Publications by Type: Conference Paper

A mechanism for predicting whether individual regions will meet there UN Sustainability for Development Goals (SDGs) is presented which takes into consideration the potential relationships be- tween time series associated with individual SDGs, unlike previous work where an independence assumption was made. The challenge is in identifying the relationships and then using these relationships to make SDG attainment predictions. To this end, the SDG Relational Multivariate Forecast- ing (SDG-RMF) attainment prediction methodology is presented. A multivariate forecasting mechanism for forecasting SDGs time series The results demonstrate that by considering the relationships between time series, more accurate SDG forecast predictions can be made.

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While artificial intelligence (AI) has been heralded as a technology capable of solving unique problems, social good challenges are inherently structural and require the partnership of many stake- holders in order to apply AI for social good (AI4SG) in a sustainable and scaled manner. This paper explains current challenges in project implementation, surveys framework approaches, and contributes our differentiating lessons learned on scaling projects to problem domain-wide impact. The goal is to guide partnering organizations through challenges and identifying opportunities to accelerate the application of AI4SG.

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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 possibilities to tackle the problem. The multi- and interdisciplinary research on persuasive technology, which attempts to change behavior or attitudes without deception or coercion, shows promise in improving wellbeing, 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.

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Fairness, in machine learning research, is often conceived as an exercise in constrained optimization, based on a predefined fairness metric. We argue that this abstract model of algorithmic fairness is a poor match for the real-world, in which applications are likely to be embedded within a larger context involving multiple classes of stakeholders as well as multiple social and technical systems. We may expect multiple, competing claims around fairness coming from various stakeholders, especially in applications oriented towards social good. We propose that computational social choice is a promising framework for the integration of multiple perspectives on system outcomes in fairness- aware systems and provide an example case of personalized recommendation for a non-profit.

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As fairness and discrimination concerns permeate the design of both machine learning algorithms and mechanism design problems, we discuss differences in approaches between these two fields. We aim to bridge these two communities into a cohesive narrative that en- compasses both the large-scale capabilities of machine learning and group-focused fairness as well as the strategic incentives and utility- based notions of fairness from mechanism de- sign, showing their necessity in designing a fair pipeline.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major challenge to humanity, with 12.7 million confirmed cases as of July 13th, 2020 [1]. In previous work, we described how Artificial Intelligence can be used to tackle the pandemic with applications at the molecular, clinical, and societal scales [2]. In the present follow-up article, we review these three research directions, and assess the level of maturity and feasibility of the approaches used, as well as their potential for operationalization. We also summarize some commonly encountered risks and practical pitfalls, as well as guidelines and best practices for formulating and deploying AI applications at different scales.

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Trees on farms provide environmental benefits to society and improve agricultural productivity for farmers. We study incentive schemes for afforestation on farms through the lens of contract theory, designing conditional cash transfer schemes that encourage farmers to sustain tree growth. We capture the tree growth process as a Markov chain whose evolution is affected by the agent’s (farmer) actions – e.g., investing costly effort or cutting the tree for firewood. The principal has imperfect information about the agent’s costs and actions taken, and wants to maximize long-run tree survival with minimal payment. We show how to calculate the optimal contract structure in our model: notably, it can involve time-varying payments and may incentivize the agent to join the program but abandon it prematurely.

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Word embeddings learned from collections of data have demonstrated a significant level of biases. When these embeddings are used in machine learn- ing tasks it often amplifies the bias. We propose a debiasing method that uses (Figure 1) a hybrid classification - variational autoencoder network. In this work, we developed a semi-supervised classification algorithm based on variational autoencoders which learns the latent structure within the dataset and then based on learned latent structure adaptively re-weights the importance of certain data points while training. Experimental results have shown that the proposed approach works better than existing SoTA methods for debiasing word embeddings.

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Not all patients who need kidney transplant can find a donor with compatible characteristics. Kidney exchange programs (KEPs) seek to match such incompatible patient-donor pairs together, usually with the objective of maximizing the total number of transplants. We propose a randomized policy for selecting an optimal solution in which patients’ equity of opportunity to receive a transplant is promoted. Our approach gives rise to the problem of enumerating all optimal solutions, which we tackle using a hybrid of constraint programming and linear programming. We empirically demonstrate the advantages of our proposed method over the common practice of using the first optimal solution obtained by a solver.

