Category: Technical

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

Embedding Domain Knowledge

In the good old days, working as a Machine Learning Engineer meant working 95% of the time on feature engineering and 5% on training models with the extracted features. This was a manually intensive and time-consuming process, that usually led to inflexible proofs of concept that could hardly be adapted to new settings. Fortunately, Deep […]

Written by on Feb 17, 2021

Difficult Targets to Optimize: the ROC AUC

In many binary classification problems, especially in domains with highly unbalanced problems (such as the medical domain and rare event detection), we need to make sure our model does not become too biased for the more predominant class.  Thus, you may have heard that accuracy is not a good metric to validate classifiers in unbalanced […]

Written by on Dec 18, 2020

Explainable AI in Healthcare

Transparency is of utmost importance when AI is applied to high stake decision problems where additional information on the underlying process beyond the output of the model may be required. Taking the automation of loan attribution as an example, a client that has a loan denied will surely want to know why did that happen […]

Written by on Nov 24, 2020

Embedding Domain Knowledge for Estimating Customer Lifetime Value

As part of the rise of Deep Neural Networks in the ML community, we have observed an increasing fit-predict approach, where AI practitioners don’t take the time to think about the domain knowledge that is already available and how to embed that knowledge in the models. In this blogpost, we will cover how we created […]

Written by on Apr 6, 2020