Autonomous vehicles are suited for continuous area patrolling problems. However, finding an optimal patrolling strategy can be challenging for many reasons. Firstly, patrolling environments are often complex and can include unknown and evolving environmental factors. Secondly, autonomous vehicles can have failures or hardware constraints such as limited battery lives. Importantly, patrolling large areas often requires multiple agents that need to collectively coordinate their actions. In this work, we consider these limitations and propose an approach based on a distributed, model-free deep reinforcement learning based multi-agent patrolling strategy. In this approach, agents make decisions locally based on their own environmental observations and on shared information. In addition, agents are trained to automatically recharge themselves when required to support continuous collective patrolling. A homogeneous multi-agent architecture is proposed, where all patrolling agents have an identical policy. This architecture provides a robust patrolling system that can tolerate agent failures and allow supplementary agents to be added to replace failed agents or to increase the overall patrol performance. This performance is validated through experiments from multiple perspectives, including the overall patrol performance, the efficiency of the battery recharging strategy, the overall robustness of the system, and the agents' ability to adapt to environment dynamics.

我们介绍了仇恨言论推文的Hateval语料库（Basile等，2019年）的丰富，旨在促进自动化的反叙事一代。与以前的工作相比（Chung etal。2019），手动书面反叙事与推文有关。但是，仅此信息似乎不足以获得反叙事生成的令人满意的语言模型。这就是为什么我们还根据Wagemanns（2016）提供了带有争论性信息的注释推文，我们认为可以帮助建立令人信服和有效的反叙事，以针对特定群体进行仇恨言论。我们讨论了这种注释过程的充分和困难，并提出了几个基线以自动检测带注释的元素。初步结果表明，自动注释者会靠近人类注释者来检测论证的某些方面，而其他人仅达到低或中等水平的通知者一致性。

可以使用具有快速有效分割网络的深度学习方法来实施医疗图像分割。单板计算机（SBC）由于内存和处理限制而难以用于训练深网。诸如Google Edge TPU之类的特定硬件使其适合使用复杂的预训练网络进行实时预测。在这项工作中，我们研究了两个SBC的性能，具有和不进行硬件加速度进行底面图像分割，尽管这项研究的结论可以通过其他类型的医学图像的深层神经网络应用于分割。为了测试硬件加速的好处，我们使用先前已发布的工作中的网络和数据集，并通过使用具有超声甲状腺图像的数据集进行测试来概括它们。我们在SBC中测量预测时间，并将其与基于云的TPU系统进行比较。结果表明，使用Edge TPU，机器学习加速SBC的可行性可加速光盘和杯赛分段，每图像可获得低于25毫秒的时间。

数据增强是自然语言处理（NLP）模型的鲁棒性评估的重要组成部分，以及增强他们培训的数据的多样性。在本文中，我们呈现NL-Cogmenter，这是一种新的参与式Python的自然语言增强框架，它支持创建两个转换（对数据的修改）和过滤器（根据特定功能的数据拆分）。我们描述了框架和初始的117个变换和23个过滤器，用于各种自然语言任务。我们通过使用其几个转换来分析流行自然语言模型的鲁棒性来证明NL-Upmenter的功效。基础架构，Datacards和稳健性分析结果在NL-Augmenter存储库上公开可用（\ url {https://github.com/gem-benchmark/nl-augmenter}）。

Modal verbs, such as "can", "may", and "must", are commonly used in daily communication to convey the speaker's perspective related to the likelihood and/or mode of the proposition. They can differ greatly in meaning depending on how they're used and the context of a sentence (e.g. "They 'must' help each other out." vs. "They 'must' have helped each other out.") Despite their practical importance in natural language understanding, linguists have yet to agree on a single, prominent framework for the categorization of modal verb senses. This lack of agreement stems from high degrees of flexibility and polysemy from the modal verbs, making it more difficult for researchers to incorporate insights from this family of words into their work. This work presents Moverb dataset, which consists of 27,240 annotations of modal verb senses over 4,540 utterances containing one or more sentences from social conversations. Each utterance is annotated by three annotators using two different theoretical frameworks (i.e., Quirk and Palmer) of modal verb senses. We observe that both frameworks have similar inter-annotator agreements, despite having different numbers of sense types (8 for Quirk and 3 for Palmer). With the RoBERTa-based classifiers fine-tuned on \dataset, we achieve F1 scores of 82.2 and 78.3 on Quirk and Palmer, respectively, showing that modal verb sense disambiguation is not a trivial task. Our dataset will be publicly available with our final version.

