We present a Machine Learning (ML) study case to illustrate the challenges of clinical translation for a real-time AI-empowered echocardiography system with data of ICU patients in LMICs. Such ML case study includes data preparation, curation and labelling from 2D Ultrasound videos of 31 ICU patients in LMICs and model selection, validation and deployment of three thinner neural networks to classify apical four-chamber view. Results of the ML heuristics showed the promising implementation, validation and application of thinner networks to classify 4CV with limited datasets. We conclude this work mentioning the need for (a) datasets to improve diversity of demographics, diseases, and (b) the need of further investigations of thinner models to be run and implemented in low-cost hardware to be clinically translated in the ICU in LMICs. The code and other resources to reproduce this work are available at https://github.com/vital-ultrasound/ai-assisted-echocardiography-for-low-resource-countries.

人心脏的准确几何定量是诊断多种心脏疾病的关键步骤，以及心脏患者的治疗。超声成像是心脏成像的主要方式，但是采集需要高操作员的技能，由于工件，其解释和分析很困难。在3D中重建心脏解剖结构可以使发现新的生物标志物，并使成像降低对操作员专业知识的依赖，但是大多数超声系统仅具有2D成像功能。我们提出了对PIX2VOX ++网络的简单变化，以大大降低存储器使用和计算复杂性，以及从2D标准心脏视图中对3D解剖结构进行重建的管道，从而有效地从有限的2D数据中启用了3D解剖学重建。我们使用合成生成的数据来评估管道，从而从只有两个标准的解剖学2D视图中获得准确的3D全心重建（峰值相交> 0.88）。我们还使用真实的回声图像显示了初步结果。

我们提出了一种新方法，可以在2D超声心动图图像上自动轮廓左心室。与大多数基于预测细分面罩的现有分割方法不同，我们重点是预测该轮廓内（基础和顶点）中的心内膜轮廓和关键地标点。这提供了一种更接近专家如何执行手动注释的表示，因此产生了在生理上更合理的结果。我们提出的方法使用基于U-NET体系结构的两头网络。一个头预测了7个轮廓点，另一个头部预测了轮廓的距离图。将这种方法与U-NET和基于点的方法进行了比较，在具有里程碑意义的定位（<4.5mm）和与地面真相轮廓（<3.5mm）的距离方面，达到30 \％的性能增长。

胎儿超声（US）中胎盘的自动分割由于（i）（i）胎盘外观的高度多样性而具有挑战性我们禁止在妊娠晚期进行整个胎盘评估的观点。在这项工作中，我们通过多任务学习方法解决了这三个挑战，该方法结合了单个卷积神经网络中胎盘位置（例如，前，后部）和语义胎盘分段的分类。通过分类任务，模型可以从更大，更多样化的数据集中学习，同时在有限的训练集条件下提高分割任务的准确性。通过这种方法，我们研究了多个评估者的注释的变异性，并表明我们的自动分割（前胎盘的骰子为0.86，后胎盘的骰子为0.83），与观察者内和观察者间的变异性相比，我们的自动段性能达到了人级的性能。最后，我们的方法可以使用由三个阶段组成的多视图US采集管道提供整个胎盘分割：多探针图像采集，图像融合和图像分段。这会导致对较大结构（例如胎盘中的胎盘）的高质量分割，其图像伪像降低，这超出了单个探针的视野。

左心室（LV）功能是心脏病患者的患者管理，结局和长期存活方面的重要因素。最近发表的心力衰竭临床指南认识到，仅依赖一种心脏功能（LV射血分数）作为诊断和治疗分层生物标志物的依赖是次优。基于AI的超声心动图分析的最新进展已在LV体积和LV射血分数的自动估计上显示出良好的结果。但是，从随时间变化的2D超声心动图摄取，可以通过从完整的心脏周期中估算功能性生物标志物来获得对心脏功能的更丰富的描述。在这项工作中，我们首次提出了一种基于全心脏周期分割的2D超声心动图的AI方法，用于从2D超声心动图中得出高级生物标志物。这些生物标志物将允许临床医生获得健康和疾病中心脏的丰富图片。 AI模型基于“ NN-UNET”框架，并使用四个不同的数据库进行了训练和测试。结果表明，手动分析和自动分析之间的一致性很高，并展示了晚期收缩期和舒张期生物标志物在患者分层中的潜力。最后，对于50例病例的子集，我们在超声心动图和CMR的临床生物标志物之间进行了相关分析，我们在两种方式之间表现出了极好的一致性。

Modelling and forecasting real-life human behaviour using online social media is an active endeavour of interest in politics, government, academia, and industry. Since its creation in 2006, Twitter has been proposed as a potential laboratory that could be used to gauge and predict social behaviour. During the last decade, the user base of Twitter has been growing and becoming more representative of the general population. Here we analyse this user base in the context of the 2021 Mexican Legislative Election. To do so, we use a dataset of 15 million election-related tweets in the six months preceding election day. We explore different election models that assign political preference to either the ruling parties or the opposition. We find that models using data with geographical attributes determine the results of the election with better precision and accuracy than conventional polling methods. These results demonstrate that analysis of public online data can outperform conventional polling methods, and that political analysis and general forecasting would likely benefit from incorporating such data in the immediate future. Moreover, the same Twitter dataset with geographical attributes is positively correlated with results from official census data on population and internet usage in Mexico. These findings suggest that we have reached a period in time when online activity, appropriately curated, can provide an accurate representation of offline behaviour.

