Disparities in healthcare access and utilization associated with demographic and socioeconomic status hinder advancement of health equity. Thus, we designed a novel equity-focused approach to quantify variations of healthcare access/utilization from the expectation in national target populations. We additionally applied survey-weighted logistic regression models, to identify factors associated with usage of a particular type of health care. To facilitate generation of analysis datasets, we built an National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) knowledge graph to help automate source-level dynamic analyses across different survey years and subjects’ characteristics. We performed a cross-sectional subgroup disparity analysis of 2013-2018 NHANES on U.S. adults for receipt of diabetes treatments and vaccines against Hepatitis A (HAV), Hepatitis B (HBV), and Human Papilloma (HPV). Results show that in populations with hemoglobin A1c level ≥6%, patients with non-private insurance were less likely to receive newer and more beneficial antidiabetic medications; being Asian further exacerbated these disparities. For widely used drugs such as insulin, Asians experienced insignificant disparities in odds of prescription compared to White patients but received highly inadequate treatments with regard to their distribution in U.S. diabetic population. Vaccination rates were associated with some demographic/socioeconomic factors but not the others at different degrees for different diseases. For instance, while equity scores increase with rising education levels for HBV, they decrease with rising wealth levels for HPV. Among women vaccinated against HPV, minorities and poor communities usually received Cervarix while non-Hispanic White and higher-income groups received the more comprehensive Gardasil vaccine. Our study identified and quantified the impact of determinants of healthcare utilization for antidiabetic medications and vaccinations. Our new methods for semantics-aware disparity analysis of NHANES data could be readily generalized to other public health goals to support more rapid identification of disparities and development of policies, thus advancing health equity.

Developing agents capable of commonsense reasoning is an important goal in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. Because commonsense is broadly defined, a computational theory that can formally categorize the various kinds of commonsense knowledge is critical for enabling fundamental research in this area. In a recent book, Gordon and Hobbs described such a categorization, argued to be reasonably complete. However, the theory’s reliability has not been independently evaluated through human annotator judgments. This paper describes such an experimental study, whereby annotations were elicited across a subset of eight foundational categories proposed in the original Gordon-Hobbs theory. We avoid bias by eliciting annotations on 200 sentences from a commonsense benchmark dataset independently developed by an external organization. The results show that, while humans agree on relatively concrete categories like time and space, they disagree on more abstract concepts. The implications of these findings are briefly discussed.

Achieving machine common sense has been a longstanding problem within Artificial Intelligence. Thus far, benchmark data sets that are grounded in a theory of common sense and can be used to conduct rigorous, semantic evaluations of common sense reasoning (CSR) systems have been lacking. One expectation of the AI community is that neuro-symbolic reasoners can help bridge this gap towards more dependable systems with common sense. We propose a novel benchmark, called Theoretically Grounded common sense Reasoning (TG-CSR), modeled as a set of question answering instances, with each instance grounded in a semantic category of common sense, such as space, time, and emotions. The benchmark is few-shot i.e., only a few training and validation examples are provided in the public release to avoid the possibility of overfitting. Results from recent evaluations suggest that TG-CSR is challenging even for state-of-the-art statistical models. Due to its semantic rigor, this benchmark can be used to evaluate the common sense reasoning capabilities of neuro-symbolic systems.

The authors describe WikiCrimes, a project founded on a website of the same name that aims to offer a common interaction space for the general public where they can note criminal activity and track the locations where such crimes occur. The goal is to encourage collaborative participation that generates useful information for everyone. The authors describe their experience with WikiCrimes, emphasizing the services it provides to citizens and underlining some of the problems they've overcome to date. Their ultimate goal is to help establish a research agenda about the topic by inviting the academic community to embrace WikiCrimes as a platform that bridges citizen participation and open government.