Federated Deep Learning frameworks can be used strategically to monitor Land Use locally and infer environmental impacts globally. Distributed data from across the world would be needed to build a global model for Land Use classification. The need for a Federated approach in this application domain would be to avoid transfer of data from distributed locations and save network bandwidth to reduce communication cost. We use a Federated UNet model for Semantic Segmentation of satellite and street view images. The novelty of the proposed architecture is the integration of Knowledge Distillation to reduce communication cost and response time. The accuracy obtained was above 95% and we also brought in a significant model compression to over 17 times and 62 times for street View and satellite images respectively. Our proposed framework has the potential to be a game-changer in real-time tracking of climate change across the planet.

We show for the first time that large-scale generative pretrained transformer (GPT) family models can be pruned to at least 50% sparsity in one-shot, without any retraining, at minimal loss of accuracy. This is achieved via a new pruning method called SparseGPT, specifically designed to work efficiently and accurately on massive GPT-family models. When executing SparseGPT on the largest available open-source models, OPT-175B and BLOOM-176B, we can reach 60% sparsity with negligible increase in perplexity: remarkably, more than 100 billion weights from these models can be ignored at inference time. SparseGPT generalizes to semi-structured (2:4 and 4:8) patterns, and is compatible with weight quantization approaches.

Neuromorphic systems require user-friendly software to support the design and optimization of experiments. In this work, we address this need by presenting our development of a machine learning-based modeling framework for the BrainScaleS-2 neuromorphic system. This work represents an improvement over previous efforts, which either focused on the matrix-multiplication mode of BrainScaleS-2 or lacked full automation. Our framework, called hxtorch.snn, enables the hardware-in-the-loop training of spiking neural networks within PyTorch, including support for auto differentiation in a fully-automated hardware experiment workflow. In addition, hxtorch.snn facilitates seamless transitions between emulating on hardware and simulating in software. We demonstrate the capabilities of hxtorch.snn on a classification task using the Yin-Yang dataset employing a gradient-based approach with surrogate gradients and densely sampled membrane observations from the BrainScaleS-2 hardware system.

A digital twin is defined as a virtual representation of a physical asset enabled through data and simulators for real-time prediction, optimization, monitoring, controlling, and improved decision-making. Unfortunately, the term remains vague and says little about its capability. Recently, the concept of capability level has been introduced to address this issue. Based on its capability, the concept states that a digital twin can be categorized on a scale from zero to five, referred to as standalone, descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, prescriptive, and autonomous, respectively. The current work introduces the concept in the context of the built environment. It demonstrates the concept by using a modern house as a use case. The house is equipped with an array of sensors that collect timeseries data regarding the internal state of the house. Together with physics-based and data-driven models, these data are used to develop digital twins at different capability levels demonstrated in virtual reality. The work, in addition to presenting a blueprint for developing digital twins, also provided future research directions to enhance the technology.

The lack of standardization is a prominent issue in magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. This often causes undesired contrast variations due to differences in hardware and acquisition parameters. In recent years, MR harmonization using image synthesis with disentanglement has been proposed to compensate for the undesired contrast variations. Despite the success of existing methods, we argue that three major improvements can be made. First, most existing methods are built upon the assumption that multi-contrast MR images of the same subject share the same anatomy. This assumption is questionable since different MR contrasts are specialized to highlight different anatomical features. Second, these methods often require a fixed set of MR contrasts for training (e.g., both Tw-weighted and T2-weighted images must be available), which limits their applicability. Third, existing methods generally are sensitive to imaging artifacts. In this paper, we present a novel approach, Harmonization with Attention-based Contrast, Anatomy, and Artifact Awareness (HACA3), to address these three issues. We first propose an anatomy fusion module that enables HACA3 to respect the anatomical differences between MR contrasts. HACA3 is also robust to imaging artifacts and can be trained and applied to any set of MR contrasts. Experiments show that HACA3 achieves state-of-the-art performance under multiple image quality metrics. We also demonstrate the applicability of HACA3 on downstream tasks with diverse MR datasets acquired from 21 sites with different field strengths, scanner platforms, and acquisition protocols.

