This report presents the evaluation approach developed for the DARPA Big Mechanism program, which aimed at developing computer systems that will read research papers, integrate the information into a computer model of cancer mechanisms, and frame new hypotheses. We employed an iterative, incremental approach to the evaluation of the three phases of the program. In Phase I, we evaluated the ability of system and human teams ability to read-with-a-model to capture mechanistic information from the biomedical literature, integrated with information from expert curated biological databases. In Phase II we evaluated the ability of systems to assemble fragments of information into a mechanistic model. The Phase III evaluation focused on the ability of systems to provide explanations of experimental observations based on models assembled (largely automatically) by the Big Mechanism process. The evaluation for each phase built on earlier evaluations and guided developers towards creating capabilities for the new phase. The report describes our approach, including innovations such as a reference set (a curated data set limited to major findings of each paper) to assess the accuracy of systems in extracting mechanistic findings in the absence of a gold standard, and a method to evaluate model-based explanations of experimental data. Results of the evaluation and supporting materials are included in the appendices.

The use of emojis affords a visual modality to, often private, textual communication. The task of predicting emojis however provides a challenge for machine learning as emoji use tends to cluster into the frequently used and the rarely used emojis. Much of the machine learning research on emoji use has focused on high resource languages and has conceptualised the task of predicting emojis around traditional server-side machine learning approaches. However, traditional machine learning approaches for private communication can introduce privacy concerns, as these approaches require all data to be transmitted to a central storage. In this paper, we seek to address the dual concerns of emphasising high resource languages for emoji prediction and risking the privacy of people's data. We introduce a new dataset of $118$k tweets (augmented from $25$k unique tweets) for emoji prediction in Hindi, and propose a modification to the federated learning algorithm, CausalFedGSD, which aims to strike a balance between model performance and user privacy. We show that our approach obtains comparative scores with more complex centralised models while reducing the amount of data required to optimise the models and minimising risks to user privacy.