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      A better way to study ocean currents

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      To study ocean currents, scientists release GPS-tagged buoys in the ocean and record their velocities to reconstruct the currents that transport them. These buoy data are also used to identify “divergences,” which are areas where water rises up from below the surface or sinks beneath it.

      By accurately predicting currents and pinpointing divergences, scientists can more precisely forecast the weather, approximate how oil will spread after a spill, or measure energy transfer in the ocean. A new model that incorporates machine learning makes more accurate predictions than conventional models do, a new study reports.

      A multidisciplinary research team including computer scientists at MIT and oceanographers has found that a standard statistical model typically used on buoy data can struggle to accurately reconstruct currents or identify divergences because it makes unrealistic assumptions about the behavior of water.

      The researchers developed a new model that incorporates knowledge from fluid dynamics to better reflect the physics at work in ocean currents. They show that their method, which only requires a small amount of additional computational expense, is more accurate at predicting currents and identifying divergences than the traditional model.

      This new model could help oceanographers make more accurate estimates from buoy data, which would enable them to more effectively monitor the transportation of biomass (such as Sargassum seaweed), carbon, plastics, oil, and nutrients in the ocean. This information is also important for understanding and tracking climate change.

      “Our method captures the physical assumptions more appropriately and more accurately. In this case, we know a lot of the physics already. We are giving the model a little bit of that information so it can focus on learning the things that are important to us, like what are the currents away from the buoys, or what is this divergence and where is it happening?” says senior author Tamara Broderick, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.

      Broderick’s co-authors include lead author Renato Berlinghieri, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student; Brian L. Trippe, a postdoc at Columbia University; David R. Burt and Ryan Giordano, MIT postdocs; Kaushik Srinivasan, an assistant researcher in atmospheric and ocean sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles; Tamay Özgökmen, professor in the Department of Ocean Sciences at the University of Miami; and Junfei Xia, a graduate student at the University of Miami. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning.

      Diving into the data

      Oceanographers use data on buoy velocity to predict ocean currents and identify “divergences” where water rises to the surface or sinks deeper.

      To estimate currents and find divergences, oceanographers have used a machine-learning technique known as a Gaussian process, which can make predictions even when data are sparse. To work well in this case, the Gaussian process must make assumptions about the data to generate a prediction.

      A standard way of applying a Gaussian process to oceans data assumes the latitude and longitude components of the current are unrelated. But this assumption isn’t physically accurate. For instance, this existing model implies that a current’s divergence and its vorticity (a whirling motion of fluid) operate on the same magnitude and length scales. Ocean scientists know this is not true, Broderick says. The previous model also assumes the frame of reference matters, which means fluid would behave differently in the latitude versus the longitude direction.

      “We were thinking we could address these problems with a model that incorporates the physics,” she says.

      They built a new model that uses what is known as a Helmholtz decomposition to accurately represent the principles of fluid dynamics. This method models an ocean current by breaking it down into a vorticity component (which captures the whirling motion) and a divergence component (which captures water rising or sinking).

      In this way, they give the model some basic physics knowledge that it uses to make more accurate predictions.

      This new model utilizes the same data as the old model. And while their method can be more computationally intensive, the researchers show that the additional cost is relatively small.

      Buoyant performance

      They evaluated the new model using synthetic and real ocean buoy data. Because the synthetic data were fabricated by the researchers, they could compare the model’s predictions to ground-truth currents and divergences. But simulation involves assumptions that may not reflect real life, so the researchers also tested their model using data captured by real buoys released in the Gulf of Mexico.

      This shows the trajectories of approximately 300 buoys released during the Grand LAgrangian Deployment (GLAD) in the Gulf of Mexico in the summer of 2013, to learn about ocean surface currents around the Deepwater Horizon oil spill site. The small, regular clockwise rotations are due to Earth’s rotation.Credit: Consortium of Advanced Research for Transport of Hydrocarbons in the Environment

      In each case, their method demonstrated superior performance for both tasks, predicting currents and identifying divergences, when compared to the standard Gaussian process and another machine-learning approach that used a neural network. For example, in one simulation that included a vortex adjacent to an ocean current, the new method correctly predicted no divergence while the previous Gaussian process method and the neural network method both predicted a divergence with very high confidence.

      The technique is also good at identifying vortices from a small set of buoys, Broderick adds.

