The weekly LUCID catchup is back to form, with a full house in-person last week. Great to see everyone and special thanks for Sameer to giving us a sneak peak at his upcoming SSCI paper on JuzzyPy, the native Python library for type-1, interval type-2 and general type-2 fuzzy systems, see ​Software - LUCID - LAB FOR UNCERTAINTY IN DATA AND DECISION MAKING (lucidresearch.org)

Our PhD student Ruizhe Li and his supervisor Xin Chen in IMA/LUCID group have won the 1st place of an international grand challenge held in MICCAI 2022 (https://conferences.miccai.org/2022/en/). MICCAI is the top international technical-oriented conference in the field of medical imaging. This challenge (CMRxMotion) tackles the task of automatic quality assessment in cardiac magnetic resonance imaging, which attracted 87 internal teams. Only 16 teams submitted their final valid algorithms for testing, and we are the winner by outperforming the second best team a large margin (75% classification accuracy vs 70%)! The technical detail can be found in our paper, entitled: “Motion-related Artefacts Classification Using Patch-based Ensemble and Transfer Learning in Cardiac MRI”, MICCAI STACOM workshop 2022. Very well done Ruizhe!

10 fully funded PhD scholarships are available at the School of Computer Science, for details, have a look here: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/jobs/currentvacancies/ref/SCI1979. Deadline for applications is 15th March 2021.

If you are interesting in applying for a scholarship to join LUCID as a PhD student, please contact Prof. Christian Wagner in the first instance. You may also want to chat to some of the existing students and/or researchers in the group and look at our publications.

The paper "ADONiS—Adaptive Online Nonsingleton Fuzzy Logic Systems" (by Direnc Pekaslan, Christian Wagner and Jonathan M. Garibaldi) has been published on IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems. 

Real-world environments are subject to different uncertainty sources which can be impactful at different levels and/or at different duration which can inevitably cause a variation in uncertainty levels over time. Due to the heterogeneity and diversity of real-world conditions, measurement devices (e.g. sensors) may not be able to provide absolute true perfect value, rather approximations which in turn processed as inputs to systems. Thus, given inputs are exposed to different effects (e.g. quadcopters subjected to varying wind gusts) which lead to input uncertainty to be a principal source of uncertainty and inseparable components of decision-making systems.
Non-Singleton Fuzzy Logic Systems have the potential to capture and handle input uncertainty within the design of input fuzzy sets. In this paper, we propose a complete ADaptive, Online Non-Singleton (ADONiS) framework which incorporates online uncertainty detection and associated parameterization of the Non-Singleton input fuzzy sets, thus providing an improved capacity to adapt to variations in the level of input-affecting noise, common in real-world applications.

The proposed approach avoids both the need for a priori knowledge of the uncertainty levels experienced at runtime and the need for offline training while providing the means for systems to continuously adapt to changing levels of uncertainty. Specifically, in the proposed approach, input fuzzy set parameters are continuously adapted based on information gained from an uncertainty level estimation process which iteratively estimates uncertainty levels over a sequence of recent observations.

The proposed ADONiS framework for combining online determination of uncertainty levels with associated adaptation of input fuzzy sets provides an efficient and effective solution which elegantly models input uncertainty ‘where it arises’ without requiring changes in any other part (e.g. antecedents, rules or consequents) of the FLS. In doing so, ADONiS limits tuning to the fuzzification stage and remain rules ‘untouched’ (which can be generated based on experts insights or in a data-driven way), thus providing a fundamental requirement for good interpretability. –if rules and sets were understood well initially.

As time series forecasting provides an ideal test bed for the systematic evaluation (offering the potential to accurately control the levels of uncertainty/noise affecting system inputs at any given time) of techniques designed to deal with input uncertainty, in this paper, we focus on applying the proposed ADONiS framework to the context of two common chaotic time series (Mackey-Glass, Lorenz) prediction as an initial area of the application enabling efficient evaluation and demonstration.

An animated illustration of the ADONiS adaptive behaviour to variation in the levels of uncertainty affecting a system’s inputs can be seen below.

 At each time step, inputs are associated with a given non-singleton FS, for which the parameters are determined directly by the levels of uncertainty detected within the preceding time frame. Employing an uncertainty detection technique to construct input FSs provides the capacity for adapting to changes in the levels of uncertainty affecting a system (e.g. in respect to varying environmental circumstances).

