Publications

Kolenik T, Gams M. Increasing Mental Health Care Access with Persuasive Technology for Social Good, in IJCAI 2021 Workshop on AI for Social Good. ; 2021.Abstract
Increasing Mental Health Care Access with Persuasive Technology for Social Good
The alarming trend of increasing mental health problems and the global inability to find effective ways to address them is hampering both individual and societal good. Barriers to access mental health care are many and high, ranging from socio- economic inequalities to personal stigmas. This gives technology, especially technology based in artificial intelligence, the opportunity to help alleviate the situation and offer unique solutions. The multi- and interdisciplinary research on persuasive technology, which attempts to change behavior or attitudes without deception or coercion, shows promise in improving well-being, which results in increased equality and social good. This paper presents such systems with a brief overview of the field, and offers general, technical and critical thoughts on the implementation as well as impact. We believe that such technology can complement existing mental health care solutions to reduce inequalities in access as well as inequalities resulting from the lack of it.
Chen X, Liu Z. The Fairness of Leximin in Allocation of Indivisible Chores, in ; 2021.Abstract
The Fairness of Leximin in Allocation of Indivisible Chores
The leximin solution — which selects an allocation that maximizes the minimum utility, then the second minimum utility, and so forth — is known to provide EFX (envy-free up to any good) fairness guarantee in some contexts when allocating indivisible goods. However, it remains unknown how fair the leximin solution is when used to allocate in- divisible chores. In this paper, we demonstrate that the leximin solution can be modified to also provide compelling fairness guarantees for the allocation of indivisible chores. First, we generalize the definition of the leximin solution. Then, we show that the leximin solution finds a PROP1 (proportional up to one good) and PO (Pareto-optimal) allocation for 3 or 4 agents in the context of chores allocation with additive distinct valuations. Additionally, we prove that the leximin solution is EFX for combinations of goods and chores for agents with general but identical valuations.
Suriyakumar VM, Papernot N, Goldenberg A, Ghassemi M. Challenges of Differentially Private Prediction in Healthcare Settings, in IJCAI 2021 Workshop on AI for Social Good. ; 2021.Abstract
Challenges of Differentially Private Prediction in Healthcare Settings
Privacy-preserving machine learning is becoming increasingly important as models are being used on sensitive data such as electronic health records. Differential privacy is considered the gold standard framework for achieving strong privacy guarantees in machine learning. Yet, the performance implications of learning with differential privacy have not been characterized in the presence of time-varying hospital policies, care practices, and known class imbalance present in health data. First, we demon- strate that due to the long-tailed nature of health- care data, learning with differential privacy results in poor utility tradeoffs. Second, we demonstrate through an application of influence functions that learning with differential privacy leads to disproportionate influence from the majority group on model predictions which results in negative consequences for utility and fairness. Our results high- light important implications of differentially private learning; which focuses by design on learn- ing the body of a distribution to protect privacy but omits important information contained in the tails of healthcare data distributions.
Zhu Z, Nair V, Olmschenk G, Seiple WH. ASSIST: Assistive Sensor Solutions for Independent and Safe Travel of Blind and Visually Impaired People, in IJCAI 2021 Workshop on AI for Social Good. ; 2021.Abstract
ASSIST: Assistive Sensor Solutions for Independent and Safe Travel of Blind and Visually Impaired People
This paper describes the interface and testing of an indoor navigation app - ASSIST - that guides blind & visually impaired (BVI) individuals through an indoor environment with high accuracy while augmenting their understanding of the surrounding environment. ASSIST features personalized inter- faces by considering the unique experiences that BVI individuals have in indoor wayfinding and of- fers multiple levels of multimodal feedback. After an overview of the technical approach and imple- mentation of the first prototype of the ASSIST system, the results of two pilot studies performed with BVI individuals are presented. Our studies show that ASSIST is useful in providing users with navigational guidance, improving their efficiency and (more significantly) their safety and accuracy in wayfinding indoors.
Xu L, Bondi E, Fang F, Perrault A, Wang K, Tambe M. Dual-Mandate Patrols: Multi-Armed Bandits for Green Security. arXiv:2009.06560 [cs, stat]. 2020. Publisher's VersionAbstract
aaai21_dual_mandate_patrols.pdf
Conservation efforts in green security domains to protect wildlife and forests are constrained by the limited availability of defenders (i.e., patrollers), who must patrol vast areas to protect from attackers (e.g., poachers or illegal loggers). Defenders must choose how much time to spend in each region of the protected area, balancing exploration of infrequently visited regions and exploitation of known hotspots. We formulate the problem as a stochastic multi-armed bandit, where each action represents a patrol strategy, enabling us to guarantee the rate of convergence of the patrolling policy. However, a naive bandit approach would compromise short-term performance for long-term optimality, resulting in animals poached and forests destroyed. To speed up performance, we leverage smoothness in the reward function and decomposability of actions. We show a synergy between Lipschitzcontinuity and decomposition as each aids the convergence of the other. In doing so, we bridge the gap between combinatorial and Lipschitz bandits, presenting a no-regret approach that tightens existing guarantees while optimizing for short-term performance. We demonstrate that our algorithm, LIZARD, improves performance on real-world poaching data from Cambodia.
