Due to the environmental impacts caused by the construction industry, repurposing existing buildings and making them more energy-efficient has become a high-priority issue. However, a legitimate concern of land developers is associated with the buildings' state of conservation. For that reason, infrared thermography has been used as a powerful tool to characterize these buildings' state of conservation by detecting pathologies, such as cracks and humidity. Thermal cameras detect the radiation emitted by any material and translate it into temperature-color-coded images. Abnormal temperature changes may indicate the presence of pathologies, however, reading thermal images might not be quite simple. This research project aims to combine infrared thermography and machine learning (ML) to help stakeholders determine the viability of reusing existing buildings by identifying their pathologies and defects more efficiently and accurately. In this particular phase of this research project, we've used an image classification machine learning model of Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) to differentiate three levels of cracks in one particular building. The model's accuracy was compared between the MSX and thermal images acquired from two distinct thermal cameras and fused images (formed through multisource information) to test the influence of the input data and network on the detection results.

The advances in Artificial Intelligence are creating new opportunities to improve lives of people around the world, from business to healthcare, from lifestyle to education. For example, some systems profile the users using their demographic and behavioral characteristics to make certain domain-specific predictions. Often, such predictions impact the life of the user directly or indirectly (e.g., loan disbursement, determining insurance coverage, shortlisting applications, etc.). As a result, the concerns over such AI-enabled systems are also increasing. To address these concerns, such systems are mandated to be responsible i.e., transparent, fair, and explainable to developers and end-users. In this paper, we present ComplAI, a unique framework to enable, observe, analyze and quantify explainability, robustness, performance, fairness, and model behavior in drift scenarios, and to provide a single Trust Factor that evaluates different supervised Machine Learning models not just from their ability to make correct predictions but from overall responsibility perspective. The framework helps users to (a) connect their models and enable explanations, (b) assess and visualize different aspects of the model, such as robustness, drift susceptibility, and fairness, and (c) compare different models (from different model families or obtained through different hyperparameter settings) from an overall perspective thereby facilitating actionable recourse for improvement of the models. It is model agnostic and works with different supervised machine learning scenarios (i.e., Binary Classification, Multi-class Classification, and Regression) and frameworks. It can be seamlessly integrated with any ML life-cycle framework. Thus, this already deployed framework aims to unify critical aspects of Responsible AI systems for regulating the development process of such real systems.

The Elo algorithm, due to its simplicity, is widely used for rating in sports competitions as well as in other applications where the rating/ranking is a useful tool for predicting future results. However, despite its widespread use, a detailed understanding of the convergence properties of the Elo algorithm is still lacking. Aiming to fill this gap, this paper presents a comprehensive (stochastic) analysis of the Elo algorithm, considering round-robin (one-on-one) competitions. Specifically, analytical expressions are derived characterizing the behavior/evolution of the skills and of important performance metrics. Then, taking into account the relationship between the behavior of the algorithm and the step-size value, which is a hyperparameter that can be controlled, some design guidelines as well as discussions about the performance of the algorithm are provided. To illustrate the applicability of the theoretical findings, experimental results are shown, corroborating the very good match between analytical predictions and those obtained from the algorithm using real-world data (from the Italian SuperLega, Volleyball League).

Objective: Accurate visual classification of bladder tissue during Trans-Urethral Resection of Bladder Tumor (TURBT) procedures is essential to improve early cancer diagnosis and treatment. During TURBT interventions, White Light Imaging (WLI) and Narrow Band Imaging (NBI) techniques are used for lesion detection. Each imaging technique provides diverse visual information that allows clinicians to identify and classify cancerous lesions. Computer vision methods that use both imaging techniques could improve endoscopic diagnosis. We address the challenge of tissue classification when annotations are available only in one domain, in our case WLI, and the endoscopic images correspond to an unpaired dataset, i.e. there is no exact equivalent for every image in both NBI and WLI domains. Method: We propose a semi-surprised Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based method composed of three main components: a teacher network trained on the labeled WLI data; a cycle-consistency GAN to perform unpaired image-to-image translation, and a multi-input student network. To ensure the quality of the synthetic images generated by the proposed GAN we perform a detailed quantitative, and qualitative analysis with the help of specialists. Conclusion: The overall average classification accuracy, precision, and recall obtained with the proposed method for tissue classification are 0.90, 0.88, and 0.89 respectively, while the same metrics obtained in the unlabeled domain (NBI) are 0.92, 0.64, and 0.94 respectively. The quality of the generated images is reliable enough to deceive specialists. Significance: This study shows the potential of using semi-supervised GAN-based classification to improve bladder tissue classification when annotations are limited in multi-domain data.

