Federated Collaborative Machine Learning

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The Google Research Group [1] is always doing awesome stuff, the most recent one is on Federated Learning [2], which enables e.g. smart phones (of course any computational device, and maybe later all internet-of-things, intelligent sensors in either smart hospitals or in smart factories etc.) to collaboratively learn a shared representation model, whilst keeping all the training data on the local devices, decoupling the ability to do machine learning from the need to store the data centralized in the cloud. This goes beyond the use of local models that make predictions on mobile devices (like the Mobile Vision API and On-Device Smart Reply) by bringing model training to the device as well – which is great. The problem with standard approaches is that you always need centralized training data – either on your USB-stick, as the medical doctors do, or in a sophisticated centralized data center.

The basic idea is that the mobile device downloads the current modela and subsequently improves it by learning from data on the respective device, and then summarizes the changes as a small focused update. The remarkable detail is that only this update to the model is sent to the cloud (yes, here privacy, data protection safety and security is challenged see e.g. [3] – but this is much easier to do with this small data – as when you would do it with the raw data – think for example on patient data), where it is immediately averaged with other devicer updates to improve the shared model. All the training data remains on the local devices, and no individual updates are stored in the cloud.

The Google Group recently solved a lot of algorithmic and technical challenges. In a typical machine learning system, an optimization algorithm e.g. Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) [4] runs on a large dataset partitioned homogeneously across servers in the cloud. Such highly iterative algorithms require low-latency, high-throughput connections to the training data. But in the Federated Learning setting, the data is distributed across millions of devices in a highly uneven fashion. In addition, these devices have significantly higher-latency, lower-throughput connections and are only intermittently available for training.

This calls for a lot of further investigations with interactive Machine Learning (iML) bringing the human-into-the loop, i.e. making use of human cognitive abilities. This can be of particular interest to solve problems, where learning algorithms suffer due to insufficient training samples (rare events, single events), where we deal with complex data and/or computationally hard problems. For example, “doctors-in-the-loop” can help with their long-term experience and heursitic knowledge to solve problems which otherwise would remain NP-hard [5, 6]. A further step is with many humans-in-the-loop: Such collaborative interactive Machine Learning (ciML) can help in many application areas and domains, e.g. in in health informatics (smart hospital) or in industrial applications (smart factory) [7].

Read the original article, posted on April, 6, 2017,  here:
https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html

[1] https://research.googleblog.com

[2] NIPS Workshop on Private Multi-Party Machine Learning, Barcelona, December, 9, 2016, https://pmpml.github.io/PMPML16/

[3] Bonawitz, K., Ivanov, V., Kreuter, B., Marcedone, A., Mcmahan, H. B., Patel, S., Ramage, D., Segal, A. & Seth, K. 2016. Practical Secure Aggregation for Federated Learning on User-Held Data. arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.04482.

[4] Bottou, L. 2010. Large-scale machine learning with stochastic gradient descent. Proceedings of COMPSTAT’2010. Springer, pp. 177-186. doi:10.1007/978-3-7908-2604-3_16  (N.B.: 836 citations as of 08.04.2017)

[5] Holzinger, A. 2016. Interactive Machine Learning for Health Informatics: When do we need the human-in-the-loop? Brain Informatics, 3, (2), 119-131, doi:10.1007/s40708-016-0042-6

[6] Holzinger, A., Plass, M., Holzinger, K., Crisan, G., Pintea, C. & Palade, V. 2016. Towards interactive Machine Learning (iML): Applying Ant Colony Algorithms to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem with the Human-in-the-Loop approach. In: Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNCS 9817. Heidelberg, Berlin, New York: Springer, pp. 81-95, [pdf]

[7] Robert, S., Büttner, S., Röcker, C. & Holzinger, A. 2016. Reasoning Under Uncertainty: Towards Collaborative Interactive Machine Learning. In: Machine Learning for Health Informatics: Lecture Notes in Artifical Intelligence LNAI 9605. Springer, pp. 357-376, [pdf]

Image source: https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html

 

3,2 Trillion USD on health per year

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The U.S. spends more on health care than any other country

Dieleman et al. (2016) just (Dec, 27, 2016) published a paper [1] which discusses data from the National Health Expenditure Accounts to estimate US spending on personal health care and public health, according to condition, age and sex group, and type of care. This paper was mentioned in the Washington Post by Carolyn Y. Johnson on December 27 at 11:00 AM