Prins A, Mate A, Killian JA, Abebe R, Tambe M. Incorporating Healthcare Motivated Constraints in Restless Bandit Based Resource Allocation. NeurIPS 2020 Workshops: Challenges of Real World Reinforcement Learning, Machine Learning in Public Health (Best Lightning Paper), Machine Learning for Health (Best on Theme), Machine Learning for the Developing World. 2020.
human_in_the_loop_rmab_short.pdf
Mate A*, Killian J*, Xu H, Perrault A, Tambe M. Collapsing Bandits and their Application to Public Health Interventions. Advances in Neural and Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) . 2020. Publisher's VersionAbstract
collapsing_bandits_full_paper_camready.pdf
We propose and study Collapsing Bandits, a new restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) setting in which each arm follows a binary-state Markovian process with a special structure: when an arm is played, the state is fully observed, thus “collapsing” any uncertainty, but when an arm is passive, no observation is made, thus allowing uncertainty to evolve. The goal is to keep as many arms in the “good” state as possible by planning a limited budget of actions per round. Such Collapsing Bandits are natural models for many healthcare domains in which health workers must simultaneously monitor patients and deliver interventions in a way that maximizes the health of their patient cohort. Our main contributions are as follows: (i) Building on the Whittle index technique for RMABs, we derive conditions under which the Collapsing Bandits problem is indexable. Our derivation hinges on novel conditions that characterize when the optimal policies may take the form of either “forward” or “reverse” threshold policies. (ii) We exploit the optimality of threshold policies to build fast algorithms for computing the Whittle index, including a closed form. (iii) We evaluate our algorithm on several data distributions including data from a real-world healthcare task in which a worker must monitor and deliver interventions to maximize their patients’ adherence to tuberculosis medication. Our algorithm achieves a 3-order-of-magnitude speedup compared to state-of-the-art RMAB techniques, while achieving similar performance.
Wang K, Wilder B, Perrault A, Tambe M. Automatically Learning Compact Quality-aware Surrogates for Optimization Problems, in NeurIPS (Spotlight). Vancouver, Canada ; 2020.Abstract
automatically-learning-compact-quality-aware-surrogates-for-optimization-problems-paper.pdf
Solving optimization problems with unknown parameters often requires learning a predictive model to predict the values of the unknown parameters and then solvingthe problem using these values. Recent work has shown that including the optimization problem as a layer in the model training pipeline results in predictions of the unobserved parameters that lead to higher decision quality. Unfortunately, this process comes at a large computational cost because the optimization problem must be solved and differentiated through in each training iteration; furthermore, it may also sometimes fail to improve solution quality due to non-smoothness issues that arise when training through a complex optimization layer. To address these shortcomings, we learn a low-dimensional surrogate model of a large optimization problem by representing the feasible space in terms of meta-variables, each of which is a linear combination of the original variables. By training a low-dimensional surrogate model end-to-end, and jointly with the predictive model, we achieve: i) a large reduction in training and inference time; and ii) improved per-formance by focusing attention on the more important variables in the optimization and learning in a smoother space. Empirically, we demonstrate these improvements on a non-convex adversary modeling task, a submodular recommendation task and a convex portfolio optimization task.
Perrault A, Fang F, Sinha A, Tambe M. AI for Social Impact: Learning and Planning in the Data-to-Deployment Pipeline. AI Magazine. 2020.Abstract
2001.00088.pdf
With the maturing of AI and multiagent systems research, we have a tremendous
opportunity to direct these advances towards addressing complex societal problems. In pursuit of this goal of AI for Social Impact, we as AI researchers must go beyond improvements in computational methodology; it is important to step out in the field to demonstrate social impact. To this end, we focus on the problems of public safety and security, wildlife conservation, and public health in low-resource communities, and present research advances in multiagent systems to address one key cross-cutting challenge: how to effectively deploy our limited intervention resources in these problem domains. We present case studies from our deployments around the world as well as lessons learned that we hope are of use to researchers who are interested in AI for Social Impact. In pushing this research agenda, we believe AI can indeed play an important
role in fighting social injustice and improving society.
Sharma A, Killian J, Perrault A. Optimization of the Low-Carbon Energy Transition Under Static and Adaptive Carbon Taxes via Markov Decision Processes, in AI for Social Good Workshop. ; 2020.Abstract

