Large language models have recently attracted significant attention due to their impressive performance on a variety of tasks. ChatGPT developed by OpenAI is one such implementation of a large, pre-trained language model that has gained immense popularity among early adopters, where certain users go to the extent of characterizing it as a disruptive technology in many domains. Understanding such early adopters' sentiments is important because it can provide insights into the potential success or failure of the technology, as well as its strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, we conduct a mixed-method study using 10,732 tweets from early ChatGPT users. We first use topic modelling to identify the main topics and then perform an in-depth qualitative sentiment analysis of each topic. Our results show that the majority of the early adopters have expressed overwhelmingly positive sentiments related to topics such as Disruptions to software development, Entertainment and exercising creativity. Only a limited percentage of users expressed concerns about issues such as the potential for misuse of ChatGPT, especially regarding topics such as Impact on educational aspects. We discuss these findings by providing specific examples for each topic and then detail implications related to addressing these concerns for both researchers and users.

While the capabilities of autonomous systems have been steadily improving in recent years, these systems still struggle to rapidly explore previously unknown environments without the aid of GPS-assisted navigation. The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aimed to fast track the development of autonomous exploration systems by evaluating their performance in real-world underground search-and-rescue scenarios. Subterranean environments present a plethora of challenges for robotic systems, such as limited communications, complex topology, visually-degraded sensing, and harsh terrain. The presented solution enables long-term autonomy with minimal human supervision by combining a powerful and independent single-agent autonomy stack, with higher level mission management operating over a flexible mesh network. The autonomy suite deployed on quadruped and wheeled robots was fully independent, freeing the human supervision to loosely supervise the mission and make high-impact strategic decisions. We also discuss lessons learned from fielding our system at the SubT Final Event, relating to vehicle versatility, system adaptability, and re-configurable communications.

This paper presents our solutions for the MediaEval 2022 task on DisasterMM. The task is composed of two subtasks, namely (i) Relevance Classification of Twitter Posts (RCTP), and (ii) Location Extraction from Twitter Texts (LETT). The RCTP subtask aims at differentiating flood-related and non-relevant social posts while LETT is a Named Entity Recognition (NER) task and aims at the extraction of location information from the text. For RCTP, we proposed four different solutions based on BERT, RoBERTa, Distil BERT, and ALBERT obtaining an F1-score of 0.7934, 0.7970, 0.7613, and 0.7924, respectively. For LETT, we used three models namely BERT, RoBERTa, and Distil BERTA obtaining an F1-score of 0.6256, 0.6744, and 0.6723, respectively.

In recent years, social media has been widely explored as a potential source of communication and information in disasters and emergency situations. Several interesting works and case studies of disaster analytics exploring different aspects of natural disasters have been already conducted. Along with the great potential, disaster analytics comes with several challenges mainly due to the nature of social media content. In this paper, we explore one such challenge and propose a text classification framework to deal with Twitter noisy data. More specifically, we employed several transformers both individually and in combination, so as to differentiate between relevant and non-relevant Twitter posts, achieving the highest F1-score of 0.87.

Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most prevalent chronic joint disease worldwide, where knee OA takes more than 80% of commonly affected joints. Knee OA is not a curable disease yet, and it affects large columns of patients, making it costly to patients and healthcare systems. Etiology, diagnosis, and treatment of knee OA might be argued by variability in its clinical and physical manifestations. Although knee OA carries a list of well-known terminology aiming to standardize the nomenclature of the diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, and clinical outcomes of the chronic joint disease, in practice there is a wide range of terminology associated with knee OA across different data sources, including but not limited to biomedical literature, clinical notes, healthcare literacy, and health-related social media. Among these data sources, the scientific articles published in the biomedical literature usually make a principled pipeline to study disease. Rapid yet, accurate text mining on large-scale scientific literature may discover novel knowledge and terminology to better understand knee OA and to improve the quality of knee OA diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. The present works aim to utilize artificial neural network strategies to automatically extract vocabularies associated with knee OA diseases. Our finding indicates the feasibility of developing word embedding neural networks for autonomous keyword extraction and abstraction of knee OA.