Here a link to the original paper:

[1] Dieleman JL, Baral R, Birger M, Bui AL, Bulchis A, Chapin A, Hamavid H, Horst C, Johnson EK, Joseph J, Lavado R, Lomsadze L, Reynolds A, Squires E, Campbell M, DeCenso B, Dicker D, Flaxman AD, Gabert R, Highfill T, Naghavi M, Nightingale N, Templin T, Tobias MI, Vos T, Murray CJL. US Spending on Personal Health Care and Public Health, 1996-2013. JAMA. 2016;316(24):2627-2646. doi:10.1001/jama.2016.16885

Here the article (shortened) from the Washington Post:

American health-care spending, measured in trillions of dollars, boggles the mind. Last year, we spent $3.2 trillion on health care  a number so large that it can be difficult to grasp its scale.

A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reveals what patients and their insurers are spending that money on, breaking it down by 155 diseases, patient age and category — such as pharmaceuticals or hospitalizations. Among its findings:

  • Chronic — and often preventable — diseases are a huge driver of personal health spending. The three most expensive diseases in 2013: diabetes ($101 billion), the most common form of heart disease ($88 billion) and back and neck pain ($88 billion).
  • Yearly spending increases aren’t uniform: Over a nearly two-decade period, diabetes and low back and neck pain grew at more than 6 percent per year — much faster than overall spending. Meanwhile, heart disease spending grew at 0.2 percent.
  • Medical spending increases with age — with the exception of newborns. About 38 percent of personal health spending in 2013 was for people over age 65. Annual spending for girls between 1 and 4 years old averaged $2,000 per person; older women 70 to 74 years old averaged $16,000.

Here the link to the original article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/27/the-u-s-spends-more-on-health-care-than-any-other-country-heres-what-were-buying/?tid=pm_business_pop&utm_term=.71fc517cdc11

machine learning for health informatics

LNAI 9605 Machine Learning for Health Informatics available

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14.12.2016 LNAI 9605 just appeared

Machine Learning for Health Informatics Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence LNAI 9605

Holzinger, Andreas (ed.) 2016. Machine Learning for Health Informatics: State-of-the-Art and Future Challenges. Cham: Springer International Publishing, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-50478-0

[book homepage]

Machine learning (ML) is the fastest growing field in computer science, and Health Informatics (HI) is amongst the greatest application challenges, providing future benefits in improved medical diagnoses, disease analyses, and pharmaceutical development. However, successful ML for HI needs a concerted effort, fostering integrative research between experts ranging from diverse disciplines from data science to visualization.

Tackling complex challenges needs both disciplinary excellence and cross-disciplinary networking without any boundaries. Following the HCI-KDD approach, in combining the best of two worlds, it is aimed to support human intelligence with machine intelligence.

This state-of-the-art survey is an output of the international HCI-KDD expert network and features 22 carefully selected and peer-reviewed chapters on hot topics in machine learning for health informatics; they discuss open problems and future challenges in order to stimulate further research and international progress in this field.

Machine Learning with Fun

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Google Research hosts a number of very interesting so-called A.I. experiments. There you can play with machine learning algorithms in a very amusing way. A recent example is QUICK, DRAW *). This is an online guessing game that challenges humans to hand sketch (called doodles) a given object. The game uses a  neural network to learn from the input data

https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com

which is part of the A.I. Experiments platform:

https://aiexperiments.withgoogle.com

and here the explanatory video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOwfiYnRi5c

Have fun and enjoy!

Here you see more than 100.000 hedgehog drawings made by humans on the internet:

https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/data/hedgehog

*) not to be confused with QuickDraw [1], which is a sketch-based drawing tool facilitating to draw precise geometry diagrams,  and can automatically recognize sketched diagrams containing components such as line segments and circles, infer geometric constraints relating recognized components, and use this information to “beautify” the sketched diagram. This “Beautification” is based on an algorithm that iteratively computes various sub-components of the components using an extensible set of deductive rules.