      Now that they have demonstrated the effectiveness of using a Helmholtz decomposition, the researchers want to incorporate a time element into their model, since currents can vary over time as well as space. In addition, they want to better capture how noise impacts the data, such as winds that sometimes affect buoy velocity. Separating that noise from the data could make their approach more accurate.

      “Our hope is to take this noisily observed field of velocities from the buoys, and then say what is the actual divergence and actual vorticity, and predict away from those buoys, and we think that our new technique will be helpful for this,” she says.

      “The authors cleverly integrate known behaviors from fluid dynamics to model ocean currents in a flexible model,” says Massimiliano Russo, an associate biostatistician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and instructor at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved with this work. “The resulting approach retains the flexibility to model the nonlinearity in the currents but can also characterize phenomena such as vortices and connected currents that would only be noticed if the fluid dynamic structure is integrated into the model. This is an excellent example of where a flexible model can be substantially improved with a well thought and scientifically sound specification.”

      This research is supported, in part, by the Office of Naval Research, a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, and the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science at the University of Miami. More

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      Researchers create a tool for accurately simulating complex systems

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      Researchers often use simulations when designing new algorithms, since testing ideas in the real world can be both costly and risky. But since it’s impossible to capture every detail of a complex system in a simulation, they typically collect a small amount of real data that they replay while simulating the components they want to study.

      Known as trace-driven simulation (the small pieces of real data are called traces), this method sometimes results in biased outcomes. This means researchers might unknowingly choose an algorithm that is not the best one they evaluated, and which will perform worse on real data than the simulation predicted that it should.

      MIT researchers have developed a new method that eliminates this source of bias in trace-driven simulation. By enabling unbiased trace-driven simulations, the new technique could help researchers design better algorithms for a variety of applications, including improving video quality on the internet and increasing the performance of data processing systems.

      The researchers’ machine-learning algorithm draws on the principles of causality to learn how the data traces were affected by the behavior of the system. In this way, they can replay the correct, unbiased version of the trace during the simulation.

      When compared to a previously developed trace-driven simulator, the researchers’ simulation method correctly predicted which newly designed algorithm would be best for video streaming — meaning the one that led to less rebuffering and higher visual quality. Existing simulators that do not account for bias would have pointed researchers to a worse-performing algorithm.

      “Data are not the only thing that matter. The story behind how the data are generated and collected is also important. If you want to answer a counterfactual question, you need to know the underlying data generation story so you only intervene on those things that you really want to simulate,” says Arash Nasr-Esfahany, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and co-lead author of a paper on this new technique.

      He is joined on the paper by co-lead authors and fellow EECS graduate students Abdullah Alomar and Pouya Hamadanian; recent graduate student Anish Agarwal PhD ’21; and senior authors Mohammad Alizadeh, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science; and Devavrat Shah, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in EECS and a member of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. The research was recently presented at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation.

      Specious simulations

      The MIT researchers studied trace-driven simulation in the context of video streaming applications.

      In video streaming, an adaptive bitrate algorithm continually decides the video quality, or bitrate, to transfer to a device based on real-time data on the user’s bandwidth. To test how different adaptive bitrate algorithms impact network performance, researchers can collect real data from users during a video stream for a trace-driven simulation.

      They use these traces to simulate what would have happened to network performance had the platform used a different adaptive bitrate algorithm in the same underlying conditions.

      Researchers have traditionally assumed that trace data are exogenous, meaning they aren’t affected by factors that are changed during the simulation. They would assume that, during the period when they collected the network performance data, the choices the bitrate adaptation algorithm made did not affect those data.

      But this is often a false assumption that results in biases about the behavior of new algorithms, making the simulation invalid, Alizadeh explains.

      “We recognized, and others have recognized, that this way of doing simulation can induce errors. But I don’t think people necessarily knew how significant those errors could be,” he says.

      To develop a solution, Alizadeh and his collaborators framed the issue as a causal inference problem. To collect an unbiased trace, one must understand the different causes that affect the observed data. Some causes are intrinsic to a system, while others are affected by the actions being taken.

      In the video streaming example, network performance is affected by the choices the bitrate adaptation algorithm made — but it’s also affected by intrinsic elements, like network capacity.

