Sameep Mehta

Bio: Sameep Mehta is an academic researcher from IBM. The author has contributed to research in topics: Service (business) & Resource (project management). The author has an hindex of 22, co-authored 160 publications receiving 2093 citations. Previous affiliations of Sameep Mehta include Lady Hardinge Medical College & All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

Fair Transfer of Multiple Style Attributes in Text

Abstract: To preserve anonymity and obfuscate their identity on online platforms users may morph their text and portray themselves as a different gender or demographic. Similarly, a chatbot may need to customize its communication style to improve engagement with its audience. This manner of changing the style of written text has gained significant attention in recent years. Yet these past research works largely cater to the transfer of single style attributes. The disadvantage of focusing on a single style alone is that this often results in target text where other existing style attributes behave unpredictably or are unfairly dominated by the new style. To counteract this behavior, it would be nice to have a style transfer mechanism that can transfer or control multiple styles simultaneously and fairly. Through such an approach, one could obtain obfuscated or written text incorporated with a desired degree of multiple soft styles such as female-quality, politeness, or formalness. To the best of our knowledge this work is the first that shows and attempt to solve the issues related to multiple style transfer. We also demonstrate that the transfer of multiple styles cannot be achieved by sequentially performing multiple single-style transfers. This is because each single style-transfer step often reverses or dominates over the style incorporated by a previous transfer step. We then propose a neural network architecture for fairly transferring multiple style attributes in a given text. We test our architecture on the Yelp dataset to demonstrate our superior performance as compared to existing one-style transfer steps performed in a sequence.

Recommending machine learning models and source codes for input datasets

Abstract: Asset recommendation for a particular input dataset is provided. Candidate data analysis assets having a corresponding relatedness score associated with the particular input dataset greater than a defined relatedness score threshold value are selected. Those candidate data analysis assets having a corresponding relatedness score greater than the defined relatedness score threshold value are ranked by score. Those candidate data analysis assets having a corresponding relatedness score greater than the defined relatedness score threshold value are listed by rank from highest to lowest. A justification for each candidate data analysis asset is inserted in the ranked list of candidate data analysis assets. The ranked list of candidate data analysis assets along with each respective justification is outputted on a display device.

Hardening Deep Neural Networks via Adversarial Model Cascades

Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to malicious inputs crafted by an adversary to produce erroneous outputs Works on securing neural networks against adversarial examples achieve high empirical robustness on simple datasets such as MNIST However, these techniques are inadequate when empirically tested on complex data sets such as CIFAR-10 and SVHN Further, existing techniques are designed to target specific attacks and fail to generalize across attacks We propose the Adversarial Model Cascades (AMC) as a way to tackle the above inadequacies Our approach trains a cascade of models sequentially where each model is optimized to be robust towards a mixture of multiple attacks Ultimately, it yields a single model which is secure against a wide range of attacks; namely FGSM, Elastic, Virtual Adversarial Perturbations and Madry On an average, AMC increases the model's empirical robustness against various attacks simultaneously, by a significant margin (of 6225% for MNIST, 5075% for SVHN and 265% for CIFAR10) At the same time, the model's performance on non-adversarial inputs is comparable to the state-of-the-art models

Methods and arrangements for prioritizing service restoration activities in the event of a catastrophic failure

Abstract: Methods and arrangements for prioritizing customer service restoration, in the event of service failure or compromise such that any adverse effect of the service disruption on the customer is minimized, the perceived drop in quality of service, if any, is minimized and timely and efficient resource reallocation for service restoration is achieved. Input data relating to customer service protocols is assimilated. A service restoration order is implemented responsive to a service disruption and based on the assimilated input data. This implementing includes determining bufferable and non-bufferable services, postponing restoration of the bufferable services, and determining an order of priority of the non-bufferable services.

Feedback-Based Keyphrase Extraction from Unstructured Text Documents

Abstract: Machine Learning experts use classification and tagging algorithms considering the black box nature of these algorithms. These algorithms, primarily key-tags extraction from unstructured text documents are meant to capture key concepts in a document. With increasing amount of data, size and complexity of the data, this problem is key in industrial setup. Different possible use cases being in IT support, conversational systems/ chatbots and financial domains, this problem is important as shown in [1], [2]. In this paper, we bring a human in the loop, and enable a human teacher to give feedback to a key-tags extraction framework in the form of natural language. We focus on the problem of key-tags extraction in which the quality of the output can easily be judged by non-experts. Our system automatically reads natural language documents, extracts key concepts and presents an interactive information exploration user interface for analysing these documents.

The spread of true and false news online

Abstract: We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise ~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.

Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification

Abstract: The paper “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification” by Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, that will be presented at the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT*) in February 2018, evaluates three commercial API-based classifiers of gender from facial images, including IBM Watson Visual Recognition. The study finds these services to have recognition capabilities that are not balanced over genders and skin tones [1]. In particular, the authors show that the highest error involves images of dark-skinned women, while the most accurate result is for light-skinned men.

A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning

Abstract: With the widespread use of AI systems and applications in our everyday lives, it is important to take fairness issues into consideration while designing and engineering these types of systems. Such systems can be used in many sensitive environments to make important and life-changing decisions; thus, it is crucial to ensure that the decisions do not reflect discriminatory behavior toward certain groups or populations. We have recently seen work in machine learning, natural language processing, and deep learning that addresses such challenges in different subdomains. With the commercialization of these systems, researchers are becoming aware of the biases that these applications can contain and have attempted to address them. In this survey we investigated different real-world applications that have shown biases in various ways, and we listed different sources of biases that can affect AI applications. We then created a taxonomy for fairness definitions that machine learning researchers have defined in order to avoid the existing bias in AI systems. In addition to that, we examined different domains and subdomains in AI showing what researchers have observed with regard to unfair outcomes in the state-of-the-art methods and how they have tried to address them. There are still many future directions and solutions that can be taken to mitigate the problem of bias in AI systems. We are hoping that this survey will motivate researchers to tackle these issues in the near future by observing existing work in their respective fields.