Advancing artificial intelligence research and dissemination through conference series: Benchmark,scientific impact and the MICAI experience

This article presents an overview, analysis and benchmark of the best-known artificial intelligence (AI) conferences, including the Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (MICAI) conference series, and describes how MICAI has contributed to both the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) research in Mexico and the advancement of AI research worldwide. Among the prestigious AI conferences examined are the IJCAI, AAAI, ECAI, IBERAMIA, AAJCAI and PRICAI. Features analyzed include number of papers, acceptance rate and the h index as a measure of the scientific impact. The MICAI has been held in Mexico since 2000, when the National Meeting on AI, held by the Mexican Society for Artificial Intelligence (SMIA) since 1983, and the International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence (ISAI), organized by Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM) since 1988, merged into a single conference. Conference trends and future developments are also explained.     

人工智能军事应用面临的道德责任困境

随着人工智能在军事领域的发展,“制智权”已成为各国争夺军事竞争战略主动权的关键。与此同时,由于人工智能高度自主化和拟人化的特性,其在军事领域的应用一直伴随着巨大的伦理争议。人工智能的引入,将对传统的战争责任划归模式产生冲击,进而引发责任鸿沟、责任分散和道德推脱等问题。深入研究现象背后的成因,探讨道德责任困境的破解之道,既是发展人工智能军事应用必须跨越的关键隘口,也是对未来战争进行伦理约束亟待攻克的重大课题。     

多媒体智能：当多媒体遇到人工智能

过去10年中涌现出大量新兴的多媒体应用和服务,带来了很多可以用于多媒体前沿研究的多媒体数据。多媒体研究在图像/视频内容分析、多媒体搜索和推荐、流媒体服务和多媒体内容分发等方向均取得了重要进展。与此同时,由于在深度学习领域所取得的重大突破,人工智能(artificial intelligence,AI)在20世纪50年代被正式视为一门学科之后,迎来了一次“新”的发展浪潮。因此,一个问题就自然而然地出现了：当多媒体遇到人工智能时会带来什么？为了回答这个问题,本文通过研究多媒体和人工智能之间的相互影响引入了多媒体智能的概念。从两个方面探讨多媒体与人工智能之间的相互影响：一是多媒体促使人工智能向着更具可解释性的方向发展;二是人工智能反过来为多媒体研究注入了新的思维方式。这两个方面形成了一个良性循环,多媒体和人工智能在其中不断促进彼此发展。本文对相关研究及进展进行了讨论,并围绕值得进一步探索的研究方向分享见解。希望可以对多媒体智能的未来发展带来新的研究思路。     

Hybrid artificial intelligence architecture for diagnosis and decision-making in manufacturing

This paper presents an architecture which combines artificial neural networks (ANNs) and an expert system (ES) into a hybrid, self-improving artificial intelligence (AI) system. The purpose of this project is to explore methods of combining multiple AI technologies into a hybrid intelligent diagnostic and advisory system. ANNs and ESs have different strengths and weaknesses, which can be exploited in such a way that they are complementary to each other: strengths in one system make up for weaknesses in the other, andvice versa. There is, presently, considerable interest in ways to exploit the strengths of these methodologies to produce an intelligent system which is more robust and flexible than one using either technology alone. Any process which involves both data-driven (bottom-up) and concept-driven (top-down) processing is especially well suited to displaying the capabilities of such a hybrid system. The system can take an incoming pattern of signals, as from various points in an automated manufacturing process, and make intelligent process control decisions on the basis of the pattern as preprocessed by the ANNs, with rule-based heuristic help or corroboration from the ES. Patterns of data from the environment which can be classified by either the ES or a human consultant can result in a high-level ANN being created and trained to recognize that pattern on future occurrences. In subsequent cases in which the ANN and the ES fail to agree on a decision concerning the environmental situation, the system can resolve those differences and retrain the networks and/or modify the models of the environment stored in the ES. Work on a hybrid system for perception in machine vision has been funded initially by an Oak Ridge National Laboratory seed grant, and most of the system components are operating presently in a parallel distributed computer environment.     

The imaginary,the computer,artificial intelligence: A cultural anthropological approach

The role of the cultural anthropologist in studying the results of information technology and artificial intelligence should be to contribute and reaffirm a sense of life which considers the human being in his or her totality, and to recognize the role of diversity and the imaginary. Technical revolutions have also proved to be cultural revolutions. The skills required by one culture, the identification and creation of problems and the solutions are interrelated. These interrelationships are worked out in a cultural context endowed with its own experiences, knowledge and needs which define and make it different from other societies. The advanced technologies require new competences and new skills. This paper examines imaginary from two different viewpoints: (a) the imaginary aspect of body-mind relations, influenced by research into artificial intelligence and its prospects for the future; and (b) the roles and forms assumed by the imaginary in human-computer relations.     

The impact of artificial intelligence on event experiences: a scenario technique approach

Electronic Markets - Digital technologies are transforming human relations, interactions and experiences in the business landscape. Whilst a great potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in the...     

