The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

这项工作旨在自动评估儿童的语言发展是否适合年龄。经过验证的语音和语言测试用于此目的测试听觉记忆。在这项工作中，任务是确定是否正确说出了口语非单词。我们比较有动机来建模特定语言结构的不同方法：低水平特征（FFT），扬声器嵌入（ECAPA-TDNN），素化 - 动机的嵌入（WAV2VEC 2.0）和语音嵌入Senones（ASR ASR ACOSTIC模型）形式。每种方法都提供了类似VGG的5层CNN分类器的输入。我们还检查了每个非单词的适应性。使用来自口头非单词的不同幼儿园的录音进行了对拟议系统的评估。 ECAPA-TDNN和低级FFT特征不会明确模型语音信息； WAV2VEC2.0经过素数标签训练，我们的ASR声学模型包含（子）语音信息。我们发现，语音建模越颗粒状，达到的识别率就越高。在ASR声学模型特征上训练的最佳系统的精度为89.4％，在ROC（接收器操作特征）曲线（AUC）下的面积为0.923。与FFT-BASELINE相比，这对应于20.2％和AUC相对0.309的改善。

本文经验研究了不同数据拆分和分裂策略对功能障碍检测系统性能的影响。为此，我们使用具有分类头的WAV2VEC 2.0模型以及支持向量机（SVM）以及从WAV2VEC 2.0模型中提取的功能进行实验。我们使用播客（SEP-28K）数据集中的口吃事件的不同非说明书和说话者的分裂训练和评估系统，以阐明结果W.R.T.的可变性。使用使用的分区方法。此外，我们表明SEP-28K数据集仅由少数扬声器主导，因此很难评估。为了解决这个问题，我们创建了Sep-28k扩展（Sep-28k-e），其中包含半自动生成的扬声器和性别信息，为SEP-28K语料库，建议不同的数据拆分，每个数据分配有用，可用于评估方法的其他方面用于功能障碍检测。

口吃是一种多种言语障碍，会损害个人的沟通能力。口吃（PWS）的人经常使用语音疗法来应对自己的病情。改善具有这种非典型语音或跟踪语音疗法的人的语音识别系统将需要能够检测功能障碍的系统，同时能够检测到治疗中获得的语​​音技术。本文表明，用于在含有口吃的语音上结结巴巴的口吃的微调2VEC 2.0 [1]，结合多任务的学习，增强了通用Purepose Wav2VEC 2.0的有效性，以检测语音在语音中检测说话的功能;内部和跨语言。我们通过训练支持向量机分类器评估我们的FluencyBank的方法[2]和以德国治疗为中心的Kassel Fluency（KSOF）[3]数据集[3]数据集，该数据集使用六种不同结肠相关的事件类型中提取的功能：块：块： ，延长，声音重复，单词重复，插入和 - 特定于治疗 - 语音修改。使用来自微调模型的嵌入式嵌入会导致相对分类的性能增长到高达27％W.R.T. F1得分。

Machine learning models are typically evaluated by computing similarity with reference annotations and trained by maximizing similarity with such. Especially in the bio-medical domain, annotations are subjective and suffer from low inter- and intra-rater reliability. Since annotations only reflect the annotation entity's interpretation of the real world, this can lead to sub-optimal predictions even though the model achieves high similarity scores. Here, the theoretical concept of Peak Ground Truth (PGT) is introduced. PGT marks the point beyond which an increase in similarity with the reference annotation stops translating to better Real World Model Performance (RWMP). Additionally, a quantitative technique to approximate PGT by computing inter- and intra-rater reliability is proposed. Finally, three categories of PGT-aware strategies to evaluate and improve model performance are reviewed.

