Publications

Breaking Barriers to Creative Expression: Co-Designing and Implementing an Accessible Text-to-Image Interface
Atieh Taheri
Mohammad Izadi
Gururaj Shriram
Shaun Kane
Text-to-image generation models have grown in popularity due to their ability to produce high-quality images from a text prompt. One use for… (voir plus) this technology is to enable the creation of more accessible art creation software. In this paper, we document the development of an alternative user interface that reduces the typing effort needed to enter image prompts by providing suggestions from a large language model, developed through iterative design and testing within the project team. The results of this testing demonstrate how generative text models can support the accessibility of text-to-image models, enabling users with a range of abilities to create visual art.
Deep reinforcement learning for option pricing and hedging under dynamic expectile risk measures
Option Pricing
Saeed Marzban
Jonathan Yu-Meng Li
Tidying Up the Conversational Recommender Systems' Biases
Armin Moradi
The growing popularity of language models has sparked interest in conversational recommender systems (CRS) within both industry and research… (voir plus) circles. However, concerns regarding biases in these systems have emerged. While individual components of CRS have been subject to bias studies, a literature gap remains in understanding specific biases unique to CRS and how these biases may be amplified or reduced when integrated into complex CRS models. In this paper, we provide a concise review of biases in CRS by surveying recent literature. We examine the presence of biases throughout the system's pipeline and consider the challenges that arise from combining multiple models. Our study investigates biases in classic recommender systems and their relevance to CRS. Moreover, we address specific biases in CRS, considering variations with and without natural language understanding capabilities, along with biases related to dialogue systems and language models. Through our findings, we highlight the necessity of adopting a holistic perspective when dealing with biases in complex CRS models.
xSA: A Binary Cross-Entropy Simulated Annealing Polar Decoder
Ryan Seah
Huayi Zhou
Marwan Jalaleddine
Polar decoders such as successive-cancellation and successive-cancellation list decoders are limited by their sequential nature, which leads… (voir plus) to a linear increase in latency with the codeword length. Heuristic based decoders such as quantum annealing have been proposed to overcome this limitation. However, these decoders have shown poor performance when decoding polar codes with more than eight bits. In this paper, we developed new meta-heuristic based polar decoder, called xSA, which uses a new receiver constraint modeled by the binary cross-entropy function. We also propose a method to determine the weights used in a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) function. The polar code is assumed to have been sent across an AWGN channel and we conducted our experiments and simulations using PyQUBO and dwave-neal. Our results show that xSA is able to decode codes of length 16 and 32 with a near-ML FER performance, presenting itself as a promising alternative to traditional polar decoders for real world applications and next generation cellular communications.
Automated liver segmentation and steatosis grading using deep learning on B-mode ultrasound images
Pedro Vianna
Merve Kulbay
Pamela Boustros
Sara-Ivana Calce
Cassandra Larocque-Rigney
Laurent Patry-Beaudoin
Yi Hui Luo
Muawiz Chaudary
Samuel Kadoury
Bich Nguyen
Emmanuel Montagnon
Michael Chassé
An Tang
Guy Cloutier
Early detection of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is crucial to avoid further complications. Ultrasound is often used for screenin… (voir plus)g and monitoring of hepatic steatosis, however it is limited by the subjective interpretation of images. Computer assisted diagnosis could aid radiologists to achieve objective grading, and artificial intelligence approaches have been tested across various medical applications. In this study, we evaluated the performance of a two-stage hepatic steatosis detection deep learning framework, with a first step of liver segmentation and a subsequent step of hepatic steatosis classification. We evaluated the models on internal and external datasets, aiming to understand the generalizability of the framework. In the external dataset, our segmentation model achieved a Dice score of 0.92 (95% CI: 0.78, 1.00), and our classification model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.84 (95% CI: 0.79, 0.89). Our findings highlight the potential benefits of applying artificial intelligence models in NAFLD assessment.
122 Is Selenium-75 a Feasible HDR Brachytherapy Source?
Jake Reid
Jonathan Kalinowski
A. Armstrong
John Munro
124 Development of a Novel Dosimetry Software for Patient-Specific Intravascular Brachytherapy Treatment Planning on Optical Coherence Tomography Images
Maryam Rahbaran
Jonathan Kalinowski
James Man Git Tsui
Joseph DeCunha
Kevin Croce
Brian Bergmark
Philip Devlin
125 Toward the Translation of Rectal Intensity Modulated Brachytherapy for Feasibility and Safety Studies
Jonathan Kalinowski
163 Evaluating the Inter-Observer Variability in the Delineation of Rectal Lesions in Endoscopy Images
A. Thibodeau-Antonacci
Corey Miller
L. Weishaupt
Aurélie Garant
T. Vuong
P. Nicolaï
181 RapidBrachyTG43: A TG-43 Parameter and Dose Calculation Module for RapidBrachyMCTPs
Jonathan Kalinowski
186 Diffusion of 220RN and 212PB in Diffusing Alpha-Emitter Radiation Therapy Dosimetry with Geant4
Victor Daniel Díaz Martínez
192 Investigation of the Dose Properties and Source to Source Variabilities in Xoft Source Model S7500
A. Esmaelbeigi
Jonathan Kalinowski
T. Vuong