The concept of walkable urban development has gained increased attention due to its public health, economic, and environmental sustainability benefits. Unfortunately, land zoning and historic under-investment have resulted in spatial inequality in walkability and social inequality among residents. We tackle the problem of Walkability Optimization through the lens of combinatorial optimization. The task is to select locations in which additional amenities (e.g., grocery stores, schools, restaurants) can be allocated to improve resident access via walking while taking into account existing amenities and providing multiple options (e.g., for restaurants). To this end, we derive Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) and Constraint Programming (CP) models. Moreover, we show that the problem's objective function is submodular in special cases, which motivates an efficient greedy heuristic. We conduct a case study on 31 underserved neighborhoods in the City of Toronto, Canada. MILP finds the best solutions in most scenarios but does not scale well with network size. The greedy algorithm scales well and finds near-optimal solutions. Our empirical evaluation shows that neighbourhoods with low walkability have a great potential for transformation into pedestrian-friendly neighbourhoods by strategically placing new amenities. Allocating 3 additional grocery stores, schools, and restaurants can improve the "WalkScore" by more than 50 points (on a scale of 100) for 4 neighbourhoods and reduce the walking distances to amenities for 75% of all residential locations to 10 minutes for all amenity types. Our code and paper appendix are available at https://github.com/khalil-research/walkability.

Neural networks have revolutionized the area of artificial intelligence and introduced transformative applications to almost every scientific field and industry. However, this success comes at a great price; the energy requirements for training advanced models are unsustainable. One promising way to address this pressing issue is by developing low-energy neuromorphic hardware that directly supports the algorithm's requirements. The intrinsic non-volatility, non-linearity, and memory of spintronic devices make them appealing candidates for neuromorphic devices. Here we focus on the reservoir computing paradigm, a recurrent network with a simple training algorithm suitable for computation with spintronic devices since they can provide the properties of non-linearity and memory. We review technologies and methods for developing neuromorphic spintronic devices and conclude with critical open issues to address before such devices become widely used.

In the contemporary media landscape, with the vast and diverse supply of news, it is increasingly challenging to study such an enormous amount of items without a standardized framework. Although attempts have been made to organize and compare news items on the basis of news values, news genres receive little attention, especially the genres in a news consumer's perception. Yet, perceived news genres serve as an essential component in exploring how news has developed, as well as a precondition for understanding media effects. We approach this concept by conceptualizing and operationalizing a non-discrete framework for mapping news items in terms of genre cues. As a starting point, we propose a preliminary set of dimensions consisting of "factuality" and "formality". To automatically analyze a large amount of news items, we deliver two computational models for predicting news sentences in terms of the said two dimensions. Such predictions could then be used for locating news items within our framework. This proposed approach that positions news items upon a multidimensional grid helps in deepening our insight into the evolving nature of news genres.

As machine learning (ML) systems get adopted in more critical areas, it has become increasingly crucial to address the bias that could occur in these systems. Several fairness pre-processing algorithms are available to alleviate implicit biases during model training. These algorithms employ different concepts of fairness, often leading to conflicting strategies with consequential trade-offs between fairness and accuracy. In this work, we evaluate three popular fairness pre-processing algorithms and investigate the potential for combining all algorithms into a more robust pre-processing ensemble. We report on lessons learned that can help practitioners better select fairness algorithms for their models.

Mobile health (mHealth) technologies empower patients to adopt/maintain healthy behaviors in their daily lives, by providing interventions (e.g. push notifications) tailored to the user's needs. In these settings, without intervention, human decision making may be impaired (e.g. valuing near term pleasure over own long term goals). In this work, we formalize this relationship with a framework in which the user optimizes a (potentially impaired) Markov Decision Process (MDP) and the mHealth agent intervenes on the user's MDP parameters. We show that different types of impairments imply different types of optimal intervention. We also provide analytical and empirical explorations of these differences.