Becoming Good at AI for Good

AI for good (AI4G) projects involve developing and applying artificial intelligence (AI) based solutions to further goals in areas such as sustainability, health, humanitarian aid, and social justice. Developing and deploying such solutions must be done in collaboration with partners who are experts in the domain in question and who already have experience in making progress towards such goals. Based on our experiences, we detail the different aspects of this type of collaboration broken down into four high-level categories: communication, data, modeling, and impact, and distill eleven takeaways to guide such projects in the future. We briefly describe two case studies to illustrate how some of these takeaways were applied in practice during our past collaborations.

Efficient and accurate computation to the $varphi$-function and its action on a vector

In this paper, we develop efficient and accurate algorithms for evaluating $varphi(A)$ and $varphi(A)b$, where $A$ is an $Ntimes N$ matrix, $b$ is an $N$ dimensional vector and $varphi$ is the function defined by $varphi(x)equivsumlimits^{infty}_{k=0}frac{z^k}{(1+k)!}$. Such matrix function (the so-called $varphi$-function) plays a key role in a class of numerical methods well-known as exponential integrators. The algorithms use the scaling and modified squaring procedure combined with truncated Taylor series. The backward error analysis is presented to find the optimal value of the scaling and the degree of the Taylor approximation. Some useful techniques are employed for reducing the computational cost. Numerical comparisons with state-of-the-art algorithms show that the algorithms perform well in both accuracy and efficiency.

Efficient Pipeline for Camera Trap Image Review

Biologists all over the world use camera traps to monitor biodiversity and wildlife population density. The computer vision community has been making strides towards automating the species classification challenge in camera traps, but it has proven difficult to to apply models trained in one region to images collected in different geographic areas. In some cases, accuracy falls off catastrophically in new region, due to both changes in background and the presence of previously-unseen species. We propose a pipeline that takes advantage of a pre-trained general animal detector and a smaller set of labeled images to train a classification model that can efficiently achieve accurate results in a new region.

Affinity Derivation and Graph Merge for Instance Segmentation

We present an instance segmentation scheme based on pixel affinity information, which is the relationship of two pixels belonging to a same instance. In our scheme, we use two neural networks with similar structure. One is to predict pixel level semantic score and the other is designed to derive pixel affinities. Regarding pixels as the vertexes and affinities as edges, we then propose a simple yet effective graph merge algorithm to cluster pixels into instances. Experimental results show that our scheme can generate fine-grained instance mask. With Cityscapes training data, the proposed scheme achieves 27.3 AP on test set.