      “Our task is to disentangle these two effects, to try to understand what aspects of the behavior we are seeing are intrinsic to the system and how much of what we are observing is based on the actions that were taken. If we can disentangle these two effects, then we can do unbiased simulations,” he says.

      Learning from data

      But researchers often cannot directly observe intrinsic properties. This is where the new tool, called CausalSim, comes in. The algorithm can learn the underlying characteristics of a system using only the trace data.

      CausalSim takes trace data that were collected through a randomized control trial, and estimates the underlying functions that produced those data. The model tells the researchers, under the exact same underlying conditions that a user experienced, how a new algorithm would change the outcome.

      Using a typical trace-driven simulator, bias might lead a researcher to select a worse-performing algorithm, even though the simulation indicates it should be better. CausalSim helps researchers select the best algorithm that was tested.

      The MIT researchers observed this in practice. When they used CausalSim to design an improved bitrate adaptation algorithm, it led them to select a new variant that had a stall rate that was nearly 1.4 times lower than a well-accepted competing algorithm, while achieving the same video quality. The stall rate is the amount of time a user spent rebuffering the video.

      By contrast, an expert-designed trace-driven simulator predicted the opposite. It indicated that this new variant should cause a stall rate that was nearly 1.3 times higher. The researchers tested the algorithm on real-world video streaming and confirmed that CausalSim was correct.

      “The gains we were getting in the new variant were very close to CausalSim’s prediction, while the expert simulator was way off. This is really exciting because this expert-designed simulator has been used in research for the past decade. If CausalSim can so clearly be better than this, who knows what we can do with it?” says Hamadanian.

      During a 10-month experiment, CausalSim consistently improved simulation accuracy, resulting in algorithms that made about half as many errors as those designed using baseline methods.

      In the future, the researchers want to apply CausalSim to situations where randomized control trial data are not available or where it is especially difficult to recover the causal dynamics of the system. They also want to explore how to design and monitor systems to make them more amenable to causal analysis. More

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      Martin Wainwright named director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

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      Martin Wainwright, the Cecil H. Green Professor in MIT’s departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Mathematics, has been named the new director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), effective July 1.

      “Martin is a widely recognized leader in statistics and machine learning — both in research and in education. In taking on this leadership role in the college, Martin will work to build up the human and institutional behavior component of IDSS, while strengthening initiatives in both policy and statistics, and collaborations within the institute, across MIT, and beyond,” says Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “I look forward to working with him and supporting his efforts in this next chapter for IDSS.”

      “Martin holds a strong belief in the value of theoretical, experimental, and computational approaches to research and in facilitating connections between them. He also places much importance in having practical, as well as academic, impact,” says Asu Ozdaglar, deputy dean of academics for the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, department head of EECS, and the MathWorks Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “As the new director of IDSS, he will undoubtedly bring these tenets to the role in advancing the mission of IDSS and helping to shape its future.”

      A principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and the Statistics and Data Science Center, Wainwright joined the MIT faculty in July 2022 from the University of California at Berkeley, where he held the Howard Friesen Chair with a joint appointment between the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Statistics.

      Wainwright received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and doctoral degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. He has received a number of awards and recognition, including an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and best paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, IEEE Communications Society, and IEEE Information Theory and Communication Societies. He has also been honored with the Medallion Lectureship and Award from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the COPSS Presidents’ Award from the Joint Statistical Societies. He was a section lecturer with the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2014 and received the Blackwell Award from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2017.

      He is the author of “High-dimensional Statistics: A Non-Asymptotic Viewpoint” (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and is coauthor on several books, including on graphical models and on sparse statistical modeling.

      Wainwright succeeds Munther Dahleh, the William A. Coolidge Professor in EECS, who has helmed IDSS since its founding in 2015.

      “I am grateful to Munther and thank him for his leadership of IDSS. As the founding director, he has led the creation of a remarkable new part of MIT,” says Huttenlocher. More

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      A method for designing neural networks optimally suited for certain tasks

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      Neural networks, a type of machine-learning model, are being used to help humans complete a wide variety of tasks, from predicting if someone’s credit score is high enough to qualify for a loan to diagnosing whether a patient has a certain disease. But researchers still have only a limited understanding of how these models work. Whether a given model is optimal for certain task remains an open question.

