Publications

SigTran: Signature Vectors for Detecting Illicit Activities in Blockchain Transaction Networks
Farimah Poursafaei
Reihaneh Rabbany
Željko Žilić
2021-05-09
Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (published)
doi.org
Facilitating Asynchronous Participatory Design of Open Source Software: Bringing End Users into the Loop
Jazlyn Hellman
Jinghui Cheng
Jin Guo
2021-05-08
Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Interprofessional collaboration and health policy: results from a Quebec mixed method legal research
Marie-Andree Girard
Catherine Régis
Jean-Louis Denis
2021-05-06
Journal of Interprofessional Care (published)
doi.org
Interprofessional collaboration and health policy: results from a Quebec mixed method legal research
Marie-Andree Girard
Catherine Régis
Jean-Louis Denis
ABSTRACT Interprofessional collaboration (IPC) is central to effective care. This practice is structured by an array of laws, regulations an… (see more)d policies but the literature on their impact on IPC is scarce. This study aims to illustrate the gap between the texts and clinicians’ knowledge of the legal framework using an anonymous web-based survey. The survey, sent to nurses and physicians in Quebec, Canada, focused on the IPC legal framework, legal knowledge sources and IPC perceptions or beliefs. The primary outcome was to determine the gap between the law and understanding of the law. The secondary outcome was to identify legal knowledge sources for clinicians in Quebec. A total of 267 participants filled in the survey. For knowledge acquisition, 40% of physicians turned to insurers whereas 43% of nurses turned to their regulatory body. Only 30% of physicians correctly identified what activity is reserved for physicians while 39% of nurses correctly identified their reserved activity. Regarding legal perceptions, 28% of physicians and 39% of nurses thought IPC could increase their liability. These participants have a higher tendency to name liability-related issues as barriers to IPC. These results show an important discrepancy between clinicians’ knowledge about law and policies, and the actual texts themselves. This gap can lead to misinterpretations of the law by clinicians, ineffective policy changes by policymakers and can perpetuate ineffective implementation of IPC.
2021-05-06
Journal of Interprofessional Care (published)
doi.org
Pharmacists' perceptions of a machine learning model for the identification of atypical medication orders
Sophie-Camille Hogue
Flora Chen
Geneviève Brassard
Denis Lebel
Jean-François Bussières
Audrey Durand
Maxime Thibault
2021-05-06
J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc. (published)
doi.org
PNS-GAN: Conditional Generation of Peripheral Nerve Signals in the Wavelet Domain via Adversarial Networks
Olivier Tessier-Lariviere
Luke Y. Prince
Pascal Fortier-Poisson
Lorenz Wernisch
Oliver Armitage
Emil Hewage
Guillaume Lajoie
Blake Richards
Simulated datasets of neural recordings are a crucial tool in neural engineering for testing the ability of decoding algorithms to recover k… (see more)nown ground-truth. In this work, we introduce PNS-GAN, a generative adversarial network capable of producing realistic nerve recordings conditioned on physiological biomarkers. PNS-GAN operates in the wavelet domain to preserve both the timing and frequency of neural events with high resolution. PNS-GAN generates sequences of scaleograms from noise using a recurrent neural network and 2D transposed convolution layers. PNS-GAN discriminates over stacks of scaleograms with a network of 3D convolution layers. We find that our generated signal reproduces a number of characteristics of the real signal, including similarity in a canonical time-series feature-space, and contains physiologically related neural events including respiration modulation and similar distributions of afferent and efferent signalling.
2021-05-04
International IEEE/EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering (published)
doi.org
Design and Implementation of Smooth Renewable Power in Cloud Data Centers
Xinxin Liu
Yu Hua
Xue (Steve) Liu
Ling Yang
Yuanyuan Sun
The renewable power has been widely used in modern cloud data centers, which also produce large electricity bills and the negative impacts o… (see more)n environments. However, frequent fluctuation and intermittency of renewable power often cause the challenges in terms of the stability of both electricity grid and data centers, as well as decreasing the utilization of renewable power. Existing schemes fail to alleviate the renewable power fluctuation, which is caused by the essential properties of renewable power. In order to address this problem, we propose an efficient and easy-to-use smooth renewable power-aware scheme, called Smoother, which consists of Flexible Smoothing (FS) and Active Delay (AD). First, in order to smooth the fluctuation of renewable power, FS carries out the optimized charge/discharge operation via computing the minimum variance of the renewable power that is supplied to data centers per interval. Second, AD improves the utilization of renewable power via actively adjusting the execution time of deferrable workloads. Extensive experimental results via examining the traces of real-world data centers demonstrate that Smoother significantly reduces the negative impact of renewable power fluctuations on data centers and improves the utilization of renewable power by 250.88 percent on average. We have released the source codes for public use.