Optimization of the Low-Carbon Energy Transition Under Static and Adaptive Carbon Taxes via Markov Decision Processes

Many economists argue that a national carbon tax would be the most effective policy for incentivizing the development of low-carbon energy technologies. Yet existing models that measure the effects of a carbon tax only consider carbon taxes with fixed schedules. We propose a simple energy system transition model based on a finite-horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP) and use it to compare the carbon emissions reductions achieved by static versus adaptive carbon taxes. We find that in most cases, adaptive taxes achieve equivalent if not lower emissions trajectories while reducing the cost burden imposed by the carbon tax. However, the MDP optimization in our model adapted optimal policies to take advantage of the expected carbon tax adjustment, which sometimes resulted in the simulation missing its emissions targets.

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Jonnerby J, Lazos P, Lock E, Marmolejo-Cossío F, Ramsey CB, Sridhar D. Test and Contain: A Resource-Optimal Testing Strategy for COVID-19, in AI for Social Good Workshop. ; 2020.Abstract

Test and Contain: A Resource-Optimal Testing Strategy for COVID-19

We propose a novel testing and containment strategy to limit the spread of SARS-CoV2 while minimising the impact on the social and economic fabric of countries struggling with the pandemic. Our approach recognises the fact that testing capacities in many low and middle-income countries (LMICs) are severely constrained. In this setting, we show that the best way to utilise a limited number of tests during a pandemic can be found by solving an allocation problem. Our problem formulation takes into account the heterogeneity of the population and uses pooled testing to identify and isolate individuals while prioritising key workers and individuals with a higher risk of spreading the disease. In order to demonstrate the efficacy of our strategy, we perform simulations using a network-based SIR model. Our simulations indicate that applying our mechanism to a population of 10, 000 individuals with only 1 test per day reduces the peak number of infected individuals by approximately 27%, when compared to the scenario where no intervention is implemented, and requires at most 2% of the population to self-isolate at any given point.

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Leavy S, O’Sullivan B, Siapera E. Data, Power and Bias in Artificial Intelligence, in AI for Social Good Workshop. ; 2020.Abstract

Data, Power and Bias in Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to exacerbate societal bias and set back decades of advances in equal rights and civil liberty. Data used to train machine learning algorithms may capture social injustices, inequality or discriminatory attitudes that may be learned and perpetuated in society. Attempts to address this issue are rapidly emerging from different perspectives involving technical solutions, social justice and data governance measures. While each of these approaches are essential to the development of a comprehensive solution, often discourse associated with each seems disparate. This paper reviews ongoing work to ensure data justice, fairness and bias mitigation in AI systems from different domains exploring the interrelated dynamics of each and examining whether the inevitability of bias in AI training data may in fact be used for social good. We highlight the complexity associated with defining policies for dealing with bias. We also consider technical challenges in addressing issues of societal bias.

