Adriano Barra
Last Update  18/05/2022
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        Brain-inspired ULtra-fast & ULtra-sharp machines for AI-assisted health-care
                         MAECI-MOST funded projects 2021 (time window 2022-2023)

Israeli Partner:  Prof. Ido Kanter (Head), Department of Physics, Bar-Ilan University
Italian Partner: Prof. Adriano Barra (Head), Dipartimento di Matematica & Fisica, Università del Salento
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Aims and purposes of this shared project between Israeli and Italian scientists: (argument: AI and its applications)
After the so-called “winter time”, following Minsky&Papert criticisms on Rosenblatt's perceptron, in the '70s and '80s the research focus  in autonomous information processing systems drifted from models of single neuron to models of networks of interacting neurons. The new wave of Artificial Intelligence (AI) arouse in those decades as a discipline inspired by biological information processing in the brain, based on the neurophysiological knowledge available at that time. Next, the development of modern clouds (i.e., big-data repositories where these machines can be trained) as well as a shift in the paradigm from CPU-computing to GPU-computing, has brought to the so-called “computational spring time”, with modern-AI algorithms able of impressive results.
Indeed, nowadays the technology is ready to usher in a "AI revolution", which, much like earlier industrial revolutions, is sparking a great economic activity with an increase in the Gross Domestic Product of the Western world assessed around 18%. The ubiquity of related
applications has already changed our everyday life, yet, at present, AI is far from being optimized, especially as for health-care is concerned, where  machine  training  requires  massive  datasets.  In fact,  the large-scale  analysis which underlies a Personalized Medicine would imply
tremendous efforts in terms of time and energy consuming. A novel generation of learning machines is therefore imperative for large-scale healthcare applications (e.g., worldwide hospitals) and this project aims to contribute in this direction, by leveraging our recent understanding of information processing and storage in biological neural networks.

In this project we plan to extend the AI paradigm by including bio-inspired local improvement (at the single neuron level) such as implementing ​dendritic –i.e. beyond synaptic– learning that is expected to generate ultra-fast algorithms as well as bio-inspired global improvement (at the whole-network level). To this aim, we will implement sleeping mechanisms that allow neural networks to sensibly boost their storage capacity and precision in signal detection/pattern recognition, after proper rest. The natural outcome of this novel generation of ultra-fast & ultra-sharp AIs is expected to finally be its “scalability”, de facto allowing its broad usage in healthcare. We also plan to extensively investigate properties of this new AI at work with cancer-detection within our Laboratories in Italy (mainly pancreatic, brest and colon cancers  with and without chemotherapies - for comparison), and at work with neural derangements within our Laboratory in Israel (in particular in cross-linking degeneracy and anisotropy at the single neuron level).​

We acknowledge, from the Italy part, the MAECI -Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale and, from the Israeli part, the MOST - Ministry of Science and Technology for for funding the project BULBUL.



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​                                                                               PUBLISHED PAPERS IN 2022
  

09. E. Agliari, M. Aquaro, A. Barra, A. Fachechi, C. Marullo,  
Pavlov learning machines, 
Neural Computation  arxiv (2022).  
This research is crucial for the project and BulBul was the principal sponsor. 
​This paper belongs to Task B.2

​08. L. Albanese, A. Alessandrelli,  
On Gaussian spin-glass with P-wise interactions, 
Journal of Mathematical Physics  webpage (2022).  
This research is crucial for the project and BulBul was the principal sponsor. 
​This paper belongs to Task B.1

07. V. Onesto, et al.,
Probing single cell fermentation flux and intercellular exchange networks via inverse modeling, 
submitted to Nature Comm  bioRxiv (2022). 
This research is not pivotal for the project (it is a source of datasets for it) hence BulBul was a partner sponsor. ​​
​This paper belongs to Tasks D.1 & D.2
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06. M. Aquaro, F. Alemanno, I. Kanter, F. Durante, E. Agliari, A. Barra,
Recurrent neural networks that generalize from examples and optimize by dreaming, 
submitted to Neural Networks arXiv (22022). 
This research is crucial for the project and BulBul was the principal sponsor. 
​This paper belongs to Task A.2

05. A. Fachechi, E. Agliari, F. Alemanno, A. Barra,
Outperforming RBM feature-extraction capabilities by "dreaming" mechanisms,
IEEE Trans. on Neural Nets and Learn Machines  in press webpage (2022). 
This research is crucial for the project and BulBul was the principal sponsor. 
​This paper belongs to Task A.2

04. A. Chandra, S. Pandija, F. Alemanno, R. Rizzo, R. Romano, G. Gigli, C. Bucci, A. Barra, L. Del Mercato, 
A fully automatic computational approach for precisely measuring organelle acidification, 
ACS Appl. Mat. & Interf. in press webpage (2022).  
Note: Italian CNR (National Center for Scientific Research) press release available for this work: link to the website or  download file
This research is not pivotal for the project (it is a source of datasets for it) hence BulBul was a partner sponsor. 
​This paper belongs to Tasks C.1 & C.2

03. F. Alemanno,  M. Aquaro, I. Kanter,  A. Barra, E. Agliari, 
Supervised Hebbian learning: toward eXplainable AI, 
submitted to Physical Review Letters  arxiv (2022).  
This research is crucial for the project and BulBul was the principal sponsor. 
​This paper belongs to Task A.1

02. L. Albanese, F. Alemanno, A. Alessandrelli, A. Barra,  
Replica symmetry breaking in dense neural networks, 
Journal of Statistical Physics arxiv in press (2022).  
This research is crucial for the project and BulBul was the principal sponsor. 
​This paper belongs to Tasks A.1 & A.2

01. E. Agliari, F. Alemanno, A. Barra, G. Di Marzio,
The emergence of a concept in shallow neural networks,
Neural Networks, 148, 232, arxiv webpage (2022).
This research is crucial for the project and BulBul was the principal sponsor. 
​This paper belongs to Task A.1

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Group Members (Italian side)**


Adriano Barra, Ross Rinaldi, Elena Agliari (staff members)
Alberto Fachechi, Francesco Alemanno (post-docs)
Chiara Marullo, Linda Albanese, Miriam Aquaro, Daniele Lotito (PhD students),
Andrea Alessandrelli (master student).

**the group is spread among the Salento Unit and the Rome Unit: for more info see our ResearchGate webapage

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