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The increasingly widespread use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in AI applications must be continually monitored for biases and false associations, especially those surrounding protected or disadvantaged classes of people. We discuss methods and algorithms used to mitigate such biases and their weak points, using real world examples in civilian agencies of the US government.

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Deep Learning is changing the face of agriculture. Combined with high-resolution aerial imagery, these methods enable farmers to understand and manage their farms with previously unseen precision and efficiency. Beyond reducing costs for an industry already under significant economic stress, these advances have key environmental benefits as well: maximizing production, reducing waste, anticipating disruptions to supply chains, and limiting the use of chemicals and water through targeted application. Our approach uses a U-net based neural network to predict the density of flowering pineapple plants from aerial imagery, enabling farmers to optimize their harvesting schedule.

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In this paper we consider the problem of forming student teams adequate for company internship tasks. First, we provide a formalisation of the Feasible Team-For-Task Allocation Problem, and show the computational hardness of solving it optimally. Thereafter, we propose Edu2Com, an any- time heuristic algorithm that generates an initial team allocation that is then improved in an iterative process. Finally, we conduct a systematic evaluation and show that Edu2Com manages to (a) out- perform CPLEX in computation time, and (b) reach optimality, in the experiments considered.

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has started to transform our economy and society, more specifically, AI has the potential to make both labor and machines more productive while displacing certain human tasks and simultaneously introducing new tasks into the economy. Using online job postings data, this pa- per proposes novel methodologies to characterize the dynamic evolution of occupational task-share demands across different industries in the U.S. la- bor market and estimates the implied US-$ market values for skills. The paper develops a multi-variate and multi-step long short term memory (LSTM) network architecture to estimate 12-month and 24- month ahead forecasts of task-shares with 10% root mean-squared error. The industry-specific insights on occupation evolution and forecasts on task- shares will facilitate the policy-makers and strategy leaders’ decision-making to transform the current workforce for the future.

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Staying up-to-date with current medical research can be a challenge for doctors and other medi- cal decision-makers. Systematic reviews are one of the key tools that doctors use to stay informed. These are meta-analyses of all the relevant research with the intention of answering one specific ques- tion within the healthcare domain. Cochrane pro- duces systematic reviews of medical research that are globally considered as a gold standard for high- quality healthcare information. However, because of the high volume of papers published and the fact that Cochrane’s review authors are volunteers, it can take up to three years to write and publish one of these reviews. Our research focuses on speeding up this process. We propose a hybrid human-AI system to establish the topical area of a newly pub- lished paper faster, easing the process of searching for papers to include in a review.

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Conflict resolution practitioners consistently struggle with access to structured armed conflict data, a dataset already rife with uncertainty, inconsistency, and politicization. Due to the lack of a standardized approach to collating conflict data, publicly available armed conflict datasets often require manipulation depending upon the needs of end users. Transformation of armed conflict data tends to be a manual, time consuming task that nonprofits with limited budgets struggle to keep up with. In this paper, we explore the use of a deep natural language processing (NLP) model to aid the transformation of armed conflict data for conflict analysis. Our model drastically reduces the time spent on manual data transformations and improves armed conflict event classification by identifying multiple incidence types. This minimizes the human supervision cost and allows nonprofits to access a broader range of conflict data sources to reduce reporting bias. Thus our model contributes to the incorporation of technology in the peace building and conflict resolution sector.

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Within the relatively busy area of fair machine learning that has been dominated by classification fairness research, fairness in clustering has started to see some recent attention. In this position paper, we assess the existing work in fair clustering and observe that there are several directions that are yet to be explored, and postulate that the state-of-the- art in fair clustering has been quite parochial in out- look. We posit that widening the normative prin- ciples to target for, characterizing shortfalls where the target cannot be achieved fully, and making use of knowledge of downstream processes can significantly widen the scope of research in fair clustering research. At a time when clustering and unsupervised learning are being increasingly used to make and influence decisions that matter significantly to human lives, we believe that widening the ambit of fair clustering is of immense significance.