The analysis of network structure is essential to many scientific areas, ranging from biology to sociology. As the computational task of clustering these networks into partitions, i.e., solving the community detection problem, is generally NP-hard, heuristic solutions are indispensable. The exploration of expedient heuristics has led to the development of particularly promising approaches in the emerging technology of quantum computing. Motivated by the substantial hardware demands for all established quantum community detection approaches, we introduce a novel QUBO based approach that only needs number-of-nodes many qubits and is represented by a QUBO-matrix as sparse as the input graph's adjacency matrix. The substantial improvement on the sparsity of the QUBO-matrix, which is typically very dense in related work, is achieved through the novel concept of separation-nodes. Instead of assigning every node to a community directly, this approach relies on the identification of a separation-node set, which -- upon its removal from the graph -- yields a set of connected components, representing the core components of the communities. Employing a greedy heuristic to assign the nodes from the separation-node sets to the identified community cores, subsequent experimental results yield a proof of concept. This work hence displays a promising approach to NISQ ready quantum community detection, catalyzing the application of quantum computers for the network structure analysis of large scale, real world problem instances.

In this work, a method for obtaining pixel-wise error bounds in Bayesian regularization of inverse imaging problems is introduced. The proposed method employs estimates of the posterior variance together with techniques from conformal prediction in order to obtain coverage guarantees for the error bounds, without making any assumption on the underlying data distribution. It is generally applicable to Bayesian regularization approaches, independent, e.g., of the concrete choice of the prior. Furthermore, the coverage guarantees can also be obtained in case only approximate sampling from the posterior is possible. With this in particular, the proposed framework is able to incorporate any learned prior in a black-box manner. Guaranteed coverage without assumptions on the underlying distributions is only achievable since the magnitude of the error bounds is, in general, unknown in advance. Nevertheless, experiments with multiple regularization approaches presented in the paper confirm that in practice, the obtained error bounds are rather tight. For realizing the numerical experiments, also a novel primal-dual Langevin algorithm for sampling from non-smooth distributions is introduced in this work.

Machine learning (ML) on graph-structured data has recently received deepened interest in the context of intrusion detection in the cybersecurity domain. Due to the increasing amounts of data generated by monitoring tools as well as more and more sophisticated attacks, these ML methods are gaining traction. Knowledge graphs and their corresponding learning techniques such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with their ability to seamlessly integrate data from multiple domains using human-understandable vocabularies, are finding application in the cybersecurity domain. However, similar to other connectionist models, GNNs are lacking transparency in their decision making. This is especially important as there tend to be a high number of false positive alerts in the cybersecurity domain, such that triage needs to be done by domain experts, requiring a lot of man power. Therefore, we are addressing Explainable AI (XAI) for GNNs to enhance trust management by exploring combining symbolic and sub-symbolic methods in the area of cybersecurity that incorporate domain knowledge. We experimented with this approach by generating explanations in an industrial demonstrator system. The proposed method is shown to produce intuitive explanations for alerts for a diverse range of scenarios. Not only do the explanations provide deeper insights into the alerts, but they also lead to a reduction of false positive alerts by 66% and by 93% when including the fidelity metric.

Earthquakes, fire, and floods often cause structural collapses of buildings. The inspection of damaged buildings poses a high risk for emergency forces or is even impossible, though. We present three recent selected missions of the Robotics Task Force of the German Rescue Robotics Center, where both ground and aerial robots were used to explore destroyed buildings. We describe and reflect the missions as well as the lessons learned that have resulted from them. In order to make robots from research laboratories fit for real operations, realistic test environments were set up for outdoor and indoor use and tested in regular exercises by researchers and emergency forces. Based on this experience, the robots and their control software were significantly improved. Furthermore, top teams of researchers and first responders were formed, each with realistic assessments of the operational and practical suitability of robotic systems.

Modeling perception sensors is key for simulation based testing of automated driving functions. Beyond weather conditions themselves, sensors are also subjected to object dependent environmental influences like tire spray caused by vehicles moving on wet pavement. In this work, a novel modeling approach for spray in lidar data is introduced. The model conforms to the Open Simulation Interface (OSI) standard and is based on the formation of detection clusters within a spray plume. The detections are rendered with a simple custom ray casting algorithm without the need of a fluid dynamics simulation or physics engine. The model is subsequently used to generate training data for object detection algorithms. It is shown that the model helps to improve detection in real-world spray scenarios significantly. Furthermore, a systematic real-world data set is recorded and published for analysis, model calibration and validation of spray effects in active perception sensors. Experiments are conducted on a test track by driving over artificially watered pavement with varying vehicle speeds, vehicle types and levels of pavement wetness. All models and data of this work are available open source.