (95% CI 68.6–70.4) per 100,000 person years. Conclusions: In this large study we found higher estimates of IBD incidence and prevalence than previously reported. Estimates are highly dependent on definitions of disease and previously may have been underestimated

Faecal calprotectin testing in UK general practice : a retrospective cohort study using The Health Improvement Network database

Faecal calprotectin (FC) testing to detect inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) was recommended for use in UK general practice in 2013. The actual use of FC testing following the national recommendations is unknown. To characterise the use of FC testing for IBD in UK general practice. A retrospective cohort study of routine electronic patient records from The Health Improvement Network database from UK general practice. The study included 6 965 853 adult patients (aged ≥18 years), between 2006 and 2016. FC test uptake, the patients tested, and patient management following testing were characterised. A total of 17 027 patients had 19 840 FC tests recorded. The mean age of tested patients was 44.2 years. The first FC tests were documented in 2009. FC test use was still increasing in 2016. By 2016, 66.8% ( = 493/738) of practices had started FC testing. About one-fifth (20.7%, = 1253/6051) of tests were carried out in patients aged ≥60 years. Only 7.8% ( = 473/6051) of the FC test records were preceded by symptoms eligible for FC testing. Only 3.1% ( = 1720/55 477) of patients with eligible symptoms have received FC testing since the national recommendations were published. There was only a small number of patients with symptoms, FC test, and a IBD diagnosis. In total, 71.3% ( = 1416/1987) of patients with a positive and 47.7% ( = 1337/2805) with a negative FC test were referred or further investigated. Uptake of FC testing in clinical practice has been slow and inconsistent. The indication of non-compliance with national recommendations may suggest that these recommendations lack applicability to the general practice context