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Planner+Reinforcement Learning: Best of both worlds

If we have to drive from one place to another, we first think about the major route we will undertake and then while driving on the same route we worry about the small turns we need to take, the speed limit we need to follow etc. These two levels of thinking, i.e. high-level planning and low-level execution is hierarchical thinking. As humans we think in a hierarchical manner- we first figure out the major outlines and then work on the nitty-gritty of a task or process. Efforts are on to incorporate this hierarchical level of thinking and execution abilities in machines as well.

By Aditi Jain

• May 29, 2023

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Probing patterning in microbial consortia with a cellular automaton for spatial organisation

Some of us like hills and others are fond of beaches. Microbes are no different! Some love fresh air and so stay outside, the more shy ones feel comfier inside, some don’t mind any location as long as their favourite pals are with them and others don’t thrive close to their enemies. This affinity of different microbes for different positions and locations can be seen in any environment they choose to inhabit—be it the human gut, soil aggregates or waste.

By Aditi Jain

• Feb 13, 2023

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An Early Warning System for Earthquake

On 26th January 2001, when the whole country was celebrating our 52nd Republic day, a piece of devastating news shook the entire nation. A massive earthquake measuring 7.7 on Richter’s scale hit the state of Gujarat killing 30 thousand people and destroying 4 lakh homes in Gujarat in just 2 minutes. Although the epicentre of this earthquake was the Kutch region, it demolished 40% of homes, eight schools, two hospitals and numerous other significant buildings in the Bhuj. Dubbed Bhuj 2001, this earthquake is only one of the many earthquakes that shook India and cost lives and property damages.

By Kanchan Aggarwal , By Siddhartha Mukhopadhya

• Aug 23, 2022

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Extracting cues of causality from Medical text to mine factors related to Sjögren’s Syndrome

-- Dr. Sunandan Chakraborty --

The web is a sea of information where the much-needed information may just seem a click away! However, mining exhaustive information from the web is not a trivial and straightforward task as it looks to be. Therefore, AI researchers are developing natural language processing models to mine relevant information from the web. One such researcher is Dr. Sunandan Chakraborty, Assistant Professor at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. Sharing his research work, he gave a talk entitled “Extracting cues of causality from Medical text to mine factors related to Sjögren’s Syndrome” on 28th July at IIT Madras. The talk was hosted by RBCDSAI.

• Aug 23, 2022

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Towards Personalized Cancer treatment

As per the National Cancer Registry Programme Report 2022, over 13 lakhs people in India suffer from cancer each year making India rank third nation-wise in the number of cancer cases across the world. The figures are not good globally as well! As per the WHO, cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide and accounted for nearly one in six deaths in the year 2020. The disease not only torments the patient but is physically, emotionally and financially draining for the family as well.

By Malvika Sudhakar , By Raghunathan Rengaswamy

• Jul 18, 2022

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A strategy to make networks more resilient to attacks

We live in a highly connected world! World Wide Web, social networks, brain networks, Railway networks, Power Distribution networks etc. are all examples of connections or say networks. All these networks can be pictorially represented as a collection of connected objects. Varied it may seem but all these networks have two common entities: nodes and edges. Here, a node is an object and an edge is a line that links objects together. In the case of a social network, the nodes are human profiles and the edges can be considered as following/ follower relationships between two profiles. Similarly, in the case of railway networks- stations are nodes and the railway lines that connect the stations are edges.

By Sai Saranga Das , By Karthik Raman

• Jun 16, 2022

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DailyDialog++ and DEB: A new dataset and new metric to make the evaluation of chatbots and dialogue systems better

How are you feeling today? Good, Great, fine, bad, worst, bored? Either way, you are feeling, you will agree that there is no one right answer to that question and many other millions of questions where multiple answers are correct. While you, as a human, would understand that for some questions there is no single right answer, it’s difficult to teach this to machines! This is one of the problems AI researchers are struggling with today, especially in the chatbot and virtual assistant space. This is because the AI models designed for dialogue applications, like any other AI model, are trained on a dataset that has a single answer to a single question.

By Ananya B. Sai , By Akash Kumar Mohankumar

• Apr 18, 2022

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Generating tailored multimodal fragments from documents and Videos

--Dr. Balaji Vasan Srinivasan--

In today’s digital world, social media and websites have become an important tool for communication. As digital communication is becoming more and more important, companies are looking forward to increase their user engagement to advertise their products, agenda or to just spread knowledge. One of the ways to increase user engagement is to provide them with multimodal content which is a combination of two or more modes of communication such as text, image, video, audio etc. Multimodal content have been shown to be more effective and impactful and provides with better understanding. Therefore, AI researchers are scouting for ways by which AI can be employed to generate multimodal content. Dr. Balaji Vasan Srinivasan, Principal Scientist at Adobe Research- India, has been working in this area and was invited to share developments and his learnings as a RBCDSAI Seminar Series talk entitled “Generating tailored multimodal fragments from documents and Videos” on 25th March, 2022.