[1] Cheema, S., Gulwani, S. & Laviola, J. QuickDraw: improving drawing experience for geometric diagrams. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2012. ACM, 1037-1064. doi: 10.1145/2207676.2208550

[2] https://experiments.withgoogle.com/ai

Visualization of High Dimensional Data

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Google is doing experiments with visualization of high dimenisonal data. This experiment helps visualize what’s happening in machine learning. It allows coders to see and explore their high-dimensional data. The goal is to eventually make this an open-source tool within TensorFlow, so that any coder can use these visualization techniques to explore their data.
Built by Daniel Smilkov, Fernanda Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, and the Big Picture team at Google:
https://aiexperiments.withgoogle.com/visualizing-high-dimensional-space
This work is based on a method developed by Laurens van der Maaten & Geoffrey Hinton in 2008:
Maaten, L. V. D. & Hinton, G. 2008. Visualizing data using t-SNE. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 9, 11, 2579-2605, https://www.jmlr.org/papers/v9/vandermaaten08a.html
t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE, spoken: Disney) is a (prize-winning) nonlinear technique for dimensionality reduction that is particularly well suited for the visualization of high-dimensional data sets into R2 or R3. The technique can be implemented via Barnes-Hut approximations, allowing it to be applied on large real-world datasets (“big data”).
For details please refer directly to:
https://lvdmaaten.github.io/tsne/
Compare this method to our own work on subspace clustering:
https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40708-016-0043-5

Obama on humans-in-the-loop

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How artificial intelligence will affect jobs

In an discussion with Barack OBAMA [1] on how artificial intelligence will affect jobs, he emphasized how important human-in-the-loop machine learning will become in the future. Trust, transparency and explainabiltity will be THE driving factors of future AI solutions! The discussion interview was led by the Wired [2] Editor Scott DADICH, and MIT Media Lab [3] Director Joi ITO. I recommend my students to watch the full video. Barack Obama demonstrates a  good understanding of the field and indicates indirectly the importance of our research in the the human-in-the-loop approach [4], despite all progress towards fully automatic approaches and autonomous systems.

More information see:

Barack Obama Talks AI, Robo-Cars, and the Future of the World

[1] Barack Obama was the 44th President of the United States of America and was in office from January, 20, 2009 to January, 20, 2017. He was born August, 4, 1961 in Honolulu (Hawaii)

[2] Wired is a monthly tech magazine which reports since 1993 on how emerging technologies may affect culture, politics, economics. Very interesting to note is that Wired is known for coning the popular terms “long tail” and “crowdsourcing”. https://www.wired.com

[3] The MIT Media Lab is an interdisciplinary research lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (MA), which is part of the Boston metropolitan area in the north, just across the Charles River – not far way from the Harvard Campus.

[4] Holzinger, A., Plass, M., Holzinger, K., Crisan, G.C., Pintea, C.-M. & Palade, V. 2017. A glass-box interactive machine learning approach for solving NP-hard problems with the human-in-the-loop. arXiv:1708.01104

 

 

Google releases their Syntactic Parser Open Source

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Google researchers spend a lot of time thinking about how computer systems can read and understand human language in order to process it in intelligent ways. On May, 12, 2016 Slav Petrov (expertise) based in New York and leading the machine learning for natural language group (Slav Petrov Page), announced that they released SyntaxNet as an open-source neural network framework implemented in TensorFlow that provides a new foundation for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) . The release includes all code needed to train new SyntaxNet models on own data, as well as Parsey McParseface, an English parser that the Googlers have trained and that can be used to analyze English text. Parsey McParseface is built on powerful machine learning algorithms that learn to analyze the linguistic structure of language, and that can explain the functional role of each word in a given sentence.

Read more:
https://googleresearch.blogspot.co.at/2016/05/announcing-syntaxnet-worlds-most.html

Literature:

Andor, D., Alberti, C., Weiss, D., Severyn, A., Presta, A., Ganchev, K., Petrov, S. & Collins, M. 2016. Globally normalized transition-based neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.06042.

Petrov, S., Mcdonald, R. & Hall, K. 2016. Multi-source transfer of delexicalized dependency parsers. US Patent 9,305,544.

Weiss, D., Alberti, C., Collins, M. & Petrov, S. 2015. Structured Training for Neural Network Transition-Based Parsing. arXiv:1506.06158.

Vinyals, O., Kaiser, Ł., Koo, T., Petrov, S., Sutskever, I. & Hinton, G. Grammar as a foreign language. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2015. 2755-2763.

Human-in-the-Loop

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Interactive machine learning for health informatics: when do we need the human-in-the-loop?