Neural models that do not rely on pre-training have excelled in the keyphrase generation task with large annotated datasets. Meanwhile, new approaches have incorporated pre-trained language models (PLMs) for their data efficiency. However, there lacks a systematic study of how the two types of approaches compare and how different design choices can affect the performance of PLM-based models. To fill in this knowledge gap and facilitate a more informed use of PLMs for keyphrase extraction and keyphrase generation, we present an in-depth empirical study. Formulating keyphrase extraction as sequence labeling and keyphrase generation as sequence-to-sequence generation, we perform extensive experiments in three domains. After showing that PLMs have competitive high-resource performance and state-of-the-art low-resource performance, we investigate important design choices including in-domain PLMs, PLMs with different pre-training objectives, using PLMs with a parameter budget, and different formulations for present keyphrases. Further results show that (1) in-domain BERT-like PLMs can be used to build strong and data-efficient keyphrase generation models; (2) with a fixed parameter budget, prioritizing model depth over width and allocating more layers in the encoder leads to better encoder-decoder models; and (3) introducing four in-domain PLMs, we achieve a competitive performance in the news domain and the state-of-the-art performance in the scientific domain.

Privacy policies provide individuals with information about their rights and how their personal information is handled. Natural language understanding (NLU) technologies can support individuals and practitioners to understand better privacy practices described in lengthy and complex documents. However, existing efforts that use NLU technologies are limited by processing the language in a way exclusive to a single task focusing on certain privacy practices. To this end, we introduce the Privacy Policy Language Understanding Evaluation (PLUE) benchmark, a multi-task benchmark for evaluating the privacy policy language understanding across various tasks. We also collect a large corpus of privacy policies to enable privacy policy domain-specific language model pre-training. We demonstrate that domain-specific pre-training offers performance improvements across all tasks. We release the benchmark to encourage future research in this domain.

While pre-trained language models (LM) for code have achieved great success in code completion, they generate code conditioned only on the contents within the file, i.e., in-file context, but ignore the rich semantics in other files within the same project, i.e., cross-file context, a critical source of information that is especially useful in modern modular software development. Such overlooking constrains code language models' capacity in code completion, leading to unexpected behaviors such as generating hallucinated class member functions or function calls with unexpected arguments. In this work, we develop a cross-file context finder tool, CCFINDER, that effectively locates and retrieves the most relevant cross-file context. We propose CoCoMIC, a framework that incorporates cross-file context to learn the in-file and cross-file context jointly on top of pretrained code LMs. CoCoMIC successfully improves the existing code LM with a 19.30% relative increase in exact match and a 15.41% relative increase in identifier matching for code completion when the cross-file context is provided.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Security issues are threatened in various types of networks, especially in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment that requires early detection. IoT is the network of real-time devices like home automation systems and can be controlled by open-source android devices, which can be an open ground for attackers. Attackers can access the network, initiate a different kind of security breach, and compromises network control. Therefore, timely detecting the increasing number of sophisticated malware attacks is the challenge to ensure the credibility of network protection. In this regard, we have developed a new malware detection framework, Deep Squeezed-Boosted and Ensemble Learning (DSBEL), comprised of novel Squeezed-Boosted Boundary-Region Split-Transform-Merge (SB-BR-STM) CNN and ensemble learning. The proposed S.T.M. block employs multi-path dilated convolutional, Boundary, and regional operations to capture the homogenous and heterogeneous global malicious patterns. Moreover, diverse feature maps are achieved using transfer learning and multi-path-based squeezing and boosting at initial and final levels to learn minute pattern variations. Finally, the boosted discriminative features are extracted from the developed deep SB-BR-STM CNN and provided to the ensemble classifiers (SVM, M.L.P., and AdaboostM1) to improve the hybrid learning generalization. The performance analysis of the proposed DSBEL framework and SB-BR-STM CNN against the existing techniques have been evaluated by the IOT_Malware dataset on standard performance measures. Evaluation results show progressive performance as 98.50% accuracy, 97.12% F1-Score, 91.91% MCC, 95.97 % Recall, and 98.42 % Precision. The proposed malware analysis framework is helpful for the timely detection of malicious activity and suggests future strategies.