Forecasting where and when new buildings will emerge is a rather unexplored niche topic, but relevant in disciplines such as urban planning, agriculture, resource management, and even autonomous flight. In this work, we present a method that accomplishes this task using satellite images and a custom neural network training procedure. In stage A, a DeepLapv3+ backbone is pretrained through a Siamese network architecture aimed at solving a building change detection task. In stage B, we transfer the backbone into a change forecasting model that relies solely on the initial input image. We also transfer the backbone into a forecasting model predicting the correct time range of the future change. For our experiments, we use the SpaceNet7 dataset with 960 km2 spatial extension and 24 monthly frames. We found that our training strategy consistently outperforms the traditional pretraining on the ImageNet dataset. Especially with longer forecasting ranges of 24 months, we observe F1 scores of 24% instead of 16%. Furthermore, we found that our method performed well in forecasting the times of future building constructions. Hereby, the strengths of our custom pretraining become especially apparent when we increase the difficulty of the task by predicting finer time windows.
The Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model is a popular method for creating mixed-membership clusters. Despite having been originally developed for text analysis, LDA has been used for a wide range of other applications. We propose a new formulation for the LDA model which incorporates covariates. In this model, a negative binomial regression is embedded within LDA, enabling straight-forward interpretation of the regression coefficients and the analysis of the quantity of cluster-specific elements in each sampling units (instead of the analysis being focused on modeling the proportion of each cluster, as in Structural Topic Models). We use slice sampling within a Gibbs sampling algorithm to estimate model parameters. We rely on simulations to show how our algorithm is able to successfully retrieve the true parameter values and the ability to make predictions for the abundance matrix using the information given by the covariates. The model is illustrated using real data sets from three different areas: text-mining of Coronavirus articles, analysis of grocery shopping baskets, and ecology of tree species on Barro Colorado Island (Panama). This model allows the identification of mixed-membership clusters in discrete data and provides inference on the relationship between covariates and the abundance of these clusters.
Social media has become extremely influential when it comes to policy making in modern societies especially in the western world (e.g., 48% of Europeans use social media every day or almost every day). Platforms such as Twitter allow users to follow politicians, thus making citizens more involved in political discussion. In the same vein, politicians use Twitter to express their opinions, debate among others on current topics and promote their political agenda aiming to influence voter behaviour. Previous studies have shown that tweets conveying negative sentiment are likely to be retweeted more frequently. In this paper, we attempt to analyse tweets from politicians from different countries and explore if their tweets follow the same trend. Utilising state-of-the-art pre-trained language models we performed sentiment analysis on multilingual tweets collected from members of parliament of Greece, Spain and United Kingdom, including devolved administrations. We achieved this by systematically exploring and analysing the differences between influential and less popular tweets. Our analysis indicates that politicians' negatively charged tweets spread more widely, especially in more recent times, and highlights interesting trends in the intersection of sentiment and popularity.
Nowadays, intelligent systems and services are getting increasingly popular as they provide data-driven solutions to diverse real-world problems, thanks to recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). However, machine learning meets software engineering not only with promising potentials but also with some inherent challenges. Despite some recent research efforts, we still do not have a clear understanding of the challenges of developing ML-based applications and the current industry practices. Moreover, it is unclear where software engineering researchers should focus their efforts to better support ML application developers. In this paper, we report about a survey that aimed to understand the challenges and best practices of ML application development. We synthesize the results obtained from 80 practitioners (with diverse skills, experience, and application domains) into 17 findings; outlining challenges and best practices for ML application development. Practitioners involved in the development of ML-based software systems can leverage the summarized best practices to improve the quality of their system. We hope that the reported challenges will inform the research community about topics that need to be investigated to improve the engineering process and the quality of ML-based applications.
Multi-agent formation as well as obstacle avoidance is one of the most actively studied topics in the field of multi-agent systems. Although some classic controllers like model predictive control (MPC) and fuzzy control achieve a certain measure of success, most of them require precise global information which is not accessible in harsh environments. On the other hand, some reinforcement learning (RL) based approaches adopt the leader-follower structure to organize different agents' behaviors, which sacrifices the collaboration between agents thus suffering from bottlenecks in maneuverability and robustness. In this paper, we propose a distributed formation and obstacle avoidance method based on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Agents in our system only utilize local and relative information to make decisions and control themselves distributively. Agent in the multi-agent system will reorganize themselves into a new topology quickly in case that any of them is disconnected. Our method achieves better performance regarding formation error, formation convergence rate and on-par success rate of obstacle avoidance compared with baselines (both classic control methods and another RL-based method). The feasibility of our method is verified by both simulation and hardware implementation with Ackermann-steering vehicles.
Keyphrase extraction is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing, which usually contains two main parts: candidate keyphrase extraction and keyphrase importance estimation. From the view of human understanding documents, we typically measure the importance of phrase according to its syntactic accuracy, information saliency, and concept consistency simultaneously. However, most existing keyphrase extraction approaches only focus on the part of them, which leads to biased results. In this paper, we propose a new approach to estimate the importance of keyphrase from multiple perspectives (called as \textit{KIEMP}) and further improve the performance of keyphrase extraction. Specifically, \textit{KIEMP} estimates the importance of phrase with three modules: a chunking module to measure its syntactic accuracy, a ranking module to check its information saliency, and a matching module to judge the concept (i.e., topic) consistency between phrase and the whole document. These three modules are seamlessly jointed together via an end-to-end multi-task learning model, which is helpful for three parts to enhance each other and balance the effects of three perspectives. Experimental results on six benchmark datasets show that \textit{KIEMP} outperforms the existing state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction approaches in most cases.
We introduce a learning-based algorithm to obtain a measurement matrix for compressive sensing related recovery problems. The focus lies on matrices with a constant modulus constraint which typically represent a network of analog phase shifters in hybrid precoding/combining architectures. We interpret a matrix with restricted isometry property as a mapping of points from a high- to a low-dimensional hypersphere. We argue that points on the low-dimensional hypersphere, namely, in the range of the matrix, should be uniformly distributed to increase robustness against measurement noise. This notion is formalized in an optimization problem which uses one of the maximum mean discrepancy metrics in the objective function. Recent success of such metrics in neural network related topics motivate a solution of the problem based on machine learning. Numerical experiments show better performance than random measurement matrices that are generally employed in compressive sensing contexts. Further, we adapt a method from the literature to the constant modulus constraint. This method can also compete with random matrices and it is shown to harmonize well with the proposed learning-based approach if it is used as an initialization. Lastly, we describe how other structural matrix constraints, e.g., a Toeplitz constraint, can be taken into account, too.
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