Publications

Hierarchical Distributed Energy Management Framework for Multiple Greenhouses Considering Demand Response
Ehsan Rezaei
Hanane Dagdougui
Kianoosh Ojand
Greenhouses are a key component of modernised agriculture, aiming for producing high-quality crops and plants. Furthermore, a network of gre… (see more)enhouses has enormous potential as part of demand response programs. Saving energy during off-peak time, reducing power consumption and delaying the start time of subsystems during on-peak time are some strategies that can be used to limit power exchanged with the main grid. In this work, a hierarchical distributed alternating direction method of multipliers-based model predictive control framework is proposed that has two main objectives: 1) providing appropriate conditions for greenhouses' crops and plants to grow, and 2) limiting the total power exchanged with the main grid. At each time step in the framework, an aggregator coordinates the greenhouses to reach a consensus and limit the total electric power exchanged while managing shared resources, e.g., reservoir water. The proposed framework's performance is investigated through a case study.
2022-12-31
IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy (published)
doi.org
Home alone: A population neuroscience investigation of brain morphology substrates
MaryAnn Noonan
Chris Zajner
Danilo Bzdok
As a social species, ready exchange with peers is a pivotal asset - our “social capital”. Yet, single-person households have come to per… (see more)vade metropolitan cities worldwide, with unknown consequences in the long run. Here, we systematically explore the morphological manifestations associated with singular living in ∼40,000 UK Biobank participants. The uncovered population-level signature spotlights the highly associative default mode network, in addition to findings such as in the amygdala central, cortical and corticoamygdaloid nuclei groups, as well as the hippocampal fimbria and dentate gyrus. Sex-stratified analyses revealed male-specific neural substrates, including somatomotor, saliency and visual systems, while female-specific neural substrates centred on the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. In line with our demographic profiling results, the discovered neural imprint of living alone is potentially linked to alcohol and tobacco consumption, anxiety, sleep quality as well as daily TV watching. The secular trend for solitary living will require new answers from public-health decision makers.
2022-12-31
NeuroImage (published)
doi.org
Homotopic local-global parcellation of the human cerebral cortex from resting-state functional connectivity
Xiaoxuan Yan
Ru Kong
Aihuiping Xue
Qing Yang
Csaba Orbán
Lijun An
Avram J. Holmes
Xing Qian
Jianzhong Chen
Xi-Nian Zuo
Juan Helen Zhou
Marielle V Fortier
Ai Peng Tan
Peter Gluckman
Yap Seng Chong
Michael J Meaney
Danilo Bzdok
Simon B. Eickhoff
B.T. Thomas Yeo
Resting-state fMRI is commonly used to derive brain parcellations, which are widely used for dimensionality reduction and interpreting human… (see more) neuroscience studies. We previously developed a model that integrates local and global approaches for estimating areal-level cortical parcellations. The resulting local-global parcellations are often referred to as the Schaefer parcellations. However, the lack of homotopic correspondence between left and right Schaefer parcels has limited their use for brain lateralization studies. Here, we extend our previous model to derive homotopic areal-level parcellations. Using resting-fMRI and task-fMRI across diverse scanners, acquisition protocols, preprocessing and demographics, we show that the resulting homotopic parcellations are as homogeneous as the Schaefer parcellations, while being more homogeneous than five publicly available parcellations. Furthermore, weaker correlations between homotopic parcels are associated with greater lateralization in resting network organization, as well as lateralization in language and motor task activation. Finally, the homotopic parcellations agree with the boundaries of a number of cortical areas estimated from histology and visuotopic fMRI, while capturing sub-areal (e.g., somatotopic and visuotopic) features. Overall, these results suggest that the homotopic local-global parcellations represent neurobiologically meaningful subdivisions of the human cerebral cortex and will be a useful resource for future studies. Multi-resolution parcellations estimated from 1479 participants are publicly available (https://github.com/ThomasYeoLab/CBIG/tree/master/stable_projects/brain_parcellation/Yan2023_homotopic).
2022-12-31
NeuroImage (published)
doi.org
HoneyBee: Progressive Instruction Finetuning of Large Language Models for Materials Science
Song, Yu
Santiago Miret
Zhang, Huan
Bang Liu
Huan Zhang
We propose an instruction-based process for trustworthy data curation in materials science (MatSci-Instruct), which we then apply to finetun… (see more)e a LLaMa-based language model targeted for materials science (HoneyBee). MatSci-Instruct helps alleviate the scarcity of relevant, high-quality materials science textual data available in the open literature, and HoneyBee is the first billion-parameter language model specialized to materials science. In MatSci-Instruct we improve the trustworthiness of generated data by prompting multiple commercially available large language models for generation with an Instructor module (e.g. Chat-GPT) and verification from an independent Verifier module (e.g. Claude). Using MatSci-Instruct, we construct a dataset of multiple tasks and measure the quality of our dataset along multiple dimensions, including accuracy against known facts, relevance to materials science, as well as completeness and reasonableness of the data. Moreover, we iteratively generate more targeted instructions and instruction-data in a finetuning-evaluation-feedback loop leading to progressively better performance for our finetuned HoneyBee models. Our evaluation on the MatSci-NLP benchmark shows HoneyBee's outperformance of existing language models on materials science tasks and iterative improvement in successive stages of instruction-data refinement. We study the quality of HoneyBee's language modeling through automatic evaluation and analyze case studies to further understand the model's capabilities and limitations. Our code and relevant datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/BangLab-UdeM-Mila/NLP4MatSci-HoneyBee.
2022-12-31
Zenodo (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
How can intelligent systems revolutionise health care?
Narges Armanfard
2022-12-31
Futurum Careers (published)
doi.org
How Useful Are Educational Questions Generated by Large Language Models?