      MIT researchers have found some answers. They conducted an analysis of neural networks and proved that they can be designed so they are “optimal,” meaning they minimize the probability of misclassifying borrowers or patients into the wrong category when the networks are given a lot of labeled training data. To achieve optimality, these networks must be built with a specific architecture.

      The researchers discovered that, in certain situations, the building blocks that enable a neural network to be optimal are not the ones developers use in practice. These optimal building blocks, derived through the new analysis, are unconventional and haven’t been considered before, the researchers say.

      In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they describe these optimal building blocks, called activation functions, and show how they can be used to design neural networks that achieve better performance on any dataset. The results hold even as the neural networks grow very large. This work could help developers select the correct activation function, enabling them to build neural networks that classify data more accurately in a wide range of application areas, explains senior author Caroline Uhler, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).

      “While these are new activation functions that have never been used before, they are simple functions that someone could actually implement for a particular problem. This work really shows the importance of having theoretical proofs. If you go after a principled understanding of these models, that can actually lead you to new activation functions that you would otherwise never have thought of,” says Uhler, who is also co-director of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and a researcher at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and its Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS).

      Joining Uhler on the paper are lead author Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan, an EECS graduate student and an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center Fellow, and Mikhail Belkin, a professor in the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute at the University of California at San Diego.

      Activation investigation

      A neural network is a type of machine-learning model that is loosely based on the human brain. Many layers of interconnected nodes, or neurons, process data. Researchers train a network to complete a task by showing it millions of examples from a dataset.

      For instance, a network that has been trained to classify images into categories, say dogs and cats, is given an image that has been encoded as numbers. The network performs a series of complex multiplication operations, layer by layer, until the result is just one number. If that number is positive, the network classifies the image a dog, and if it is negative, a cat.

      Activation functions help the network learn complex patterns in the input data. They do this by applying a transformation to the output of one layer before data are sent to the next layer. When researchers build a neural network, they select one activation function to use. They also choose the width of the network (how many neurons are in each layer) and the depth (how many layers are in the network.)

      “It turns out that, if you take the standard activation functions that people use in practice, and keep increasing the depth of the network, it gives you really terrible performance. We show that if you design with different activation functions, as you get more data, your network will get better and better,” says Radhakrishnan.

      He and his collaborators studied a situation in which a neural network is infinitely deep and wide — which means the network is built by continually adding more layers and more nodes — and is trained to perform classification tasks. In classification, the network learns to place data inputs into separate categories.

      “A clean picture”

      After conducting a detailed analysis, the researchers determined that there are only three ways this kind of network can learn to classify inputs. One method classifies an input based on the majority of inputs in the training data; if there are more dogs than cats, it will decide every new input is a dog. Another method classifies by choosing the label (dog or cat) of the training data point that most resembles the new input.

      The third method classifies a new input based on a weighted average of all the training data points that are similar to it. Their analysis shows that this is the only method of the three that leads to optimal performance. They identified a set of activation functions that always use this optimal classification method.

      “That was one of the most surprising things — no matter what you choose for an activation function, it is just going to be one of these three classifiers. We have formulas that will tell you explicitly which of these three it is going to be. It is a very clean picture,” he says.

      They tested this theory on a several classification benchmarking tasks and found that it led to improved performance in many cases. Neural network builders could use their formulas to select an activation function that yields improved classification performance, Radhakrishnan says.

      In the future, the researchers want to use what they’ve learned to analyze situations where they have a limited amount of data and for networks that are not infinitely wide or deep. They also want to apply this analysis to situations where data do not have labels.

      “In deep learning, we want to build theoretically grounded models so we can reliably deploy them in some mission-critical setting. This is a promising approach at getting toward something like that — building architectures in a theoretically grounded way that translates into better results in practice,” he says.

      This work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute, and a Simons Investigator Award. More

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      Strengthening trust in machine-learning models

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      Probabilistic machine learning methods are becoming increasingly powerful tools in data analysis, informing a range of critical decisions across disciplines and applications, from forecasting election results to predicting the impact of microloans on addressing poverty.

      This class of methods uses sophisticated concepts from probability theory to handle uncertainty in decision-making. But the math is only one piece of the puzzle in determining their accuracy and effectiveness. In a typical data analysis, researchers make many subjective choices, or potentially introduce human error, that must also be assessed in order to cultivate users’ trust in the quality of decisions based on these methods.

