Melanie Herschel | Searcharxiv

arXiv2023

From Plate to Prevention: A Dietary Nutrient-aided Platform for Health Promotion in Singapore

Singapore has been striving to improve the provision of healthcare services to her people. In this course, the government has taken note of the deficiency in regulating and supervising people's nutrient intake, which is identified as a contributing factor to the development of chronic diseases. Consequently, this issue has garnered significant attention. In this paper, we share our experience in addressing this issue and attaining medical-grade nutrient intake information to benefit Singaporeans in different aspects. To this end, we develop the FoodSG platform to incubate diverse healthcare-oriented applications as a service in Singapore, taking into account their shared requirements. We further identify the profound meaning of localized food datasets and systematically clean and curate a localized Singaporean food dataset FoodSG-233. To overcome the hurdle in recognition performance brought by Singaporean multifarious food dishes, we propose to integrate supervised contrastive learning into our food recognition model FoodSG-SCL for the intrinsic capability to mine hard positive/negative samples and therefore boost the accuracy. Through a comprehensive evaluation, we present performance results of the proposed model and insights on food-related healthcare applications. The FoodSG-233 dataset has been released in https://foodlg.comp.nus.edu.sg/.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

To not miss the forest for the trees -- a holistic approach for explaining missing answers over nested data (extended version)

Query-based explanations for missing answers identify which operators of a query are responsible for the failure to return a missing answer of interest. This type of explanations has proven to be useful in a variety of contexts including debugging of complex analytical queries. Such queries are frequent in big data systems such as Apache Spark. We present a novel approach for producing query-based explanations. Our approach is the first to support nested data and to consider operators that modify the schema and structure of the data (e.g., nesting and projections) as potential causes of missing answers. To efficiently compute explanations, we propose a heuristic algorithm that applies two novel techniques: (i) reasoning about multiple schema alternatives for a query and (ii) re-validating at each step whether an intermediate result can contribute to the missing answer. Using an implementation of our approach on Spark, we demonstrate that it is the first to scale to large datasets and that it often finds explanations that existing techniques fail to identify.

cs.DB↗