AudioInsight: Detecting Social Contexts Relevant to Social Anxiety from Speech

During social interactions, understanding the intricacies of the context can be vital, particularly for socially anxious individuals. While previous research has found that the presence of a social interaction can be detected from ambient audio, the nuances within social contexts, which influence how anxiety provoking interactions are, remain largely unexplored. As an alternative to traditional, burdensome methods like self-report, this study presents a novel approach that harnesses ambient audio segments to detect social threat contexts. We focus on two key dimensions: number of interaction partners (dyadic vs. group) and degree of evaluative threat (explicitly evaluative vs. not explicitly evaluative). Building on data from a Zoom-based social interaction study (N=52 college students, of whom the majority N=45 are socially anxious), we employ deep learning methods to achieve strong detection performance. Under sample-wide 5-fold Cross Validation (CV), our model distinguished dyadic from group interactions with 90\% accuracy and detected evaluative threat at 83\%. Using a leave-one-group-out CV, accuracies were 82\% and 77\%, respectively. While our data are based on virtual interactions due to pandemic constraints, our method has the potential to extend to diverse real-world settings. This research underscores the potential of passive sensing and AI to differentiate intricate social contexts, and may ultimately advance the ability of context-aware digital interventions to offer personalized mental health support.

Converging Paradigms: The Synergy of Symbolic and Connectionist AI in LLM-Empowered Autonomous Agents

This article explores the convergence of connectionist and symbolic artificial intelligence (AI), from historical debates to contemporary advancements. Traditionally considered distinct paradigms, connectionist AI focuses on neural networks, while symbolic AI emphasizes symbolic representation and logic. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), exemplified by ChatGPT and GPT-4, highlight the potential of connectionist architectures in handling human language as a form of symbols. The study argues that LLM-empowered Autonomous Agents (LAAs) embody this paradigm convergence. By utilizing LLMs for text-based knowledge modeling and representation, LAAs integrate neuro-symbolic AI principles, showcasing enhanced reasoning and decision-making capabilities. Comparing LAAs with Knowledge Graphs within the neuro-symbolic AI theme highlights the unique strengths of LAAs in mimicking human-like reasoning processes, scaling effectively with large datasets, and leveraging in-context samples without explicit re-training. The research underscores promising avenues in neuro-vector-symbolic integration, instructional encoding, and implicit reasoning, aimed at further enhancing LAA capabilities. By exploring the progression of neuro-symbolic AI and proposing future research trajectories, this work advances the understanding and development of AI technologies.

Incremental Semi-supervised Federated Learning for Health Inference via Mobile Sensing

Mobile sensing appears as a promising solution for health inference problem (e.g., influenza-like symptom recognition) by leveraging diverse smart sensors to capture fine-grained information about human behaviors and ambient contexts. Centralized training of machine learning models can place mobile users' sensitive information under privacy risks due to data breach and misexploitation. Federated Learning (FL) enables mobile devices to collaboratively learn global models without the exposure of local private data. However, there are challenges of on-device FL deployment using mobile sensing: 1) long-term and continuously collected mobile sensing data may exhibit domain shifts as sensing objects (e.g. humans) have varying behaviors as a result of internal and/or external stimulus; 2) model retraining using all available data may increase computation and memory burden; and 3) the sparsity of annotated crowd-sourced data causes supervised FL to lack robustness. In this work, we propose FedMobile, an incremental semi-supervised federated learning algorithm, to train models semi-supervisedly and incrementally in a decentralized online fashion. We evaluate FedMobile using a real-world mobile sensing dataset for influenza-like symptom recognition. Our empirical results show that FedMobile-trained models achieve the best results in comparison to the selected baseline methods.

Personalized State Anxiety Detection: An Empirical Study with Linguistic Biomarkers and A Machine Learning Pipeline

Individuals high in social anxiety symptoms often exhibit elevated state anxiety in social situations. Research has shown it is possible to detect state anxiety by leveraging digital biomarkers and machine learning techniques. However, most existing work trains models on an entire group of participants, failing to capture individual differences in their psychological and behavioral responses to social contexts. To address this concern, in Study 1, we collected linguistic data from N=35 high socially anxious participants in a variety of social contexts, finding that digital linguistic biomarkers significantly differ between evaluative vs. non-evaluative social contexts and between individuals having different trait psychological symptoms, suggesting the likely importance of personalized approaches to detect state anxiety. In Study 2, we used the same data and results from Study 1 to model a multilayer personalized machine learning pipeline to detect state anxiety that considers contextual and individual differences. This personalized model outperformed the baseline F1-score by 28.0%. Results suggest that state anxiety can be more accurately detected with personalized machine learning approaches, and that linguistic biomarkers hold promise for identifying periods of state anxiety in an unobtrusive way.