Sabina Elkins
Ekaterina Kochmar
Jackie CK Cheung
Iulian V. Serban
2022-12-31
AIED (Posters/Late Breaking Results/...) (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
ICSPIS 2023 Full Program
Benjamin C. M. Fung
C Benjamin
Bashar Kilani
Khalid Yaqoob
Marshall Stephen
Khalid Yaqoob
Marshall Stephen
Three research directions in cybersecurity and privacy will be presented in this session.The first research direction is on privacy-preservi… (see more)ng data publishing.The objective is to share large volumes of data for machine learning without compromising the privacy of individuals.We will discuss multiple data sharing scenarios in privacy-preserving data publishing.The second research direction is on authorship analysis.The objective is to identify the author or infer the author's characteristics based on his/her writing styles.The third problem is on malware analysis.Assembly code analysis is one of the critical processes for mitigating the exponentially increasing threats from malicious software.However, it is a manually intensive and time-consuming process even for experienced reverse engineers.An effective and efficient assembly code clone search engine can greatly reduce the effort of this process.I will briefly describe our award-winning assembly clone search engine.
2022-12-31
International Conference on Signal Processing and Information Security (published)
doi.org
Identification of Substitutable Context-Free Languages over Infinite Alphabets from Positive Data
Yutaro Numaya
Diptarama Hendrian
Ryo Yoshinaka
Ayumi Shinohara
François Coste
Faissal Ouardi
Guillaume Rabusseau
This paper is concerned with the identification in the limit from positive data of sub-stitutable context-free languages cfl s) over infinit… (see more)e alphabets. Clark and Eyraud (2007) showed that substitutable cfl s over finite alphabets are learnable in this learning paradigm. We show that substitutable cfl s generated by grammars whose production rules may have predicates that represent sets of potentially infinitely many terminal symbols in a compact manner are learnable if the terminal symbol sets represented by those predicates are learnable, under a certain condition. This can be seen as a result parallel to Argyros and D’Antoni’s work (2018) that amplifies the query learnability of predicate classes to that of symbolic automata classes. Our result is the first that shows such amplification is possible for identifying some cfl s in the limit from positive data.
2022-12-31
ICGI (published)
dblp.uni-trier.de
Impact in Software Engineering Activities After One Year of COVID-19 Restrictions for Startups and Established Companies
Hosna Hooshyar
Eduardo Guerra
Jorge Melegati
Dron Khanna
Abdullah Aldaeej
Gerardo Matturro
Luciana Zaina
Des Greer
Usman Rafiq
Rafael Chanin
Xiaofeng Wang
Juan Garbajosa
Pekka Abrahamsson
Foutse Khomh
Anh Nguyen-Duc
The restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic required software development teams to adapt, being forced to work remotely and adjust the… (see more) software engineering activities accordingly. In the studies evaluating these effects, a few have assessed the impact on software engineering activities from a broader perspective and after a period of time when teams had time to adjust to the changes. No studies have been found comparing software startups and established companies either. This paper aims to investigate the impacts of COVID-19 on software development activities after one year of the pandemic restrictions, comparing the results between startups and established companies. Our approach was to design a cross-sectional survey and distribute it online among software development companies worldwide. The participants were asked about their perception of COVID-19’s pandemic impact on different software engineering activities: requirements engineering, software architecture, user experience design, software implementation, and software quality assurance. The survey received 170 valid answers from 29 countries, and for all the software engineering activities, we found that most respondents did not observe a significant impact. The results also showed that software startups and established companies were affected differently since, in some activities, we found a negative impact in the former and a positive impact in the latter. Regarding the time spent on each software engineering activity, most of the answers reported no change, but on those that did, the result points to an increase in time. Thus, we cannot find any relation between the change in time of effort and the reported positive or negative impact.
2022-12-31
IEEE Access (published)
doi.org
In-Context Learning for Text Classification with Many Labels
Aristides Milios
Siva Reddy
Dzmitry Bahdanau
2022-12-31
GenBench @ Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Inferring multiple consensus trees and supertrees using clustering: a review
Vladimir Makarenkov
Gayane S. Barseghyan
Nadia Tahiri
2022-12-31
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
An Intentional Forgetting-Driven Self-Healing Method for Deep Reinforcement Learning Systems
Ahmed Haj Yahmed
Rached Bouchoucha
Houssem Ben Braiek
Foutse Khomh
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is increasingly applied in large-scale productions like Netflix and Facebook. As with most data-driven sys… (see more)tems, DRL systems can exhibit undesirable behaviors due to environmental drifts, which often occur in constantly-changing production settings. Continual Learning (CL) is the inherent self-healing approach for adapting the DRL agent in response to the environment's conditions shifts. However, successive shifts of considerable magnitude may cause the production environment to drift from its original state. Recent studies have shown that these environmental drifts tend to drive CL into long, or even unsuccessful, healing cycles, which arise from inefficiencies such as catastrophic forgetting, warm-starting failure, and slow convergence. In this paper, we propose Dr. DRL, an effective self-healing approach for DRL systems that integrates a novel mechanism of intentional forgetting into vanilla CL (i.e., standard CL) to overcome its main issues. Dr. DRL deliberately erases the DRL system's minor behaviors to systematically prioritize the adaptation of the key problem-solving skills. Using well-established DRL algorithms, Dr. DRL is compared with vanilla CL on various drifted environments. Dr. DRL is able to reduce, on average, the healing time and fine-tuning episodes by, respectively, 18.74% and 17.72%. Dr. DRL successfully helps agents to adapt to 19.63% of drifted environments left unsolved by vanilla CL while maintaining and even enhancing by up to 45% the obtained rewards for drifted environments that are resolved by both approaches.
2022-12-31
2023 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org