ICAConfPubs: A Dataset and User Interface for ICA Conference Papers (2003-2018)

This paper presents a comprehensive dataset of past ICA (The International Communication Association) annual conference papers from 2003 to 2018, encompassing 27,466 papers, 21,038 authors, and 4,935 sessions. We made the dataset publicly available in both CSV and JSON formats. Additionally, we developed an API to facilitate programmatic access, and an intuitive user interface to enable users to navigate and explore the data more easily. The web application, API documentation, downloadable data, and reproducible code to obtain and process the data are available at https://ica.hongtaoh.com.

TEMPO: Transformers for Temporal Disease Progression from Cross-Sectional Data

Event-Based Models (EBMs) infer biomarker progression from cross-sectional data but typically only as ordinal sequences and rely on rigid model assumptions. We propose \textsc{Tempo}, a Transformer architecture that learns both ordinal and continuous event sequences through simulation-based supervised learning. \textsc{Tempo} uses two Transformer modules: one treats biomarkers as tokens to infer event sequencing; the other treats patients as tokens, representing each by their per-biomarker abnormality profile, to infer patients' disease stages. On synthetic benchmarks, \textsc{Tempo} reduces normalized Kendall's Tau distance by 52.89\% and staging MAE by 25.33\% compared to state-of-the-art SA-EBM, with larger reductions in high-dimensional settings (58.88\% and 61.10\%). Applied to ADNI, \textsc{Tempo} recovers a biologically plausible Alzheimer's progression: early medial temporal atrophy, followed by amyloid accumulation and cognitive decline, and late-stage tau pathology with terminal acceleration of global neurodegeneration -- broadly consistent with established disease models. \textsc{Tempo} also eliminates the need to derive custom inference algorithms and enables rapid empirical comparison of generative hypotheses.