医学影像人工智能辅助诊断的样本增广方法

针对不同领域人工智能（AI）应用研究所面临的采用常规手段获取大量样本时耗时耗力耗财的问题,许多AI研究领域提出了各种各样的样本增广方法。首先,对样本增广的研究背景与意义进行介绍;其次,归纳了几种公知领域（包括自然图像识别、字符识别、语义分析）的样本增广方法,并在此基础上详细论述了医学影像辅助诊断方面的样本获取或增广方法,包括X光片、计算机断层成像（CT）图像、磁共振成像（MRI）图像的样本增广方法;最后,对AI应用领域数据增广方法存在的关键问题进行总结,并对未来的发展趋势进行展望。经归纳总结可知,获取足够数量且具有广泛代表性的训练样本是所有领域AI研发的关键环节。无论是公知领域还是专业领域都进行样本增广,且不同领域甚至同一领域的不同研究方向,其样本获取或增广方法均不相同。此外,样本增广并不是简单地增加样本数量,而是尽可能再现小样本量无法完全覆盖的真实样本存在,进而提高样本多样性,增强AI系统性能。     

Pathologies of AI: Responsible use of artificial intelligence in professional work

Although the AI paradigm is useful for building knowledge-based systems for the applied natural sciences, there are dangers when it is extended into the domains of business, law and other social systems. It is misleading to treat knowledge as a commodity that can be separated from the context in which it is regularly used. Especially when it relates to social behaviour, knowledge should be treated as socially constructed, interpreted and maintained through its practical use in context. The meanings of terms in a knowledge-base are assumed to be references to an objective reality whereas they are instruments for expressing values and exercising power. Expert systems that are not perspicuous to the expert community will lose their meanings and cease to contain genuine knowledge, as they will be divorced from the social processes essential for the maintenance of both meaning and knowledge. Perspicuity is usually sacrificed when knowledge is represented in a formalism, with the result that the original problem is compounded with a second problem of penetrating the representation language. Formalisms that make business and legal problems easier to understand are one essential research goal, not only in the quest for intelligent machines to replace intelligent human beings, but also in the wiser quest for computers to support collaborative work and other forms of social problem solving.     

Managing artificial intelligence projects: Key insights from an AI consulting firm

While organisations are increasingly interested in artificial intelligence (AI), many AI projects encounter significant issues or even fail. To gain a deeper understanding of the issues that arise during these projects and the practices that contribute to addressing them, we study the case of Consult, a North American AI consulting firm that helps organisations leverage the power of AI by providing custom solutions. The management of AI projects at Consult is a multi-method approach that draws on elements from traditional project management, agile practices, and AI workflow practices. While the combination of these elements enables Consult to be effective in delivering AI projects to their customers, our analysis reveals that managing AI projects in this way draw upon three core logics, that is, commonly shared norms, values, and prescribed behaviours which influence actors' understanding of how work should be done. We identify that the simultaneous presence of these three logics—a traditional project management logic, an agile logic, and an AI workflow logic—gives rise to conflicts and issues in managing AI projects at Consult, and successfully managing these AI projects involves resolving conflicts that arise between them. From our case findings, we derive four strategies to help organisations better manage their AI projects.     

Counterfactuals and causability in explainable artificial intelligence: Theory,algorithms, and applications

Deep learning models have achieved high performance across different domains, such as medical decision-making, autonomous vehicles, decision support systems, among many others. However, despite this success, the inner mechanisms of these models are opaque because their internal representations are too complex for a human to understand. This opacity makes it hard to understand the how or the why of the predictions of deep learning models.There has been a growing interest in model-agnostic methods that make deep learning models more transparent and explainable to humans. Some researchers recently argued that for a machine to achieve human-level explainability, this machine needs to provide human causally understandable explanations, also known as causability. A specific class of algorithms that have the potential to provide causability are counterfactuals.This paper presents an in-depth systematic review of the diverse existing literature on counterfactuals and causability for explainable artificial intelligence (AI). We performed a Latent Dirichlet topic modelling analysis (LDA) under a Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework to find the most relevant literature articles. This analysis yielded a novel taxonomy that considers the grounding theories of the surveyed algorithms, together with their underlying properties and applications to real-world data.Our research suggests that current model-agnostic counterfactual algorithms for explainable AI are not grounded on a causal theoretical formalism and, consequently, cannot promote causability to a human decision-maker. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the explanations derived from popular algorithms in the literature provide spurious correlations rather than cause/effects relationships, leading to sub-optimal, erroneous, or even biased explanations. Thus, this paper also advances the literature with new directions and challenges on promoting causability in model-agnostic approaches for explainable AI.     