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.

In 2021 300 mm of rain, nearly half the average annual rainfall, fell near Catania (Sicily island, Italy). Such events took place in just a few hours, with dramatic consequences on the environmental, social, economic, and health systems of the region. This is the reason why, detecting extreme rainfall events is a crucial prerequisite for planning actions able to reverse possibly intensified dramatic future scenarios. In this paper, the Affinity Propagation algorithm, a clustering algorithm grounded on machine learning, was applied, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time, to identify excess rain events in Sicily. This was possible by using a high-frequency, large dataset we collected, ranging from 2009 to 2021 which we named RSE (the Rainfall Sicily Extreme dataset). Weather indicators were then been employed to validate the results, thus confirming the presence of recent anomalous rainfall events in eastern Sicily. We believe that easy-to-use and multi-modal data science techniques, such as the one proposed in this study, could give rise to significant improvements in policy-making for successfully contrasting climate changes.

Answering complex questions over textual resources remains a challenging problem$\unicode{x2013}$especially when interpreting the fine-grained relationships among multiple entities that occur within a natural-language question or clue. Curated knowledge bases (KBs), such as YAGO, DBpedia, Freebase and Wikidata, have been widely used in this context and gained great acceptance for question-answering (QA) applications in the past decade. While current KBs offer a concise representation of structured knowledge, they lack the variety of formulations and semantic nuances as well as the context of information provided by the natural-language sources. With BigText-QA, we aim to develop an integrated QA system which is able to answer questions based on a more redundant form of a knowledge graph (KG) that organizes both structured and unstructured (i.e., "hybrid") knowledge in a unified graphical representation. BigText-QA thereby is able to combine the best of both worlds$\unicode{x2013}$a canonical set of named entities, mapped to a structured background KB (such as YAGO or Wikidata), as well as an open set of textual clauses providing highly diversified relational paraphrases with rich context information.

This project explores the feasibility of remote patient monitoring based on the analysis of 3D movements captured with smartwatches. We base our analysis on the Kinematic Theory of Rapid Human Movement. We have validated our research in a real case scenario for stroke rehabilitation at the Guttmann Institute5 (neurorehabilitation hospital), showing promising results. Our work could have a great impact in remote healthcare applications, improving the medical efficiency and reducing the healthcare costs. Future steps include more clinical validation, developing multi-modal analysis architectures (analysing data from sensors, images, audio, etc.), and exploring the application of our technology to monitor other neurodegenerative diseases.

Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs) are receiving increasing attention due to their lightweight architecture and ability to run on low-power devices. The state-of-the-art for training classification BNNs restricted to few-shot learning is based on a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) approach. This paper proposes the BeMi ensemble, a structured architecture of BNNs based on training a single BNN for each possible pair of classes and applying a majority voting scheme to predict the final output. The training of a single BNN discriminating between two classes is achieved by a MIP model that optimizes a lexicographic multi-objective function according to robustness and simplicity principles. This approach results in training networks whose output is not affected by small perturbations on the input and whose number of active weights is as small as possible, while good accuracy is preserved. We computationally validate our model using the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets using up to 40 training images per class. Our structured ensemble outperforms both BNNs trained by stochastic gradient descent and state-of-the-art MIP-based approaches. While the previous approaches achieve an average accuracy of 51.1% on the MNIST dataset, the BeMi ensemble achieves an average accuracy of 61.7% when trained with 10 images per class and 76.4% when trained with 40 images per class.