• Apr 18, 2022

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Accurate and Interpretable AI models: Towards Deployable AI

A self-driving car bumps into a lamppost. A doctor prescribes the wrong treatment to a patient based on an AI-based diagnostic tool. A missile is misfired by an AI-based defense system. An unfair decision provided by a banking chatbot leads to loss of customers.

The above examples are probably sufficient to explain why there is a need to tread carefully while deploying AI-based solutions in the real world. While wrong predictions made by recommendation systems in domains like retail might be inexpensive, such predictions in domains like healthcare, self-driving vehicles, banking or defense can cause hefty monetary losses or even loss of lives. A majority of these problems may be avoided if one is able to understand the AI’s reasoning behind its decisions.

By Abhishek Ghose , By Balaraman Ravindran

• Mar 28, 2022

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CAMP: The perfect bacterial matchmaker

Lovers, enemies, friends aren’t the relationships confined to human or animal societies. Tiny beings like bacteria also react to different bacteria in their vicinity, and their growth and survival depend on the kind of relationship they have with the other bacteria residing near them. Two or more types of bacteria living together constitute a microbial community, and in such a community, division of labor occurs which help in the overall growth of community, efficient production of products or teams up to get rid of chemicals which are harmful to the growth of the community. Biotechnologists are trying to understand the relationships between different bacteria better so as to develop microbial communities through which one can enhance the production of desired products of human use. However, testing the interaction between thousands of different types of bacteria is a laborious task.

By Maziya Ibrahim , By Karthik Raman

• Mar 28, 2022

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It takes two to tango — making bio-production more economical

As the world decides to tread on a sustainable path, a more eco-friendly alternative for each and every industrial process is being looked upon. One of the environmentally harmful processes is the production of chemicals through traditional means. Biotechnology offers to remedy this problem by producing chemicals through microbial means, which does not end in creating hazardous byproducts. Despite this advantage, bioproduction hasn’t truly taken off yet due to the poor yield of products obtained through this process.

By Lavanya Raajaraam , By Karthik Raman

• Mar 28, 2022

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A new model that solves the charging woes of Electric vehicles

As nations race to meet their sustainable goals, the need to shift from fuel-based vehicles to electric vehicles has become more certain. Electric vehicles promise a cleaner and greener future as they don’t release pollutants. Apart from that, electric cars are also more economical to use making them pocket-friendly. Although these advantages make electric vehicles attractive for consumers, yet they are not in demand. This is because they have a short driving range requiring frequent trips to charging stations which is an inconvenience. Adding to the inconvenience, is the poor penetration of charging infrastructure in the country as opposed to petrol/diesel stations. This is one of the reasons why Indian consumers are keeping their hands off electric vehicles despite the attractive subsidies offered by the Indian states. While battery scientists are trying to increase the battery capacity, researchers in the transport domain are trying to solve this problem from the logistics angle.

By Surendra Reddy Kancharla, Gitakrishnan Ramadurai

• Mar 17, 2022

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Learning systems biology, the computational way

The 90s was an interesting time for biology research as researchers shifted from reductionist to a systems approach for studying and understanding biological systems. A decade later, high-throughput technologies revolutionized the field of systems biology by generating heaps of data. Thanks to these technologies, the state of thousands of genes, proteins, chemicals or metabolites at a given time-point, or in response to any stimuli, can be captured now. However, generating insights from this humongous amount of data was like looking for a needle in a haystack. It was at this time that the need for computation in conducting biology research became apparent and the field of computational biology reached its full glory.

By Karthik Raman

• Feb 25, 2022

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Mind the messenger: Analyzing the SARS-CoV-2 transcriptome

Coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19), a severe respiratory disease caused by infection with the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus, has impacted almost every nation globally, making it a pandemic. More than 4.91 billion doses of vaccines have been administered worldwide, but the number of infections continues to rise. mRNA-based vaccines have been developed to bring the pandemic under control in some parts of the world. This brief review will give an overview of how mRNA vaccines work and what we can learn from the transcriptome of COVID-19 patients to identify the significant marker genes responsible for disease severity and mortality.

By Shayantan Banerjee

• Sep 18, 2021

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CombSGPO: A new algorithm to protect wildlife

Poaching and illegal smuggling of wildlife have remained a cause of concern for wildlife authorities. As per the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Wildlife trade poses the second-biggest direct threat to the survival of species after habitat destruction. As per the study conducted by TRAFFIC, a leading wildlife trade monitoring networking of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), around 1,11,312 individual tortoises or freshwater turtles (11,000 a year) have been illegally traded across India since 2009. While several organizations and regulatory authorities are trying to curb the incidences of poaching, the poachers seemed to have always remained one step ahead of the patrollers.