      To address this issue, MIT computer scientist Tamara Broderick, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), and a team of researchers have developed a classification system — a “taxonomy of trust” — that defines where trust might break down in a data analysis and identifies strategies to strengthen trust at each step. The other researchers on the project are Professor Anna Smith at the University of Kentucky, professors Tian Zheng and Andrew Gelman at Columbia University, and Professor Rachael Meager at the London School of Economics. The team’s hope is to highlight concerns that are already well-studied and those that need more attention.

      In their paper, published in February in Science Advances, the researchers begin by detailing the steps in the data analysis process where trust might break down: Analysts make choices about what data to collect and which models, or mathematical representations, most closely mirror the real-life problem or question they are aiming to answer. They select algorithms to fit the model and use code to run those algorithms. Each of these steps poses unique challenges around building trust. Some components can be checked for accuracy in measurable ways. “Does my code have bugs?”, for example, is a question that can be tested against objective criteria. Other times, problems are more subjective, with no clear-cut answers; analysts are confronted with numerous strategies to gather data and decide whether a model reflects the real world.

      “What I think is nice about making this taxonomy, is that it really highlights where people are focusing. I think a lot of research naturally focuses on this level of ‘are my algorithms solving a particular mathematical problem?’ in part because it’s very objective, even if it’s a hard problem,” Broderick says.

      “I think it’s really hard to answer ‘is it reasonable to mathematize an important applied problem in a certain way?’ because it’s somehow getting into a harder space, it’s not just a mathematical problem anymore.”

      Capturing real life in a model

      The researchers’ work in categorizing where trust breaks down, though it may seem abstract, is rooted in real-world application.

      Meager, a co-author on the paper, analyzed whether microfinances can have a positive effect in a community. The project became a case study for where trust could break down, and ways to reduce this risk.

      At first look, measuring the impact of microfinancing might seem like a straightforward endeavor. But like any analysis, researchers meet challenges at each step in the process that can affect trust in the outcome. Microfinancing — in which individuals or small businesses receive small loans and other financial services in lieu of conventional banking — can offer different services, depending on the program. For the analysis, Meager gathered datasets from microfinance programs in countries across the globe, including in Mexico, Mongolia, Bosnia, and the Philippines.

      When combining conspicuously distinct datasets, in this case from multiple countries and across different cultures and geographies, researchers must evaluate whether specific case studies can reflect broader trends. It is also important to contextualize the data on hand. For example, in rural Mexico, owning goats may be counted as an investment.

      “It’s hard to measure the quality of life of an individual. People measure things like, ‘What’s the business profit of the small business?’ Or ‘What’s the consumption level of a household?’ There’s this potential for mismatch between what you ultimately really care about, and what you’re measuring,” Broderick says. “Before we get to the mathematical level, what data and what assumptions are we leaning on?”

      With data on hand, analysts must define the real-world questions they seek to answer. In the case of evaluating the benefits of microfinancing, analysts must define what they consider a positive outcome. It is standard in economics, for example, to measure the average financial gain per business in communities where a microfinance program is introduced. But reporting an average might suggest a net positive effect even if only a few (or even one) person benefited, instead of the community as a whole.

      “What you really wanted was that a lot of people are benefiting,” Broderick says. “It sounds simple. Why didn’t we measure the thing that we cared about? But I think it’s really common that practitioners use standard machine learning tools, for a lot of reasons. And these tools might report a proxy that doesn’t always agree with the quantity of interest.”

      Analysts may consciously or subconsciously favor models they are familiar with, especially after investing a great deal of time learning their ins and outs. “Someone might be hesitant to try a nonstandard method because they might be less certain they will use it correctly. Or peer review might favor certain familiar methods, even if a researcher might like to use nonstandard methods,” Broderick says. “There are a lot of reasons, sociologically. But this can be a concern for trust.”

      Final step, checking the code 

      While distilling a real-life problem into a model can be a big-picture, amorphous problem, checking the code that runs an algorithm can feel “prosaic,” Broderick says. But it is another potentially overlooked area where trust can be strengthened.

      In some cases, checking a coding pipeline that executes an algorithm might be considered outside the purview of an analyst’s job, especially when there is the option to use standard software packages.

      One way to catch bugs is to test whether code is reproducible. Depending on the field, however, sharing code alongside published work is not always a requirement or the norm. As models increase in complexity over time, it becomes harder to recreate code from scratch. Reproducing a model becomes difficult or even impossible.

