Machine learning (ML) has become a popular technique for various automation tasks in the era of Industry 4.0, such as the analysis and synthesis of visual data such as images and videos, natural language and speech, financial data, and biomedical applications. However, ML-based automation techniques are facing difficulties like decision-making, thus incorporating user expertise into the system might be advantageous. The goal of adding human domain expertise with ML-based automation is to provide more accurate prediction models. Human-in-the-loop (HITL) systems that integrate human expertise with ML algorithms are becoming more and more common in various industries. However, there are a number of methodological, technical, and ethical difficulties with the development and application of HITL systems. This paper aims to explore the methodologies, challenges, and opportunities associated with HITL systems implementations. We also discuss a number of issues that must be resolved for HITL systems to be effective, including data quality, bias, and user engagement. Besides, we also explored several approaches that can be utilized to enhance the performance of HITL systems, such as active learning (AL), iterative ML, and reinforcement learning, as well as the current state of the art in HITL systems. We also selectively highlighted the advantages of HITL systems, such as their potential to increase decision-making process accountability and transparency by utilizing human experience to improve ML decision-making capability. The paper will be very useful for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.

Accurate breast cancer detection using automated algorithms remains a problem within the literature. Although a plethora of work has tried to address this issue, an exact solution is yet to be found. This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that most of the existing datasets are imbalanced, i.e. the number of instances of a particular class far exceeds that of the others. In this paper, we propose a framework based on the notion of transfer learning to address this issue and focus our efforts on histopathological and imbalanced image classification. We use the popular VGG-19 as the base model and complement it with several state-of-the-art techniques to improve the overall performance of the system. With the ImageNet dataset taken as the source domain, we apply the learned knowledge in the target domain consisting of histopathological images. With experimentation performed on a large-scale dataset consisting of 277,524 images, we show that the framework proposed in this paper gives superior performance than those available in the existing literature. Through numerical simulations conducted on a supercomputer, we also present guidelines for work in transfer learning and imbalanced image classification.

The overuse of antibiotics has led to emergence of antimicrobial resistance, and as a result, antibacterial peptides (ABPs) are receiving significant attention as an alternative. Identification of effective ABPs in lab from natural sources is a cost-intensive and time-consuming process. Therefore, there is a need for the development of in silico models, which can identify novel ABPs in protein sequences for chemical synthesis and testing. In this study, we propose a deep learning classifier named Deep-ABPpred that can identify ABPs in protein sequences. We developed Deep-ABPpred using bidirectional long short-term memory algorithm with amino acid level features from word2vec. The results show that Deep-ABPpred outperforms other state-of-the-art ABP classifiers on both test and independent datasets. Our proposed model achieved the precision of approximately 97 and 94% on test dataset and independent dataset, respectively. The high precision suggests applicability of Deep-ABPpred in proposing novel ABPs for synthesis and experimentation. By utilizing Deep-ABPpred, we identified ABPs in the tail protein sequences of Streptococcus bacteriophages, chemically synthesized identified peptides in lab and tested their activity in vitro. These ABPs showed potent antibacterial activity against selected Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, which confirms the capability of Deep-ABPpred in identifying novel ABPs in protein sequences. Based on the proposed approach, an online prediction server is also developed, which is freely accessible at https://abppred.anvil.app/. This web server takes the protein sequence as input and provides ABPs with high probability (>0.95) as output.