2021-04-30
IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (published)
doi.org
Gradient Masked Federated Optimization
Irene Tenison
Sreya Francis
Irina Rish
2021-04-21
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
hBERT + BiasCorp - Fighting Racism on the Web
Olawale Moses Onabola
Zhuang Ma
Xie Yang
Benjamin Akera
Ibraheem Abdulrahman
Jia Xue
Dianbo Liu
Yoshua Bengio
Subtle and overt racism is still present both in physical and online communities today and has impacted many lives in different segments of … (see more)the society. In this short piece of work, we present how we’re tackling this societal issue with Natural Language Processing. We are releasing BiasCorp, a dataset containing 139,090 comments and news segment from three specific sources - Fox News, BreitbartNews and YouTube. The first batch (45,000 manually annotated) is ready for publication. We are currently in the final phase of manually labeling the remaining dataset using Amazon Mechanical Turk. BERT has been used widely in several downstream tasks. In this work, we present hBERT, where we modify certain layers of the pretrained BERT model with the new Hopfield Layer. hBert generalizes well across different distributions with the added advantage of a reduced model complexity. We are also releasing a JavaScript library 3 and a Chrome Extension Application, to help developers make use of our trained model in web applications (say chat application) and for users to identify and report racially biased contents on the web respectively
2021-04-19
OpenReview.net/Archive (published)
openreview.net
openreview.net
INFOSHIELD: Generalizable Information-Theoretic Human-Trafficking Detection
Meng-Chieh Lee
Catalina Vajiac
Aayushi Kulshrestha
Sacha Lévy
Namyong Park
Cara Jones
Reihaneh Rabbany
Christos Faloutsos
Given a million escort advertisements, how can we spot near-duplicates? Such micro-clusters of ads are usually signals of human trafficking.… (see more) How can we summarize them, visually, to convince law enforcement to act? Can we build a general tool that works for different languages? Spotting micro-clusters of near-duplicate documents is useful in multiple, additional settings, including spam-bot detection in Twitter ads, plagiarism, and more.We present INFOSHIELD, which makes the following contributions: (a) Practical, being scalable and effective on real data, (b) Parameter-free and Principled, requiring no user-defined parameters, (c) Interpretable, finding a document to be the cluster representative, highlighting all the common phrases, and automatically detecting "slots", i.e. phrases that differ in every document; and (d) Generalizable, beating or matching domain-specific methods in Twitter bot detection and human trafficking detection respectively, as well as being language-independent finding clusters in Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. Interpretability is particularly important for the anti human-trafficking domain, where law enforcement must visually inspect ads.Our experiments on real data show that INFOSHIELD correctly identifies Twitter bots with an F1 score over 90% and detects human-trafficking ads with 84% precision. Moreover, it is scalable, requiring about 8 hours for 4 million documents on a stock laptop.
2021-04-19
2021 IEEE 37th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) (published)
doi.org
Characterizing Idioms: Conventionality and Contingency
Michaela Socolof
Jackie Cheung
Michael Wagner
Timothy O'Donnell
Idioms are unlike most phrases in two important ways. First, words in an idiom have non-canonical meanings. Second, the non-canonical meanin… (see more)gs of words in an idiom are contingent on the presence of other words in the idiom. Linguistic theories differ on whether these properties depend on one another, as well as whether special theoretical machinery is needed to accommodate idioms. We define two measures that correspond to the properties above, and we show that idioms fall at the expected intersection of the two dimensions, but that the dimensions themselves are not correlated. Our results suggest that introducing special machinery to handle idioms may not be warranted.
2021-04-17
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Ethics of Corporeal, Co-present Robots as Agents of Influence: a Review
AJung Moon
Shalaleh Rismani
H. V. D. Van der Loos
2021-04-14
Current Robotics Reports (published)
doi.org