In the last years, the number of IoT devices deployed has suffered an undoubted explosion, reaching the scale of billions. However, some new cybersecurity issues have appeared together with this development. Some of these issues are the deployment of unauthorized devices, malicious code modification, malware deployment, or vulnerability exploitation. This fact has motivated the requirement for new device identification mechanisms based on behavior monitoring. Besides, these solutions have recently leveraged Machine and Deep Learning techniques due to the advances in this field and the increase in processing capabilities. In contrast, attackers do not stay stalled and have developed adversarial attacks focused on context modification and ML/DL evaluation evasion applied to IoT device identification solutions. This work explores the performance of hardware behavior-based individual device identification, how it is affected by possible context- and ML/DL-focused attacks, and how its resilience can be improved using defense techniques. In this sense, it proposes an LSTM-CNN architecture based on hardware performance behavior for individual device identification. Then, previous techniques have been compared with the proposed architecture using a hardware performance dataset collected from 45 Raspberry Pi devices running identical software. The LSTM-CNN improves previous solutions achieving a +0.96 average F1-Score and 0.8 minimum TPR for all devices. Afterward, context- and ML/DL-focused adversarial attacks were applied against the previous model to test its robustness. A temperature-based context attack was not able to disrupt the identification. However, some ML/DL state-of-the-art evasion attacks were successful. Finally, adversarial training and model distillation defense techniques are selected to improve the model resilience to evasion attacks, without degrading its performance.

Cybercriminals are moving towards zero-day attacks affecting resource-constrained devices such as single-board computers (SBC). Assuming that perfect security is unrealistic, Moving Target Defense (MTD) is a promising approach to mitigate attacks by dynamically altering target attack surfaces. Still, selecting suitable MTD techniques for zero-day attacks is an open challenge. Reinforcement Learning (RL) could be an effective approach to optimize the MTD selection through trial and error, but the literature fails when i) evaluating the performance of RL and MTD solutions in real-world scenarios, ii) studying whether behavioral fingerprinting is suitable for representing SBC's states, and iii) calculating the consumption of resources in SBC. To improve these limitations, the work at hand proposes an online RL-based framework to learn the correct MTD mechanisms mitigating heterogeneous zero-day attacks in SBC. The framework considers behavioral fingerprinting to represent SBCs' states and RL to learn MTD techniques that mitigate each malicious state. It has been deployed on a real IoT crowdsensing scenario with a Raspberry Pi acting as a spectrum sensor. More in detail, the Raspberry Pi has been infected with different samples of command and control malware, rootkits, and ransomware to later select between four existing MTD techniques. A set of experiments demonstrated the suitability of the framework to learn proper MTD techniques mitigating all attacks (except a harmfulness rootkit) while consuming <1 MB of storage and utilizing <55% CPU and <80% RAM.

Explainability is a vibrant research topic in the artificial intelligence community, with growing interest across methods and domains. Much has been written about the topic, yet explainability still lacks shared terminology and a framework capable of providing structural soundness to explanations. In our work, we address these issues by proposing a novel definition of explanation that is a synthesis of what can be found in the literature. We recognize that explanations are not atomic but the product of evidence stemming from the model and its input-output and the human interpretation of this evidence. Furthermore, we fit explanations into the properties of faithfulness (i.e., the explanation being a true description of the model's decision-making) and plausibility (i.e., how much the explanation looks convincing to the user). Using our proposed theoretical framework simplifies how these properties are ope rationalized and provide new insight into common explanation methods that we analyze as case studies.

We propose a learning-based methodology to reconstruct private information held by a population of interacting agents in order to predict an exact outcome of the underlying multi-agent interaction process, here identified as a stationary action profile. We envision a scenario where an external observer, endowed with a learning procedure, is allowed to make queries and observe the agents' reactions through private action-reaction mappings, whose collective fixed point corresponds to a stationary profile. By adopting a smart query process to iteratively collect sensible data and update parametric estimates, we establish sufficient conditions to assess the asymptotic properties of the proposed learning-based methodology so that, if convergence happens, it can only be towards a stationary action profile. This fact yields two main consequences: i) learning locally-exact surrogates of the action-reaction mappings allows the external observer to succeed in its prediction task, and ii) working with assumptions so general that a stationary profile is not even guaranteed to exist, the established sufficient conditions hence act also as certificates for the existence of such a desirable profile. Extensive numerical simulations involving typical competitive multi-agent control and decision making problems illustrate the practical effectiveness of the proposed learning-based approach.