      “Let’s just start with every journal requiring you to release your code. Maybe it doesn’t get totally double-checked, and everything isn’t absolutely perfect, but let’s start there,” Broderick says, as one step toward building trust.

      Paper co-author Gelman worked on an analysis that forecast the 2020 U.S. presidential election using state and national polls in real-time. The team published daily updates in The Economist magazine, while also publishing their code online for anyone to download and run themselves. Throughout the season, outsiders pointed out both bugs and conceptual problems in the model, ultimately contributing to a stronger analysis.

      The researchers acknowledge that while there is no single solution to create a perfect model, analysts and scientists have the opportunity to reinforce trust at nearly every turn.

      “I don’t think we expect any of these things to be perfect,” Broderick says, “but I think we can expect them to be better or to be as good as possible.” More

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      MIT community members elected to the National Academy of Engineering for 2023

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      Seven MIT researchers are among the 106 new members and 18 international members elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) this week. Fourteen additional MIT alumni, including one member of the MIT Corporation, were also elected as new members.

      One of the highest professional distinctions for engineers, membership to the NAE is given to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

      The seven MIT researchers elected this year include:

      Regina Barzilay, the School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI and Health in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, principal investigator at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and faculty lead for the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health, for machine learning models that understand structures in text, molecules, and medical images.

      Markus J. Buehler, the Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor in Engineering from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, for implementing the use of nanomechanics to model and design fracture-resistant bioinspired materials.

      Elfatih A.B. Eltahir SM ’93, ScD ’93, the H.M. King Bhumibol Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, for advancing understanding of how climate and land use impact water availability, environmental and human health, and vector-borne diseases.

      Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms, for eliminating boundaries between digital and physical worlds, from quantum computing to digital materials to the internet of things.

      Roger D. Kamm SM ’73, PhD ’77, the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Biological and Mechanical Engineering, for contributions to the understanding of mechanics in biology and medicine, and leadership in biomechanics.

      David W. Miller ’82, SM ’85, ScD ’88, the Jerome C. Hunsaker Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, for contributions in control technology for space-based telescope design, and leadership in cross-agency guidance of space technology.

      David Simchi-Levi, professor of civil and environmental engineering, core faculty member in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, and principal investigator at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, for contributions using optimization and stochastic modeling to enhance supply chain management and operations.

      Fariborz Maseeh ScD ’90, life member of the MIT Corporation and member of the School of Engineering Dean’s Advisory Council, was also elected as a member for leadership and advances in efficient design, development, and manufacturing of microelectromechanical systems, and for empowering engineering talent through public service.

      Thirteen additional alumni were elected to the National Academy of Engineering this year. They are: Mark George Allen SM ’86, PhD ’89; Shorya Awtar ScD ’04; Inderjit Chopra ScD ’77; David Huang ’85, SM ’89, PhD ’93; Eva Lerner-Lam SM ’78; David F. Merrion SM ’59; Virginia Norwood ’47; Martin Gerard Plys ’80, SM ’81, ScD ’84; Mark Prausnitz PhD ’94; Anil Kumar Sachdev ScD ’77; Christopher Scholz PhD ’67; Melody Ann Swartz PhD ’98; and Elias Towe ’80, SM ’81, PhD ’87.

      “I am delighted that seven members of MIT’s faculty and many members of the wider MIT community were elected to the National Academy of Engineering this year,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, the dean of the MIT School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “My warmest congratulations on this recognition of their many contributions to engineering research and education.”

      Including this year’s inductees, 156 members of the National Academy of Engineering are current or retired members of the MIT faculty and staff, or members of the MIT Corporation. More

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      When should data scientists try a new technique?

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      If a scientist wanted to forecast ocean currents to understand how pollution travels after an oil spill, she could use a common approach that looks at currents traveling between 10 and 200 kilometers. Or, she could choose a newer model that also includes shorter currents. This might be more accurate, but it could also require learning new software or running new computational experiments. How to know if it will be worth the time, cost, and effort to use the new method?

      A new approach developed by MIT researchers could help data scientists answer this question, whether they are looking at statistics on ocean currents, violent crime, children’s reading ability, or any number of other types of datasets.