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Nishtala S, Kamarthi H, Thakkar D, Narayanan D, Grama A, Hegde A, Padmanabhan R, Madhiwalla N, Chaudhary S, Ravindran B, et al. Missed calls, Automated Calls and Health Support: Using AI to improve maternal health outcomes by increasing program engagement, in AI for Social Good Workshop. ; 2020.Abstract

Missed calls, Automated Calls and Health Support: Using AI to improve maternal health outcomes by increasing program engagement

India accounts for 11% of maternal deaths globally where a woman dies in childbirth every fifteen minutes. Lack of access to preventive care information is a significant problem contributing to high maternal morbidity and mortality numbers, especially in low-income households. We work with ARMMAN, a non-profit based in India, to further the use of call-based information programs by earlyon identifying women who might not engage on these programs that are proven to affect health parameters positively. We analyzed anonymized callrecords of over 300,000 women registered in an awareness program created by ARMMAN that uses cellphone calls to regularly disseminate health related information. We built robust deep learning based models to predict short term and long term dropout risk from call logs and beneficiaries’ demographic information. Our model performs 13% better than competitive baselines for short-term forecasting and 7% better for long term forecasting. We also discuss the applicability of this method in the real world through a pilot validation that uses our method to perform targeted interventions.

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Khudabukhsh A, Palakodety S, Carbonell J. On NLP Methods Robust to Noisy Indian Social Media Data , in AI for Social Good Workshop. ; 2020.Abstract

On NLP Methods Robust to Noisy Indian Social Media Data

Much of the computational social science research focusing on issues faced in developing nations concentrates on web content written in a world language often ignoring a significant chunk of a corpus written in a poorly resourced yet highly prevalent first language of the region in concern. Such omissions are common and convenient due to the sheer mismatch between linguistic resources offered in a world language and its low-resource counterpart. However, the path to analyze English content generated in linguistically diverse regions, such as the Indian subcontinent, is not straight-forward either. Social science/AI for social good research focusing on Indian sub-continental issues faces two major Natural Language Processing (NLP) challenges: (1) how to extract a (reasonably clean) monolingual English corpus? (2) How to extend resources and analyses to its low-resource counterpart? In this paper1 , we share NLP methods, lessons learnt from our multiple projects, and outline future focus areas that could be useful in tackling these two challenges. The discussed results are critical to two important domains: (1) detecting peace-seeking, hostility-diffusing hope speech in the context of the 2019 India-Pakistan conflict (2) detecting user generated web-content encouraging COVID-19 health compliance.

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Brubach B, Srinivasan A, Zhao S. The Relationship between Gerrymandering Classification and Voter Incentives, in AI for Social Good Workshop. ; 2020.Abstract

The Relationship between Gerrymandering Classification and Voter Incentives

Gerrymandering is the process of drawing electoral district maps in order to manipulate the outcomes of elections. Increasingly, computers are involved in both drawing biased districts and attempts to measure and regulate this practice. The most highprofile proposals to measure partisan gerrymandering use past voting data to classify a map as gerrymandered (or not). Prior work studies the ability of these metrics to detect gerrymandering, but does not explore how the metrics could affect voter behavior or be circumvented via strategic voting. We show that using past voting data for this classification can affect strategyproofness by introducing a game which models the iterative sequence of voting and redrawing districts under regulation that bans outlier maps. In experiments, we show that a heuristic can find strategies for this game including on real North Carolin maps and voting data. Finally, we address questions from a recent US Supreme Court case that relate to our model. This is a summary of “Meddling Metrics: the Effects of Measuring and Constraining Partisan Gerrymandering on Voter Incentives” appearing in EC2020

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Bayramli I, Bondi E, Tambe M. In the Shadow of Disaster: Finding Shadows to Improve Damage Detection, in AI for Social Good Workshop. ; 2020.Abstract

In the Shadow of Disaster: Finding Shadows to Improve Damage Detection

Rapid damage assessment after natural disasters is crucial for effective planning of relief efforts. Satellites with Very High Resolution (VHR) sensors can provide a detailed aerial image of the affected area, but current damage detection systems are fully- or semi-manual which can delay the delivery of emergency care. In this paper, we apply recent advancements in segmentation and change detection to detect damage given pre- and post-disaster VHR images of an affected area. Moreover, we demonstrate that segmentation models trained for this task rely on shadows by showing that (i) shadows influence false positive detections by the model, and (ii) removing shadows leads to poorer performance. Through this analysis, we aim to inspire future work to improve damage detection.

