Robust COVID-19 Detection in CT Images with CLIP

In the realm of medical imaging, particularly for COVID-19 detection, deep learning models face substantial challenges such as the necessity for extensive computational resources, the paucity of well-annotated datasets, and a significant amount of unlabeled data. In this work, we introduce the first lightweight detector designed to overcome these obstacles, leveraging a frozen CLIP image encoder and a trainable multilayer perception (MLP). Enhanced with Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) for robustness and a loss landscape flattening strategy for improved generalization, our model is tailored for high efficacy in COVID-19 detection. Furthermore, we integrate a teacher-student framework to capitalize on the vast amounts of unlabeled data, enabling our model to achieve superior performance despite the inherent data limitations. Experimental results on the COV19-CT-DB dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, surpassing baseline by up to 10.6% in `macro' F1 score in supervised learning. The code is available at https://github.com/Purdue-M2/COVID-19_Detection_M2_PURDUE.

Plane Spiral OAM Mode-Group Based MIMO Communications: An Experimental Study

Spatial division multiplexing using conventional orbital angular momentum (OAM) has become a well-known physical layer transmission method over the past decade. The mode-group (MG) superposed by specific single mode plane spiral OAM (PSOAM) waves has been proved to be a flexible beamforming method to achieve the azimuthal pattern diversity, which inherits the spiral phase distribution of conventional OAM wave. Thus, it possesses both the beam directionality and vorticity. In this paper, it's the first time to show and verify novel PSOAM MG based multiple-in-multiple-out (MIMO) communication link (MG-MIMO) experimentally in a line-of-sight (LoS) scenario. A compact multi-mode PSOAM antenna is demonstrated experimentally to generate multiple independent controllable PSOAM waves, which can be used for constructing MGs. After several proof-of-principle tests, it has been verified that the beam directionality gain of MG can improve the receiving signal-to-noise (SNR) level in an actual system, meanwhile, the vorticity can provide another degree of freedom (DoF) to reduce the spatial correlation of MIMO system. Furthermore, a tentative long-distance transmission experiment operated at 10.2 GHz has been performed successfully at a distance of 50 m with a single-way spectrum efficiency of 3.7 bits/s/Hz/stream. The proposed MG-MIMO may have potential in the long-distance LoS back-haul scenario.

Learning Skill Equivalencies Across Platform Taxonomies

Assessment and reporting of skills is a central feature of many digital learning platforms. With students often using multiple platforms, cross-platform assessment has emerged as a new challenge. While technologies such as Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) have enabled communication between platforms, reconciling the different skill taxonomies they employ has not been solved at scale. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a methodology for finding and linking equivalent skills between platforms by utilizing problem content as well as the platform's clickstream data. We propose six models to represent skills as continuous real-valued vectors and leverage machine translation to map between skill spaces. The methods are tested on three digital learning platforms: ASSISTments, Khan Academy, and Cognitive Tutor. Our results demonstrate reasonable accuracy in skill equivalency prediction from a fine-grained taxonomy to a coarse-grained one, achieving an average recall@5 of 0.8 between the three platforms. Our skill translation approach has implications for aiding in the tedious, manual process of taxonomy to taxonomy mapping work, also called crosswalks, within the tutoring as well as standardized testing worlds.