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As disasters such as earthquakes and floods be- come more frequent and detrimental, it is increas- ingly important that water infrastructure resilience be strategically enhanced to support post-disaster functionality and recovery. In this paper, we focus on the problem of strategically building seismic- resilient pipe networks to ensure direct water sup- ply to critical customers and certain proximity to water sources for residential areas, which we for- malize as the Steiner network problem with cov- erage constraints. We present an efficient mixed- integer linear program encoding to solve the prob- lem. We also investigate the problem of planning partial network installments to maximize efficiency over time and propose an effective sequential plan- ning algorithm to solve it. We evaluate our algo- rithms on synthetic water networks and apply them to a case study on a water service zone in Los An- geles, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods for large-scale real-world applications.

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The goal of the proposed project is to transform a large transportation hub into a smart and accessible hub (SA T-Hub), with minimal infrastructure change. The societal need is significant, especially impactful for people in great need, such as those who are blind and visually impaired (BVI) or with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), as well as those unfamiliar with metropolitan areas. With our inter- disciplinary background in urban systems, sensing, AI and data analytics, accessibility, and paratransit and assistive services, our solution is a hu- man-centric system approach that integrates facility modeling, mobile navigation, and user interface designs. We leverage several transportation facili- ties in the heart of New York City and throughout the State of New Jersey as testbeds for ensuring the relevance of the research and a smooth transition to real world applications.

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There is widespread acceptance that data from earth observation satellites, combined with artificial intelligence, have the potential to play an important role to enable the quantification of the United Nations Sustainable Development Indicators (SDIs). However, building workflows that allow accurate and timely measurement of the SDIs from sub-national to global scales is proving challenging. We discuss a research program that aims to develop techniques to meet these challenges and help provide member states of the UN with effective methods of monitoring progress towards meeting the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

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Background: The COVID-19 outbreak has already caused significant mortality worldwide. As the epidemic accelerates, understanding the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 is crucial to informing national and regional policies. We develop an individual-level model for SARS-CoV2 transmission which accounts for location-dependent distributions of age and household structure. We apply our model to Hubei, China and Lombardy, Italy to analyze the impact of demographic structure on estimates for key parameters such as the rate of documentation and the reproduction number r0 for COVID-19 cases. We also assess the effectiveness of potential policies ranging from physical distancing to sheltering in place in Lombardy.

Methods: Our study develops a stochastic, agent-based model for SARS-CoV2 spread. A key feature of the model is the inclusion of population-specific demographic structure, such as the distributions of age, household structure, contact across age groups, and comorbidities. We use prior estimates of these demographic features to instantiate our model for two locations: Hubei, China and Lombardy, Italy. Furthermore, we utilize the data on the number of reported deaths due to COVID-19 in both locations to estimate parameters describing location-specific variation in the transmissibility and fatality of the disease (for reasons beyond demography). The range of the parameters in our model that are consistent with reported data are used to construct plausible ranges for r0 and the rate of documentation in each location. Finally, we analyze potential policy responses in the context of Lombardy. Our analysis traces out the trade-off between adoption of physical distancing across the entire population and policies that encourage members of a specific age group to shelter at home.

Results: Our estimates for r0 are comparable to the rest of the literature, with a range of 2.11–2.27 for Hubei and 2.50-3.20 for Lombardy, suggesting higher rates of transmission in the latter. Scenarios where the case fatality rates are higher in Lombardy than Hubei by a factor of 1-5 times appear plausible given the data (even after accounting for differences in age and comorbidity distributions). We estimate the rate at which symptomatic cases are documented to be at 10.3-19.2% in Hubei and 1.2-8% in Lombardy, indicating that the number of undocumented cases may be even higher than has previously been estimated. Evaluation of potential policies suggests that encouraging a single age group to shelter in place is insufficient to control the epidemic by itself, but that targeted "salutary sheltering" by even 50% of a single age group has a substantial impact when combined with adoption of physical distancing by the rest of the population.