Algorithms that involve both forecasting and optimization are at the core of solutions to many difficult real-world problems, such as in supply chains (inventory optimization), traffic, and in the transition towards carbon-free energy generation in battery/load/production scheduling in sustainable energy systems. Typically, in these scenarios we want to solve an optimization problem that depends on unknown future values, which therefore need to be forecast. As both forecasting and optimization are difficult problems in their own right, relatively few research has been done in this area. This paper presents the findings of the ``IEEE-CIS Technical Challenge on Predict+Optimize for Renewable Energy Scheduling," held in 2021. We present a comparison and evaluation of the seven highest-ranked solutions in the competition, to provide researchers with a benchmark problem and to establish the state of the art for this benchmark, with the aim to foster and facilitate research in this area. The competition used data from the Monash Microgrid, as well as weather data and energy market data. It then focused on two main challenges: forecasting renewable energy production and demand, and obtaining an optimal schedule for the activities (lectures) and on-site batteries that lead to the lowest cost of energy. The most accurate forecasts were obtained by gradient-boosted tree and random forest models, and optimization was mostly performed using mixed integer linear and quadratic programming. The winning method predicted different scenarios and optimized over all scenarios jointly using a sample average approximation method.

We describe a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) that simulates the flow induced by the astronomical tide in a synthetic port channel, with dimensions based on the Santos - S\~ao Vicente - Bertioga Estuarine System. PINN models aim to combine the knowledge of physical systems and data-driven machine learning models. This is done by training a neural network to minimize the residuals of the governing equations in sample points. In this work, our flow is governed by the Navier-Stokes equations with some approximations. There are two main novelties in this paper. First, we design our model to assume that the flow is periodic in time, which is not feasible in conventional simulation methods. Second, we evaluate the benefit of resampling the function evaluation points during training, which has a near zero computational cost and has been verified to improve the final model, especially for small batch sizes. Finally, we discuss some limitations of the approximations used in the Navier-Stokes equations regarding the modeling of turbulence and how it interacts with PINNs.

This work presents a thorough review concerning recent studies and text generation advancements using Generative Adversarial Networks. The usage of adversarial learning for text generation is promising as it provides alternatives to generate the so-called "natural" language. Nevertheless, adversarial text generation is not a simple task as its foremost architecture, the Generative Adversarial Networks, were designed to cope with continuous information (image) instead of discrete data (text). Thus, most works are based on three possible options, i.e., Gumbel-Softmax differentiation, Reinforcement Learning, and modified training objectives. All alternatives are reviewed in this survey as they present the most recent approaches for generating text using adversarial-based techniques. The selected works were taken from renowned databases, such as Science Direct, IEEEXplore, Springer, Association for Computing Machinery, and arXiv, whereas each selected work has been critically analyzed and assessed to present its objective, methodology, and experimental results.

In intensively managed forests in Europe, where forests are divided into stands of small size and may show heterogeneity within stands, a high spatial resolution (10 - 20 meters) is arguably needed to capture the differences in canopy height. In this work, we developed a deep learning model based on multi-stream remote sensing measurements to create a high-resolution canopy height map over the "Landes de Gascogne" forest in France, a large maritime pine plantation of 13,000 km$^2$ with flat terrain and intensive management. This area is characterized by even-aged and mono-specific stands, of a typical length of a few hundred meters, harvested every 35 to 50 years. Our deep learning U-Net model uses multi-band images from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 with composite time averages as input to predict tree height derived from GEDI waveforms. The evaluation is performed with external validation data from forest inventory plots and a stereo 3D reconstruction model based on Skysat imagery available at specific locations. We trained seven different U-net models based on a combination of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 bands to evaluate the importance of each instrument in the dominant height retrieval. The model outputs allow us to generate a 10 m resolution canopy height map of the whole "Landes de Gascogne" forest area for 2020 with a mean absolute error of 2.02 m on the Test dataset. The best predictions were obtained using all available satellite layers from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 but using only one satellite source also provided good predictions. For all validation datasets in coniferous forests, our model showed better metrics than previous canopy height models available in the same region.

There is growing interest in incorporating eye-tracking data and other implicit measures of human language processing into natural language processing (NLP) pipelines. The data from human language processing contain unique insight into human linguistic understanding that could be exploited by language models. However, many unanswered questions remain about the nature of this data and how it can best be utilized in downstream NLP tasks. In this paper, we present eyeStyliency, an eye-tracking dataset for human processing of stylistic text (e.g., politeness). We develop a variety of methods to derive style saliency scores over text using the collected eye dataset. We further investigate how this saliency data compares to both human annotation methods and model-based interpretability metrics. We find that while eye-tracking data is unique, it also intersects with both human annotations and model-based importance scores, providing a possible bridge between human- and machine-based perspectives. In downstream few-shot learning tasks, adding salient words to prompts generally improved style classification, with eye-tracking-based and annotation-based salient words achieving the highest accuracy.

This paper introduces the Forgotten Realms Wiki (FRW) data set and domain specific natural language generation using FRW along with related analyses. Forgotten Realms is the de-facto default setting of the popular open ended tabletop fantasy role playing game, Dungeons & Dragons. The data set was extracted from the Forgotten Realms Fandom wiki consisting of more than over 45,200 articles. The FRW data set is constituted of 11 sub-data sets in a number of formats: raw plain text, plain text annotated by article title, directed link graphs, wiki info-boxes annotated by the wiki article title, Poincar\'e embedding of first link graph, multiple Word2Vec and Doc2Vec models of the corpus. This is the first data set of this size for the Dungeons & Dragons domain. We then present a pairwise similarity comparison benchmark which utilizes similarity measures. In addition, we perform D&D domain specific natural language generation using the corpus and evaluate the named entity classification with respect to the lore of Forgotten Realms.