Wearable Sensor-based Multimodal Physiological Responses of Socially Anxious Individuals across Social Contexts

Correctly identifying an individual's social context from passively worn sensors holds promise for delivering just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs) to treat social anxiety disorder. In this study, we present results using passively collected data from a within-subject experiment that assessed physiological response across different social contexts (i.e, alone vs. with others), social phases (i.e., pre- and post-interaction vs. during an interaction), social interaction sizes (i.e., dyadic vs. group interactions), and levels of social threat (i.e., implicit vs. explicit social evaluation). Participants in the study ($N=46$) reported moderate to severe social anxiety symptoms as assessed by the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale ($\geq$34 out of 80). Univariate paired difference tests, multivariate random forest models, and follow-up cluster analyses were used to explore physiological response patterns across different social and non-social contexts. Our results suggest that social context is more reliably distinguishable than social phase, group size, or level of social threat, but that there is considerable variability in physiological response patterns even among these distinguishable contexts. Implications for real-world context detection and deployment of JITAIs are discussed.

Graph Neural Networks in IoT: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) boom has revolutionized almost every corner of people's daily lives: healthcare, home, transportation, manufacturing, supply chain, and so on. With the recent development of sensor and communication technologies, IoT devices including smart wearables, cameras, smartwatches, and autonomous vehicles can accurately measure and perceive their surrounding environment. Continuous sensing generates massive amounts of data and presents challenges for machine learning. Deep learning models (e.g., convolution neural networks and recurrent neural networks) have been extensively employed in solving IoT tasks by learning patterns from multi-modal sensory data. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), an emerging and fast-growing family of neural network models, can capture complex interactions within sensor topology and have been demonstrated to achieve state-of-the-art results in numerous IoT learning tasks. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of recent advances in the application of GNNs to the IoT field, including a deep dive analysis of GNN design in various IoT sensing environments, an overarching list of public data and source code from the collected publications, and future research directions. To keep track of newly published works, we collect representative papers and their open-source implementations and create a Github repository at https://github.com/GuiminDong/GNN4IoT.

Improving mathematical questioning in teacher training

High-fidelity, AI-based simulated classroom systems enable teachers to rehearse effective teaching strategies. However, dialogue-oriented open-ended conversations such as teaching a student about scale factors can be difficult to model. This paper builds a text-based interactive conversational agent to help teachers practice mathematical questioning skills based on the well-known Instructional Quality Assessment. We take a human-centered approach to designing our system, relying on advances in deep learning, uncertainty quantification, and natural language processing while acknowledging the limitations of conversational agents for specific pedagogical needs. Using experts' input directly during the simulation, we demonstrate how conversation success rate and high user satisfaction can be achieved.

Evaluation of mathematical questioning strategies using data collected through weak supervision

A large body of research demonstrates how teachers' questioning strategies can improve student learning outcomes. However, developing new scenarios is challenging because of the lack of training data for a specific scenario and the costs associated with labeling. This paper presents a high-fidelity, AI-based classroom simulator to help teachers rehearse research-based mathematical questioning skills. Using a human-in-the-loop approach, we collected a high-quality training dataset for a mathematical questioning scenario. Using recent advances in uncertainty quantification, we evaluated our conversational agent for usability and analyzed the practicality of incorporating a human-in-the-loop approach for data collection and system evaluation for a mathematical questioning scenario.

From Personalized Medicine to Population Health: A Survey of mHealth Sensing Techniques

Mobile Sensing Apps have been widely used as a practical approach to collect behavioral and health-related information from individuals and provide timely intervention to promote health and well-beings, such as mental health and chronic cares. As the objectives of mobile sensing could be either \emph{(a) personalized medicine for individuals} or \emph{(b) public health for populations}, in this work we review the design of these mobile sensing apps, and propose to categorize the design of these apps/systems in two paradigms -- \emph{(i) Personal Sensing} and \emph{(ii) Crowd Sensing} paradigms. While both sensing paradigms might incorporate with common ubiquitous sensing technologies, such as wearable sensors, mobility monitoring, mobile data offloading, and/or cloud-based data analytics to collect and process sensing data from individuals, we present a novel taxonomy system with two major components that can specify and classify apps/systems from aspects of the life-cycle of mHealth Sensing: \emph{(1) Sensing Task Creation \& Participation}, \emph{(2) Health Surveillance \& Data Collection}, and \emph{(3) Data Analysis \& Knowledge Discovery}. With respect to different goals of the two paradigms, this work systematically reviews this field, and summarizes the design of typical apps/systems in the view of the configurations and interactions between these two components. In addition to summarization, the proposed taxonomy system also helps figure out the potential directions of mobile sensing for health from both personalized medicines and population health perspectives.

LonelyText: A Short Messaging Based Classification of Loneliness

Loneliness does not only have emotional implications on a person but also on his/her well-being. The study of loneliness has been challenging and largely inconclusive in findings because of the several factors that might correlate to the phenomenon. We present one approach to predicting this event by discovering patterns of language associated with loneliness. Our results show insights and promising directions for mining text from instant messaging to predict loneliness.