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Zhang A, Perrault A. Influence Maximization and Equilibrium Strategies in Election Network Games, in AI for Social Good Workshop. ; 2020.Abstract

Influence Maximization and Equilibrium Strategies in Election Network Games

Social media has become an increasingly important political domain in recent years, especially for campaign advertising. In this work, we develop a linear model of advertising influence maximization in two-candidate elections from the viewpoint of a fully-informed social network platform, using several variations on classical DeGroot dynamics to model different features of electoral opinion formation. We consider two types of candidate objectives—margin of victory (maximizing total votes earned) and probability of victory (maximizing probability of earning the majority)—and show key theoretical differences in the corresponding games, including advertising strategies for arbitrarily large networks and the existence of pure Nash equilibria. Finally, we contribute efficient algorithms for computing mixed equilibria in the margin of victory case as well as influence-maximizing best-response algorithms in both cases and show that in practice, as implemented on the Adolescent Health Dataset, they contribute to campaign equality by minimizing the advantage of the higherspending candidate.

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Nwankwo E, Okolo C, Habonimana C. Topic Modeling Approaches for Understanding COVID-19 MisinformationSpread in Sub-Saharan Africa, in AI for Social Good Workshop. ; 2020.Abstract

Topic Modeling Approaches for Understanding COVID-19 MisinformationSpread in Sub-Saharan Africa

Since the start of the pandemic, the proliferation of fake news and misinformation has been a constant battle for health officials and policy makers as they work to curb the spread of COVID-19. In areas within the Global South, it can be difficult for officials to keep track of the growth of such false information and even harder to address the real concerns their communities have. In this paper, we present some techniques the AI community can offer to help address this issue. While the topics presented within this paper are not a complete solution, we believe they could complement the work government officials, healthcare workers, and NGOs are currently doing on the ground in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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Wilder B, Charpingon M, Killian J, Ou H-C, Mate A, Jabbari S, Perrault A, Angel Desai M. Inferring between-population differences in COVID-19 dynamics, in AI for Social Good Workshop. ; 2020.Abstract

Inferring between-population differences in COVID-19 dynamics

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, formulating targeted policy interventions supported by differential SARS-CoV2 transmission dynamics will be of vital importance to national and regional governments. We develop an individual-level model for SARS-CoV2 transmission that accounts for location-dependent distributions of age, household structure, and comorbidities. We use these distributions together with age-stratified contact matrices to instantiate specific models for Hubei, China; Lombardy, Italy; and New York, United States. We then develop a Bayesian inference framework which leverages data on reported deaths to obtain a posterior distribution over unknown parameters and infer differences in the progression of the epidemic in the three locations. These findings highlight the role of between-population variation in formulating policy interventions.

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Xu L, Perrault A, Plumptre A, Driciru M, Wanyama F, Rwetsiba A, Tambe M. Game Theory on the Ground: The Effect of Increased Patrols on Deterring Poachers, in AI for Social Good Workshop. ; 2020.Abstract

Game Theory on the Ground: The Effect of Increased Patrols on Deterring Poachers

Applications of artificial intelligence for wildlife protection have focused on learning models of poacher behavior based on historical patterns. However, poachers’ behaviors are described not only by their historical preferences, but also their reaction to ranger patrols. Past work applying machine learning and game theory to combat poaching have hypothesized that ranger patrols deter poachers, but have been unable to find evidence to identify how or even if deterrence occurs. Here for the first time, we demonstrate a measurable deterrence effect on real-world poaching data. We show that increased patrols in one region deter poaching in the next timestep, but poachers then move to neighboring regions. Our findings offer guidance on how adversaries should be modeled in realistic gametheoretic settings.

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