The challenge of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a relatively young discipline, yet it has already led to general-purpose problem-solving methods and novel applications. Ultimately, AI's goals of creating models and mechanisms of intelligent action can be realized only in the broader context of computer science. Creating mechanisms for sharing of knowledge, knowhow, and literacy is the challenge. The great Chinese philosopher Kuan-Tzu once said: “If you give a fish to a man, you will feed him for a day. If you give him a fishing rod, you will feed him for life.” We can go one step further: If we can provide him with the knowledge and the know-how for making that fishing rod, we can feed the whole village. Therein lies the promise-and the challenge-of AI     

中国医学影像人工智能20年回顾和展望

在过去20年里,医学影像技术、人工智能技术以及这两项技术相结合的临床应用都取得了长足发展。中国在该领域的研究也取得卓越成就,并且在全世界范围内的贡献比例仍在逐步提高。为了记录和总结国内同行的科研成果,本文对中国医学影像人工智能过去20年的发展历程进行回顾和展望。重点分析了国内同行在公认的医学影像人工智能领域的国际顶级刊物Medical Image Analysis(MedIA)和IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging(TMI)以及顶级会议Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention(MICCAI)发表的论文,定量统计了论文发表数量、作者身份、发表单位、作者合作链、关键词和被引次数等信息。同时总结了近20年中国医学影像人工智能发展进程中的重要事件,包括举办的医学影像人工智能知名国际和国内会议、《中国医学影像AI白皮书》的发布以及国内同行在COVID-19(corona virus disease 2019)期间的贡献,最后展望了中国医学影像人工智能领域未来的发展趋势。上述统计结果系统...     

The control structure of artificial creatures

The aim of this article is to integrate some ideas from the science of complexity, behavior-based AI, and the theory of metasynthesis for intelligence systems, and to design a computational model for a brief implementation of these ideas. Our simulated microworld is a two-dimensional grid containing some resources including food and water, walls, shade, bugs, and an artificial creature. This artificial creature will fulfill a set of goals in a complex, dynamic, and unfriendly environment. The creature consists of a set of self-interested agents, and has life-like characteristics by means of interactions between its lifeless agents, as well as the interactions between the creature and its environment. The experimental result demonstrates the usefulness of this model, and this is only the first step toward our ultimate goal. This work was presented in part at the Fifth International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 26–28, 2000. Supported by NSFC 79990580     

The piping of thought and the need for a permanent monitoring of the cultural effects of artificial intelligence

Over the years, AI has undergone a transformation from its original aim of producing an intelligent machine to that of producing pragmatic solutions of problems of the market place. In doing so, AI has made a significant contribution to the debate on whether the computer is an instrument or an interlocutor. This paper discusses issues of problem solving and creativity underlying this transformation, and attempts to clarify the distinction between theresolutive intelligence andproblematic intelligence. It points out that the advance of intelligent technology, with its failure to make a clear distinction betweenresolutive andcreative intelligence, could contribute to the further cultural marginalisation of human activities not connected with production. A further danger is that AI products may suffer a further loss of social reputation and prestige for those activities for which it is not possible to build artificial devices.     

Information fusion as an integrative cross-cutting enabler to achieve robust,explainable, and trustworthy medical artificial intelligence

Medical artificial intelligence (AI) systems have been remarkably successful, even outperforming human performance at certain tasks. There is no doubt that AI is important to improve human health in many ways and will disrupt various medical workflows in the future. Using AI to solve problems in medicine beyond the lab, in routine environments, we need to do more than to just improve the performance of existing AI methods. Robust AI solutions must be able to cope with imprecision, missing and incorrect information, and explain both the result and the process of how it was obtained to a medical expert. Using conceptual knowledge as a guiding model of reality can help to develop more robust, explainable, and less biased machine learning models that can ideally learn from less data. Achieving these goals will require an orchestrated effort that combines three complementary Frontier Research Areas: (1) Complex Networks and their Inference, (2) Graph causal models and counterfactuals, and (3) Verification and Explainability methods. The goal of this paper is to describe these three areas from a unified view and to motivate how information fusion in a comprehensive and integrative manner can not only help bring these three areas together, but also have a transformative role by bridging the gap between research and practical applications in the context of future trustworthy medical AI. This makes it imperative to include ethical and legal aspects as a cross-cutting discipline, because all future solutions must not only be ethically responsible, but also legally compliant.     

The impact of artificial intelligence in accounting work: Expert systems use in auditing and tax

This paper uses Perrow’s sociological framework as a basis for a comparative organisation analysis of the impact of expert systems on organisational issues. The study analyses the relative impact of expert systems on two different types of accounting work: auditing and tax. The results indicate an impact on factors that ultimately improve productivity. The aggregate results indicate that expert systems are found to allow the user substantial control of search for solutions and discretion on whether to follow system recommendations, increased access to top management, and a decrease in the need for supervision. The systems allow the user the ability to solve a broader range of problems, while allowing the user the ability to perform more work. The comparison of auditing and tax expert systems indicates that audit systems seem to allow for greater control over search. Tax systems seem to allow more work to be done without supervision, make more decisions immediately, and allow the user to make a wider range of decisions.