      The team created a new measure, known as the “c-value,” that helps users choose between techniques based on the chance that a new method is more accurate for a specific dataset. This measure answers the question “is it likely that the new method is more accurate for this data than the common approach?”

      Traditionally, statisticians compare methods by averaging a method’s accuracy across all possible datasets. But just because a new method is better for all datasets on average doesn’t mean it will actually provide a better estimate using one particular dataset. Averages are not application-specific.

      So, researchers from MIT and elsewhere created the c-value, which is a dataset-specific tool. A high c-value means it is unlikely a new method will be less accurate than the original method on a specific data problem.

      In their proof-of-concept paper, the researchers describe and evaluate the c-value using real-world data analysis problems: modeling ocean currents, estimating violent crime in neighborhoods, and approximating student reading ability at schools. They show how the c-value could help statisticians and data analysts achieve more accurate results by indicating when to use alternative estimation methods they otherwise might have ignored.

      “What we are trying to do with this particular work is come up with something that is data specific. The classical notion of risk is really natural for someone developing a new method. That person wants their method to work well for all of their users on average. But a user of a method wants something that will work on their individual problem. We’ve shown that the c-value is a very practical proof-of-concept in that direction,” says senior author Tamara Broderick, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.

      She’s joined on the paper by Brian Trippe PhD ’22, a former graduate student in Broderick’s group who is now a postdoc at Columbia University; and Sameer Deshpande ’13, a former postdoc in Broderick’s group who is now an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. An accepted version of the paper is posted online in the Journal of the American Statistical Association.

      Evaluating estimators

      The c-value is designed to help with data problems in which researchers seek to estimate an unknown parameter using a dataset, such as estimating average student reading ability from a dataset of assessment results and student survey responses. A researcher has two estimation methods and must decide which to use for this particular problem.

      The better estimation method is the one that results in less “loss,” which means the estimate will be closer to the ground truth. Consider again the forecasting of ocean currents: Perhaps being off by a few meters per hour isn’t so bad, but being off by many kilometers per hour makes the estimate useless. The ground truth is unknown, though; the scientist is trying to estimate it. Therefore, one can never actually compute the loss of an estimate for their specific data. That’s what makes comparing estimates challenging. The c-value helps a scientist navigate this challenge.

      The c-value equation uses a specific dataset to compute the estimate with each method, and then once more to compute the c-value between the methods. If the c-value is large, it is unlikely that the alternative method is going to be worse and yield less accurate estimates than the original method.

      “In our case, we are assuming that you conservatively want to stay with the default estimator, and you only want to go to the new estimator if you feel very confident about it. With a high c-value, it’s likely that the new estimate is more accurate. If you get a low c-value, you can’t say anything conclusive. You might have actually done better, but you just don’t know,” Broderick explains.

      Probing the theory

      The researchers put that theory to the test by evaluating three real-world data analysis problems.

      For one, they used the c-value to help determine which approach is best for modeling ocean currents, a problem Trippe has been tackling. Accurate models are important for predicting the dispersion of contaminants, like pollution from an oil spill. The team found that estimating ocean currents using multiple scales, one larger and one smaller, likely yields higher accuracy than using only larger scale measurements.

      “Oceans researchers are studying this, and the c-value can provide some statistical ‘oomph’ to support modeling the smaller scale,” Broderick says.

      In another example, the researchers sought to predict violent crime in census tracts in Philadelphia, an application Deshpande has been studying. Using the c-value, they found that one could get better estimates about violent crime rates by incorporating information about census-tract-level nonviolent crime into the analysis. They also used the c-value to show that additionally leveraging violent crime data from neighboring census tracts in the analysis isn’t likely to provide further accuracy improvements.

      “That doesn’t mean there isn’t an improvement, that just means that we don’t feel confident saying that you will get it,” she says.

      Now that they have proven the c-value in theory and shown how it could be used to tackle real-world data problems, the researchers want to expand the measure to more types of data and a wider set of model classes.

      The ultimate goal is to create a measure that is general enough for many more data analysis problems, and while there is still a lot of work to do to realize that objective, Broderick says this is an important and exciting first step in the right direction.

      This research was supported, in part, by an Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy grant, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Office of Naval Research, and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. More

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      in Data Management & Statistics

      A far-sighted approach to machine learning

      by

      Picture two teams squaring off on a football field. The players can cooperate to achieve an objective, and compete against other players with conflicting interests. That’s how the game works.

