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Blood biomarkers are an essential tool for healthcare providers to diagnose, monitor, and treat a wide range of medical conditions. Current reference values and recommended ranges often rely on population-level statistics, which may not adequately account for the influence of inter-individual variability driven by factors such as lifestyle and genetics. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for predicting future blood biomarker values and define personalized references through learned representations from lifestyle data (physical activity and sleep) and blood biomarkers. Our proposed method learns a similarity-based embedding space that captures the complex relationship between biomarkers and lifestyle factors. Using the UK Biobank (257K participants), our results show that our deep-learned embeddings outperform traditional and current state-of-the-art representation learning techniques in predicting clinical diagnosis. Using a subset of UK Biobank of 6440 participants who have follow-up visits, we validate that the inclusion of these embeddings and lifestyle factors directly in blood biomarker models improves the prediction of future lab values from a single lab visit. This personalized modeling approach provides a foundation for developing more accurate risk stratification tools and tailoring preventative care strategies. In clinical settings, this translates to the potential for earlier disease detection, more timely interventions, and ultimately, a shift towards personalized healthcare.

In this paper, we present an advanced analysis of near optimal algorithms that use limited space to solve the frequency estimation, heavy hitters, frequent items, and top-k approximation in the bounded deletion model. We define the family of SpaceSaving$\pm$ algorithms and explain why the original SpaceSaving$\pm$ algorithm only works when insertions and deletions are not interleaved. Next, we propose the new Double SpaceSaving$\pm$, Unbiased Double SpaceSaving$\pm$, and Integrated SpaceSaving$\pm$ and prove their correctness. The three proposed algorithms represent different trade-offs, in which Double SpaceSaving$\pm$ can be extended to provide unbiased estimations while Integrated SpaceSaving$\pm$ uses less space. Since data streams are often skewed, we present an improved analysis of these algorithms and show that errors do not depend on the hot items. We also demonstrate how to achieve relative error guarantees under mild assumptions. Moreover, we establish that the important mergeability property is satisfied by all three algorithms, which is essential for running the algorithms in distributed settings.

Understanding user perspectives on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education is essential for creating pedagogically effective and ethically responsible AI-integrated learning environments. In this paper, we conduct an extensive qualitative content analysis of four major social media platforms (Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn) to explore the user experience (UX) and perspectives of early adopters toward ChatGPT-an AI Chatbot technology-in various education sectors. We investigate the primary applications of ChatGPT in education (RQ1) and the various perceptions of the technology (RQ2). Our findings indicate that ChatGPT is most popularly used in the contexts of higher education (24.18%), K-12 education (22.09%), and practical-skills learning (15.28%). On social media platforms, the most frequently discussed topics about ChatGPT are productivity, efficiency, and ethics. While some early adopters lean toward seeing ChatGPT as a revolutionary technology with the potential to boost students' self-efficacy and motivation to learn, others express concern that overreliance on the AI system may promote superficial learning habits and erode students' social and critical thinking skills. Our study contributes to the broader discourse on Human-AI Interaction and offers recommendations based on crowd-sourced knowledge for educators and learners interested in incorporating ChatGPT into their educational settings. Furthermore, we propose a research agenda for future studies that sets the foundation for continued investigation into the application of ChatGPT in education., Comment: Preprint version

The task of joining two tables is fundamental for querying databases. In this paper, we focus on the equi-join problem, where a pair of records from the two joined tables are part of the join results if equality holds between their values in the join column(s). While this is a tractable problem when the number of records in the joined tables is relatively small, it becomes very challenging as the table sizes increase, especially if hot keys (join column values with a large number of records) exist in both joined tables. This paper, an extended version of [metwally-SIGMOD-2022], proposes Adaptive-Multistage-Join (AM-Join) for scalable and fast equi-joins in distributed shared-nothing architectures. AM-Join utilizes (a) Tree-Join, a proposed novel algorithm that scales well when the joined tables share hot keys, and (b) Broadcast-Join, the known fastest when joining keys that are hot in only one table. Unlike the state-of-the-art algorithms, AM-Join (a) holistically solves the join-skew problem by achieving load balancing throughout the join execution, and (b) supports all outer-join variants without record deduplication or custom table partitioning. For the fastest AM-Join outer-join performance, we propose the Index-Broadcast-Join (IB-Join) family of algorithms for Small-Large joins, where one table fits in memory and the other can be up to orders of magnitude larger. The outer-join variants of IB-Join improves on the state-of-the-art Small-Large outer-join algorithms. The proposed algorithms can be adopted in any shared-nothing architecture. We implemented a MapReduce version using Spark. Our evaluation shows the proposed algorithms execute significantly faster and scale to more skewed and orders-of-magnitude bigger tables when compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms.

In this paper, we propose the first deterministic algorithms to solve the frequency estimation and frequent item problems in the bounded deletion model. We establish the space lower bound for solving the deterministic frequent items problem in the bounded deletion model, and propose the Lazy SpaceSaving$^\pm$ and SpaceSaving$^\pm$ algorithms with optimal space bound. We then develop an efficient implementation of the SpaceSaving$^\pm$ algorithm that minimizes the latency of update operations using novel data structures. The experimental evaluations testify that SpaceSaving$^\pm$ has accurate frequency estimations and achieves very high recall and precision across different data distributions while using minimal space. Our analysis and experiments clearly demonstrate that SpaceSaving$^\pm$ provides more accurate estimations using the same space as the state of the art protocols for applications with up to 93% of items deleted. Moreover, motivated by prior work, we propose Dyadic SpaceSaving$^\pm$, the first deterministic quantile approximation sketch in the bounded deletion model.

Diet management is key to managing chronic diseases such as diabetes. Automated food recommender systems may be able to assist by providing meal recommendations that conform to a user's nutrition goals and food preferences. Current recommendation systems suffer from a lack of accuracy that is in part due to a lack of knowledge of food preferences, namely foods users like to and are able to eat frequently. In this work, we propose a method for learning food preferences from food logs, a comprehensive but noisy source of information about users' dietary habits. We also introduce accompanying metrics. The method generates and compares word embeddings to identify the parent food category of each food entry and then calculates the most popular. Our proposed approach identifies 82% of a user's ten most frequently eaten foods. Our method is publicly available on (https://github.com/aametwally/LearningFoodPreferences)