scholarly journals Muddling-Through and Deep Learning for Managing Large-Scale Uncertain Risks

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Cox

AbstractManaging large-scale, geographically distributed, and long-term risks arising from diverse underlying causes – ranging from poverty to underinvestment in protecting against natural hazards or failures of sociotechnical, economic, and financial systems – poses formidable challenges for any theory of effective social decision-making. Participants may have different and rapidly evolving local information and goals, perceive different opportunities and urgencies for actions, and be differently aware of how their actions affect each other through side effects and externalities. Six decades ago, political economist Charles Lindblom viewed “rational-comprehensive decision-making” as utterly impracticable for such realistically complex situations. Instead, he advocated incremental learning and improvement, or “muddling through,” as both a positive and a normative theory of bureaucratic decision-making when costs and benefits are highly uncertain. But sparse, delayed, uncertain, and incomplete feedback undermines the effectiveness of collective learning while muddling through, even if all participant incentives are aligned; it is no panacea. We consider how recent insights from machine learning – especially, deep multiagent reinforcement learning – formalize aspects of muddling through and suggest principles for improving human organizational decision-making. Deep learning principles adapted for human use can not only help participants in different levels of government or control hierarchies manage some large-scale distributed risks, but also show how rational-comprehensive decision analysis and incremental learning and improvement can be reconciled and synthesized.

Author(s):  
Limu Chen ◽  
Ye Xia ◽  
Dexiong Pan ◽  
Chengbin Wang

<p>Deep-learning based navigational object detection is discussed with respect to active monitoring system for anti-collision between vessel and bridge. Motion based object detection method widely used in existing anti-collision monitoring systems is incompetent in dealing with complicated and changeable waterway for its limitations in accuracy, robustness and efficiency. The video surveillance system proposed contains six modules, including image acquisition, detection, tracking, prediction, risk evaluation and decision-making, and the detection module is discussed in detail. A vessel-exclusive dataset with tons of image samples is established for neural network training and a SSD (Single Shot MultiBox Detector) based object detection model with both universality and pertinence is generated attributing to tactics of sample filtering, data augmentation and large-scale optimization, which make it capable of stable and intelligent vessel detection. Comparison results with conventional methods indicate that the proposed deep-learning method shows remarkable advantages in robustness, accuracy, efficiency and intelligence. In-situ test is carried out at Songpu Bridge in Shanghai, and the results illustrate that the method is qualified for long-term monitoring and providing information support for further analysis and decision making.</p>


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anisha Keshavan ◽  
Jason D. Yeatman ◽  
Ariel Rokem

AbstractResearch in many fields has become increasingly reliant on large and complex datasets. “Big Data” holds untold promise to rapidly advance science by tackling new questions that cannot be answered with smaller datasets. While powerful, research with Big Data poses unique challenges, as many standard lab protocols rely on experts examining each one of the samples. This is not feasible for large-scale datasets because manual approaches are time-consuming and hence difficult to scale. Meanwhile, automated approaches lack the accuracy of examination by highly trained scientists and this may introduce major errors, sources of noise, and unforeseen biases into these large and complex datasets. Our proposed solution is to 1) start with a small, expertly labelled dataset, 2) amplify labels through web-based tools that engage citizen scientists, and 3) train machine learning on amplified labels to emulate expert decision making. As a proof of concept, we developed a system to quality control a large dataset of three-dimensional magnetic resonance images (MRI) of human brains. An initial dataset of 200 brain images labeled by experts were amplified by citizen scientists to label 722 brains, with over 80,000 ratings done through a simple web interface. A deep learning algorithm was then trained to predict data quality, based on a combination of the citizen scientist labels that accounts for differences in the quality of classification by different citizen scientists. In an ROC analysis (on left out test data), the deep learning network performed as well as a state-of-the-art, specialized algorithm (MRIQC) for quality control of T1-weighted images, each with an area under the curve of 0.99. Finally, as a specific practical application of the method, we explore how brain image quality relates to the replicability of a well established relationship between brain volume and age over development. Combining citizen science and deep learning can generalize and scale expert decision making; this is particularly important in emerging disciplines where specialized, automated tools do not already exist.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bin Wu ◽  
Yuhong Fan ◽  
Li Mao

Abstract For the uncertainty and complexity in object decision making and the differences of decision makers ' reliabilities, an object decision making method based on deep learning theory is proposed. However, traditional deep learning approaches optimize the parameters in an "end-to-end" mode by annotating large amounts of data to propagate the errors backwards. The learning method could be considered to be as a "black box", which is weak in explainability. Explainability refers to an algorithm that gives a clear summary of a particular task and connects it to defined principles or principles in the human world. This paper proposes an explainable attention model consisting of channel attention module and spatial attention module. The proposed module derives attention graphs from channel dimension and spatial dimension respectively, then the input features are selectively learned according to the importance of the features. For different channels, the higher the weight, the higher the correlation which required more attention. The main function of spatial attention is to capture the most informative part in the local feature graph, which is a supplement to channel attention. We evaluate our proposed module based on the ImageNet-1K and Cifar-100 respectively. Experimental results show that our algorithm is superior in both accuracy and robustness compared with the state of the arts.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 1722-1737 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keunyoung Jang ◽  
Namgyu Kim ◽  
Yun-Kyu An

This article proposes a deep learning–based autonomous concrete crack detection technique using hybrid images. The hybrid images combining vision and infrared thermography images are able to improve crack detectability while minimizing false alarms. In particular, large-scale concrete-made infrastructures such as bridge and dam can be effectively inspected by spatially scanning the unmanned vehicle–mounted hybrid imaging system including a vision camera, an infrared camera, and a continuous-wave line laser. However, the expert-dependent decision-making for crack identification which has been widely used in industrial fields is often cumbersome, time-consuming, and unreliable. As a target concrete structure gets larger, automated decision-making becomes more desirable from the practical point of view. The proposed technique is able to achieve automated crack identification and visualization by transfer learning of a well-trained deep convolutional neural network, that is, GoogLeNet, while retaining the advantages of the hybrid images. The proposed technique is experimentally validated using a lab-scale concrete specimen with cracks of various sizes. The test results reveal that macro- and microcracks are automatically visualized while minimizing false alarms.


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