Machine learning (ML) is the fastest growing field in computer science, and health informatics is among the greatest challenges. The goal of ML is to develop algorithms which can learn and improve over time and can be used for predictions. Most ML researchers concentrate on automatic machine learning (aML), where great advances have been made, for example, in speech recognition, recommender systems, or autonomous vehicles. Automatic approaches greatly benefit from big data with many training sets. However, in the health domain, sometimes we are confronted with a small number of data sets or rare events, where aML-approaches suffer of insufficient training samples. Here interactive machine learning (iML) may be of help, having its roots in reinforcement learning, preference learning, and active learning. The term iML is not yet well used, so we define it as “algorithms that can interact with agents and can optimize their learning behavior through these interactions, where the agents can also be human.” This “human-in-the-loop” can be beneficial in solving computationally hard problems, e.g., subspace clustering, protein folding, or k-anonymization of health data, where human expertise can help to reduce an exponential search space through heuristic selection of samples. Therefore, what would otherwise be an NP-hard problem, reduces greatly in complexity through the input and the assistance of a human agent involved in the learning phase. Most of all the human in the loop can bring in conceptual knowledge, “intuition”, expertise and explicit knowledge which current AI is completely lacking!

We define iML-approaches as algorithms that can interact with both computational agents and human agents *) and can optimize their learning behavior through these interactions.

*) In active learning such agents are referred to as the so-called “oracles”

From black-box to glass-box: where is the human-in-the-loop?

The first question we have to answer is: “What is the difference between the iML-approach to the aML-approach, i.e., unsupervised learning, supervised, or semi-supervised learning?”

Scenario D – see slide below – shows the iML-approach, where the human expert is seen as an agent directly involved in the actual learning phase, step-by-step influencing measures such as distance, cost functions, etc.

Obvious concerns may emerge immediately and one can argue: what about the robustness of this approach, the subjectivity, the transfer of the (human) agents; many questions remain open and are subject for future research, particularly in evaluation, replicability, robustness, etc.

Human-in-the-loop - Interactive Machine Learning

The iML-approach

Read full article here:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40708-016-0042-6/fulltext.html
https://www.mendeley.com/catalog/interactive-machine-learning-health-informatics-we-need-humanintheloop

Yahoo Labs released largest-ever annonymized machine learning data set for researchers

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In January 2016, Yahoo announce the public release of the largest-ever machine learning data set to the international research community. The data set stands at a massive ~110B events (13.5TB uncompressed) of anonymized user-news item interaction data, collected by recording the user-news item interactions of about 20M users from February 2015 to May 2015.

see: https://yahoolabs.tumblr.com/post/137281912191/yahoo-releases-the-largest-ever-machine-learning

 

January, 27, 2016, Major breakthrough in AI research …

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Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search – a very recent paper in Nature:

Silver, D., Huang, A., Maddison, C. J., Guez, A., Sifre, L., Van Den Driessche, G., Schrittwieser, J., Antonoglou, I., Panneershelvam, V., Lanctot, M., Dieleman, S., Grewe, D., Nham, J., Kalchbrenner, N., Sutskever, I., Lillicrap, T., Leach, M., Kavukcuoglu, K., Graepel, T. & Hassabis, D. 2016. Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search. Nature, 529, (7587), 484-489.

https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v529/n7587/full/nature16961.html

Go (in Chinese: 圍棋 , in Japanese 囲碁) is a two-player board strategy game (EXPTIME-complete, resp. PSPACE-complete) for two players aiming to surround more territory than the opponent; the number of he number of possible moves is enormous (10761 with a 19 x 19 board) compared to approximately 10120 in chess with a 8 x 8 board) – despite simple rules. 

According to the new article by Silver et al (2016),  Go has long been viewed as the most challenging of classic games for artificial intelligence owing to its enormous search space and the difficulty of evaluating board positions and moves. The authors introduce a new approach to computer Go that uses ‘value networks’ to evaluate board positions and ‘policy networks’ to select moves. These deep neural networks are trained by a novel combination of supervised learning from human expert games, and reinforcement learning from games of self-play. Without any lookahead search, the neural networks play Go at the level of state-of-the-art Monte Carlo tree search programs that simulate thousands of random games of self-play.  The authors introduce a new search algorithm that combines Monte Carlo simulation with value and policy networks. Using this search algorithm, the program AlphaGo (see: https://deepmind.com/alpha-go.html)  achieved a 99.8% winning rate against other Go programs, and defeated the human European Go champion by 5 games to 0. This is the first time that a computer program has defeated a human professional player in the full-sized game of Go, a feat previously thought to be at least a decade away.

There is also a news report on BBC:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35420579

Congrats to the Google Deepmind people!