Acknowledging the fact that in the real world, sources of (varying levels of) uncertainty are pervasive, a variety of different training/testing scenarios were explored to systematically evaluate the proposed framework. The results from the comparison of the proposed Adaptive and Non-adaptive techniques suggest that the proposed ADONiS approach of dynamically changing input FSs provides significant advantages, particularly in environments that include high variation in noise levels, which are common in real-world applications. For more details, please see the paper 10.1109/TFUZZ.2019.2933787.
​

The IEEE Transactions on AI is now live and open for submissions at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tai-ieee.
Scope
"The IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (TAI) is a multidisciplinary journal publishing papers on theories and methodologies of Artificial Intelligence. Applications of Artificial Intelligence are also considered.
Topics covered by IEEE TAI include, but not limited to, Agent-based Systems, Augmented Intelligence, Autonomic Computing, Constraint Systems, Explainable AI, Knowledge-Based Systems, Learning Theories, Planning, Reasoning, Search, Natural Language Processing, and Applications. Technical papers addressing contemporary topics in AI such as Ethics and Social Implications are welcomed."

For more details, see the Call for Papers here and the journal website here.

Today marked the funeral of Professor Robert (Bob) John, a great friend, scholar, and colleague. Bob was a member and supporter of LUCID from its very beginning and supported everyone across the group, sharing his expertise on fuzzy sets, in particular type-2 fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic. Bob, you will be missed.
 
Christian & LUCID, 5th March 2020

A paper authored by three LUCID members (Zack Ellerby, Josie McCulloch and Christian Wagner), together with a student from Horizon CDT (Melanie Wilson), was recently presented at the 14th International Conference on Critical Information Infrastructures Security (Linköping, Sweden). This paper won the ‘Young CRITIS Award’ 2019, having been judged as the best by someone under the age of 35 at the conference.
 
The paper, titled ‘Exploring how Component Factors and their Uncertainty Affect Judgements of Risk in Cyber-Security’ is available to view here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1910.00703

The LUCID group have returned from a successful trip to the International Conference on Fuzzy Systems FUZZ-IEEE 2019 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Multiple papers are published from the group, all of which are listed below:

Fuzzy Integral Driven Ensemble Classification using A Priori Fuzzy Measures
Utkarsh Agrawal, Christian Wagner, Jonathan M. Garibaldi and Daniele Soria

On the Concept of Meaningfulness in Constrained Type-2 Fuzzy Sets
Pasquale D'Alterio, Jonathan Garibaldi and Robert John

DECSYS - Discrete and Ellipse-based response Capture SYStem
Zack Ellerby, Josie McCulloch, John Young and Christian Wagner

A Preliminary Approach for the Exploitation of Citizen Science Data for Fast and Robust Fuzzy k-Nearest Neighbour Classification
Manuel Jimenez, Mercedes Torres Torres, Robert John and Isaac Triguero

Measuring Similarity Between Discontinuous Intervals - Challenges and Solutions
Shaily Kabir, Christian Wagner, Timothy C. Havens and Derek T. Anderson

On Comparing and Selecting Approaches to Model Interval-Valued Data as Fuzzy Sets
Josie McCulloch, Zack Ellerby and Christian Wagner

Measuring Inter-group Agreement on zSlice Based General Type-2 Fuzzy Sets
Javier Navarro and Christian Wagner

Leveraging IT2 Input Fuzzy Sets in Non-Singleton Fuzzy Logic Systems to Dynamically Adapt to Varying Uncertainty Levels
Direnc Pekaslan, Christian Wagner and Jonathan M. Garibaldi

A Measure of Structural Complexity of Hierarchical Fuzzy Systems Adapted from Software Engineering
Tajul Rosli Razak, Jonathan M. Garibaldi and Christian Wagner

A Novel Weighted Combination Method for Feature Selection using Fuzzy Sets
Zixiao Shen, Xin Chen, Jonathan M. Garibaldi

Fuzzy Hot Spot Identification for Big Data: An Initial Approach
Rebecca Tickle, Isaac Triguero, Grazziela P. Figueredo, Ender Ozcan, Mohammad Mesgarpour and Robert I. John