Category: Technical

Stop removing outliers just because!

Outliers are data points that stand out for being different from the remaining data distribution. An outlier can be: An odd value in a feature A data point distant from the centroid of the data A data point in a region of low density, but between areas of high density. Suppose you have been working […]

Written by on Nov 14, 2022

Duplicate detection in text data

A common use case seen across several industries is the creation of systems capable of detecting the similarity between pairs of objects – images and texts. For example, duplicate detection in marketplaces, or recommendation systems that show similar objects to the ones the user has searched for, can use such systems. They can also be […]

Written by on Oct 25, 2022

Turning classes into inputs

Let’s face it, we all have worked on an ML project where we had to predict a ridiculously high number of classes. Large enough to make the number of observations per class into an embarrassingly small subset. Most people model these tasks as a multiclass classification problem where, for each input observation, we must predict […]

Written by on Sep 22, 2022

Privacy Preserving Machine Learning

This article reports my work at NILG.AI during a curricular internship on privacy-preserving Machine Learning. Trip data is any type of data that connects the origin and destination of a person’s travel and is generated in countless ways as we move about our day and interact with systems connected to the internet. But why is […]

Written by on Aug 16, 2022

Local vs. global optimization

Is the fastest route always the best? This article may give you a different perspective if your answer is yes. Normally there are multiple ways to tackle a given problem or task, and the optimization field is no different, as there are different approaches we can take to find an optimal solution. The choice of […]

Written by on Jun 23, 2022

Self-Supervised Learning workshop at the XIII Symposium on Bioengineering

We are delighted to announce our forthcoming workshop on Self-Supervised Learning, a pivotal event slated to take place during the XIII Symposium on Bioengineering, the largest Portugurese Bioengineering congress! The Symposium on Bioengineering is a beacon of collaboration, organized by the Bioengineering Students’ Association, and caters to students and researchers alike. It stands firmly on […]

Written by on Mar 23, 2022

Teaching Models With Free Data

“The more I see, the less I know” might be a saying, but it does not apply to AI models. It’s well known that the performance of an artificial neural network is highly dependent on the volume and on the diversity of the data that was shown to the model. This happens because exposing the […]

Written by on Feb 23, 2022

You Have the Right to Remain Silent

The Miranda warning prevents us from self-incrimination. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be used against you. If we hold ML models accountable for their predictions, shouldn’t we at least grant them that right? Can we expect ML models to know everything? I guess we don’t! Moreover, it would be […]

Written by on Aug 2, 2021

An Introduction to Multiple Instance Learning

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is a form of weakly supervised learning where training instances are arranged in sets, called bags, and a label is provided for the entire bag, opposedly to the instances themselves. This allows to leverage weakly labeled data, which is present in many business problems as labeling data is often costly: Medical […]

Written by on May 18, 2021

An AI-Based Image Content Retrieval System

Similarity measurement is the basis for any information retrieval, management, or data mining system. Both in industry and in the scientific community, similarity detection has been shown to be extremely useful when applied to different use cases. Over time, the information available on the internet has been growing in an exponential way, making it harder […]

Written by on Mar 7, 2021