      Creating artificial intelligence agents that can learn to compete and cooperate as effectively as humans remains a thorny problem. A key challenge is enabling AI agents to anticipate future behaviors of other agents when they are all learning simultaneously.

      Because of the complexity of this problem, current approaches tend to be myopic; the agents can only guess the next few moves of their teammates or competitors, which leads to poor performance in the long run. 

      Researchers from MIT, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and elsewhere have developed a new approach that gives AI agents a farsighted perspective. Their machine-learning framework enables cooperative or competitive AI agents to consider what other agents will do as time approaches infinity, not just over a few next steps. The agents then adapt their behaviors accordingly to influence other agents’ future behaviors and arrive at an optimal, long-term solution.

      This framework could be used by a group of autonomous drones working together to find a lost hiker in a thick forest, or by self-driving cars that strive to keep passengers safe by anticipating future moves of other vehicles driving on a busy highway.

      “When AI agents are cooperating or competing, what matters most is when their behaviors converge at some point in the future. There are a lot of transient behaviors along the way that don’t matter very much in the long run. Reaching this converged behavior is what we really care about, and we now have a mathematical way to enable that,” says Dong-Ki Kim, a graduate student in the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and lead author of a paper describing this framework.

      The senior author is Jonathan P. How, the Richard C. Maclaurin Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a member of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. Co-authors include others at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, IBM Research, Mila-Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, and Oxford University. The research will be presented at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

      Play video

      In this demo video, the red robot, which has been trained using the researchers’ machine-learning system, is able to defeat the green robot by learning more effective behaviors that take advantage of the constantly changing strategy of its opponent.

      More agents, more problems

      The researchers focused on a problem known as multiagent reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning is a form of machine learning in which an AI agent learns by trial and error. Researchers give the agent a reward for “good” behaviors that help it achieve a goal. The agent adapts its behavior to maximize that reward until it eventually becomes an expert at a task.

      But when many cooperative or competing agents are simultaneously learning, things become increasingly complex. As agents consider more future steps of their fellow agents, and how their own behavior influences others, the problem soon requires far too much computational power to solve efficiently. This is why other approaches only focus on the short term.

      “The AIs really want to think about the end of the game, but they don’t know when the game will end. They need to think about how to keep adapting their behavior into infinity so they can win at some far time in the future. Our paper essentially proposes a new objective that enables an AI to think about infinity,” says Kim.

      But since it is impossible to plug infinity into an algorithm, the researchers designed their system so agents focus on a future point where their behavior will converge with that of other agents, known as equilibrium. An equilibrium point determines the long-term performance of agents, and multiple equilibria can exist in a multiagent scenario. Therefore, an effective agent actively influences the future behaviors of other agents in such a way that they reach a desirable equilibrium from the agent’s perspective. If all agents influence each other, they converge to a general concept that the researchers call an “active equilibrium.”

      The machine-learning framework they developed, known as FURTHER (which stands for FUlly Reinforcing acTive influence witH averagE Reward), enables agents to learn how to adapt their behaviors as they interact with other agents to achieve this active equilibrium.

      FURTHER does this using two machine-learning modules. The first, an inference module, enables an agent to guess the future behaviors of other agents and the learning algorithms they use, based solely on their prior actions.

      This information is fed into the reinforcement learning module, which the agent uses to adapt its behavior and influence other agents in a way that maximizes its reward.

      “The challenge was thinking about infinity. We had to use a lot of different mathematical tools to enable that, and make some assumptions to get it to work in practice,” Kim says.

      Winning in the long run

      They tested their approach against other multiagent reinforcement learning frameworks in several different scenarios, including a pair of robots fighting sumo-style and a battle pitting two 25-agent teams against one another. In both instances, the AI agents using FURTHER won the games more often.

      Since their approach is decentralized, which means the agents learn to win the games independently, it is also more scalable than other methods that require a central computer to control the agents, Kim explains.

      The researchers used games to test their approach, but FURTHER could be used to tackle any kind of multiagent problem. For instance, it could be applied by economists seeking to develop sound policy in situations where many interacting entitles have behaviors and interests that change over time.

      Economics is one application Kim is particularly excited about studying. He also wants to dig deeper into the concept of an active equilibrium and continue enhancing the FURTHER framework.

      This research is funded, in part, by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. More