Abstract: Dealing with incomplete information is a well studied problem in the context of machine learning and computational intelligence. However, in the context of computer vision, the problem has only been studied in specific scenarios (e.g., certain types of occlusions in specific types of images), although it is common to have incomplete information in visual data. This chapter describes the design of an academic competition focusing on inpainting of images and video sequences that was part of the competition program of WCCI2018 and had a satellite event collocated with ECCV2018. The ChaLearn Looking at People Inpainting Challenge aimed at advancing the state of the art on visual inpainting by promoting the development of methods for recovering missing and occluded information from images and video. Three tracks were proposed in which visual inpainting might be helpful but still challenging: human body pose estimation, text overlays removal and fingerprint denoising. This chapter describes the design of the challenge, which includes the release of three novel datasets, and the description of evaluation metrics, baselines and evaluation protocol. The results of the challenge are analyzed and discussed in detail and conclusions derived from this event are outlined.

Abstract: The management of solid waste in large urban environments has become a complex problem due to increasing amount of waste generated every day by citizens and companies. Current Computer Vision and Deep Learning techniques can help in the automatic detection and classification of waste types for further recycling tasks. In this work, we use the TrashNet dataset to train and compare different deep learning architectures for automatic classification of garbage types. In particular, several Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) architectures were compared: VGG, Inception and ResNet. The best classification results were obtained using a combined Inception-ResNet model that achieved 88.6% of accuracy. These are the best results obtained with the considered dataset.

Abstract: Massive tourism is becoming a big problem for some cities, such as Barcelona, due to its concentration in some neighborhoods. In this work we gather Instagram data related to Barcelona consisting on images-captions pairs and, using the text as a supervisory signal, we learn relations between images, words and neighborhoods. Our goal is to learn which visual elements appear in photos when people is posting about each neighborhood. We perform a language separate treatment of the data and show that it can be extrapolated to a tourists and locals separate analysis, and that tourism is reflected in Social Media at a neighborhood level. The presented pipeline allows analyzing the differences between the images that tourists and locals associate to the different neighborhoods. The proposed method, which can be extended to other cities or subjects, proves that Instagram data can be used to train multi-modal (image and text) machine learning models that are useful to analyze publications about a city at a neighborhood level. We publish the collected dataset, InstaBarcelona and the code used in the analysis.

Abstract: The ChaLearn AutoML Challenge (The authors are in alphabetical order of last name, except the first author who did most of the writing and the second author who produced most of the numerical analyses and plots.) (NIPS 2015 – ICML 2016) consisted of six rounds of a machine learning competition of progressive difficulty, subject to limited computational resources. It was followed bya one-round AutoML challenge (PAKDD 2018). The AutoML setting differs from former model selection/hyper-parameter selection challenges, such as the one we previously organized for NIPS 2006: the participants aim to develop fully automated and computationally efficient systems, capable of being trained and tested without human intervention, with code submission. This chapter analyzes the results of these competitions and provides details about the datasets, which were not revealed to the participants. The solutions of the winners are systematically benchmarked over all datasets of all rounds and compared with canonical machine learning algorithms available in scikit-learn. All materials discussed in this chapter (data and code) have been made publicly available at http://automl.chalearn.org/.

Abstract: Competitions have become a popular tool in the data science community to solve hard problems, assess the state of the art and spur new research directions. Companies like Kaggle and open source platforms like Codalab connect people with data and a data science problem to those with the skills and means to solve it. Hence, the question arises: What, if anything, could NIPS add to this rich ecosystem?
In 2017, we embarked to find out. We attracted 23 potential competitions, of which we selected five to be NIPS 2017 competitions. Our final selection features competitions advancing the state of the art in other sciences such as “Classifying Clinically Actionable Genetic Mutations” and “Learning to Run”. Others, like “The Conversational Intelligence Challenge” and “Adversarial Attacks and Defences” generated new data sets that we expect to impact the progress in their respective communities for years to come. And “Human-Computer Question Answering Competition” showed us just how far we as a field have come in ability and efficiency since the break-through performance of Watson in Jeopardy. Two additional competitions, DeepArt and AI XPRIZE Milestions, were also associated to the NIPS 2017 competition track, whose results are also presented within this chapter.

Abstract: People suffering Bipolar Disorder (BD) experiment changes in mood status having depressive or manic episodes with normal periods in the middle. BD is a chronic disease with a high level of non-adherence to medication that needs a continuous monitoring of patients to detect when they relapse in an episode, so that physicians can take care of them. Here we present MoodRecord, an easy-to-use, non-intrusive, multilingual, robust and scalable platform suitable for home monitoring patients with BD, that allows physicians and relatives to track the patient state and get alarms when abnormalities occur.
MoodRecord takes advantage of the capabilities of smartphones as a communication and recording device to do a continuous monitoring of patients. It automatically records user activity, and asks the user to answer some questions or to record himself in video, according to a predefined plan designed by physicians. The video is analysed, recognising the mood status from images and bipolar assessment scores are extracted from speech parameters. The data obtained from the different sources are merged periodically to observe if a relapse may start and if so, raise the corresponding alarm. The application got a positive evaluation in a pilot with users from three different countries. During the pilot, the predictions of the voice and image modules showed a coherent correlation with the diagnosis performed by clinicians.

Abstract: The manual inspection of intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) images to detect clinically relevant patterns is a difficult and laborious task performed routinely by physicians. In this paper, we present a framework based on convolutional nets for the quick selection of IVUS frames containing arterial calcification, a pattern whose detection plays a vital role in the diagnosis of atherosclerosis. Preliminary experiments on a dataset acquired from eighty patients show that convolutional architectures improve detections of a shallow classifier in terms of 𝐹1-measure, precision and recall.