Unexpected Inequality: Disparate-Impact From Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare Decisions

Systemic discrimination in healthcare plagues marginalized groups. Physicians incorrectly view people of color as having high pain tolerance, leading to undertreatment. Women with disabilities are often undiagnosed because their symptoms are dismissed. Low-income patients have less access to appropriate treatment. These patterns, and others, reflect long-standing disparities that have become engrained in U.S. health systems. As the healthcare industry adopts artificial intelligence and algorithminformed (AI) tools, it is vital that regulators address healthcare discrimination. AI tools are increasingly used to make both clinical and administrative decisions by hospitals, physicians, and insurers—yet there is no framework that specifically places nondiscrimination obligations on AI users. The Food & Drug Administration has limited authority to regulate AI and has not sought to incorporate anti-discrimination principles in its guidance. Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act has not been used to enforce nondiscrimination in healthcare AI and is under-utilized by the Office of Civil Rights. State level protections by medical licensing boards or malpractice liability are similarly untested and have not yet extended nondiscrimination obligations to AI. This Article discusses the role of each legal obligation on healthcare AI and the ways in which each system can improve to address discrimination. It highlights the ways in which industries can self-regulate to set nondiscrimination standards and concludes by recommending standards and creating a super-regulator to address disparate impact by AI. As the world moves towards automation, it is imperative that ongoing concerns about systemic discrimination are removed to prevent further marginalization in healthcare

Internet of Drones (IoD): Threats, Vulnerability, and Security Perspectives

The development of the Internet of Drones (IoD) becomes vital because of a proliferation of drone-based civilian or military applications. The IoD based technological revolution upgrades the current Internet environment into a more pervasive and ubiquitous world. IoD is capable of enhancing the state-of-the-art for drones while leveraging services from the existing cellular networks. Irrespective to a vast domain and range of applications, IoD is vulnerable to malicious attacks over open-air radio space. Due to increasing threats and attacks, there has been a lot of attention on deploying security measures for IoD networks. In this paper, critical threats and vulnerabilities of IoD are presented. Moreover, taxonomy is created to classify attacks based on the threats and vulnerabilities associated with the networking of drone and their incorporation in the existing cellular setups. In addition, this article summarizes the challenges and research directions to be followed for the security of IoD.Comment: 13 pages, 3 Figures, 1 Table, The 3rd International Symposium on Mobile Internet Security (MobiSec'18), Auguest 29-September 1, 2018, Cebu, Philippines, Article No. 37, pp. 1-1

A thin film approach for SiC-derived graphene as an on-chip electrode for supercapacitors

© 2015 IOP Publishing Ltd. We designed a nickel-assisted process to obtain graphene with sheet resistance as low as 80 Ω square-1 from silicon carbide films on Si wafers with highly enhanced surface area. The silicon carbide film acts as both a template and source of graphitic carbon, while, simultaneously, the nickel induces porosity on the surface of the film by forming silicides during the annealing process which are subsequently removed. As stand-alone electrodes in supercapacitors, these transfer-free graphene-on-chip samples show a typical double-layer supercapacitive behaviour with gravimetric capacitance of up to 65 F g-1. This work is the first attempt to produce graphene with high surface area from silicon carbide thin films for energy storage at the wafer-level and may open numerous opportunities for on-chip integrated energy storage applications

Toward an Aqueous Solar Battery: Direct Electrochemical Storage of Solar Energy in Carbon Nitrides

Graphitic carbon nitrides have emerged as an earth-abundant family of polymeric materials for solar energy conversion. Herein, a 2D cyanamide-functionalized polyheptazine imide (NCN-PHI) is reported, which for the first time enables the synergistic coupling of two key functions of energy conversion within one single material: light harvesting and electrical energy storage. Photo-electrochemical measurements in aqueous electrolytes reveal the underlying mechanism of this solar battery material: the charge storage in NCN-PHI is based on the photoreduction of the carbon nitride backbone and charge compensation is realized by adsorption of alkali metal ions within the NCN-PHI layers and at the solution interface. The photoreduced carbon nitride can thus be described as a battery anode operating as a pseudocapacitor, which can store light-induced charge in the form of long-lived, trapped electrons for hours. Importantly, the potential window of this process is not limited by the water reduction reaction due to the high intrinsic overpotential of carbon nitrides for hydrogen evolution, potentially enabling new applications for aqueous batteries. Thus, the feasibility of light-induced electrical energy storage and release on demand by a one-component light-charged battery anode is demonstrated, which provides a sustainable solution to overcome the intermittency of solar radiation

Organic metal-semiconductor field-effect transistor (OMESFET)

Organic electronics offers the possibility of producing ultra-low-cost and large-area electronics using printing methods. Two challenges limiting the utility of printed electronic circuits are the high operating voltage and the relatively poor performance of printed transistors. It is shown that voltages can be reduced by replacing the capacitive gate used in Organic Field-Effect Transistors (OFETs) with a Schottky contact, creating a thin-film Organic Metal-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (OMESFET). This geometry solves the voltage issue, and promises to be useful in situations where low voltage operation is important, but good performance is not essential. In cases where high voltage is acceptable or required, it is shown that OFET performance can be greatly improved by employing a Schottky contact as a second gate. The relatively thick insulating layer between the gate and the semiconductor in OFETs makes it necessary to employ a large change of gate voltage (~40 V) to control the drain current. In order to reduce the voltage to less than 5 V a very thin (<10 nm) insulating layer and/or high-k dielectric materials can be used, but these solutions are not compatible with current printing technology. Simulations and implementations of OMESFET devices demonstrate low voltage operation (<5 V) and improved sub-threshold swing compared to the OFET. However, these benefits are achieved at the expense of mobility. In order to achieve good performance in an OFET, including threshold voltage, current ratio and output resistance, the semiconductor thickness has to be less than 50 nm, whereas the thickness of a printed semiconductor is typically larger than 200 nm. The addition of a top Schottky contact on the OFET creates a depletion region thereby reducing the effective thickness of the semiconductor, and resulting in enhanced transistor performance. Simulations and experimental results show improvements in the threshold voltage, the current ratio, and the output resistance of a dual gate transistor, when compared to those in an OFET of the same thickness. The transistors introduced in this work demonstrate means of improving the performance of thick-film OFETs and of achieving substantially lower operation voltage in organic transistors.Applied Science, Faculty ofElectrical and Computer Engineering, Department ofGraduat

A novel one-base station hybrid positioning method

In wireless networks, the need for accurate and low complexity localization methods are growing. Although many positioning methods based on signals' time difference of arrival (TDOA) and angle of arrival (AOA) have been proposed, these methods require multiple base stations (BS) and calculations with high complexity. Furthermore, the distance between a target and the BSs are usually larger than the distance between different BSs, which causes geometric dilution of precision (GDP) problem. To circumvent these issues, we propose a novel and linear method for positioning by only one BS. Our method uses both AOA and TDOA of incoming signals and called 'positioning using one BS (PuOB)'. In this method, we take measurements from one BS at different time instances instead of taking measurements from multiple BSs simultaneously. The ability to estimate the mobile transmitter position accurately by using one BS is the highlighted advantage of the PuOB over the conventional methods. The positioning accuracy of PuOB for different BS numbers are presented. According to simulation results, PuOB outperforms TDOA and AOA methods using three and two BSs, respectively

Solar cells having internal energy storage capacity

In one embodiment, a solar cell having internal storage capacity includes a working electrode, a counter electrode, an electrolyte provided between the electrodes, and a composite layer of material applied to an inner side of the working electrode, the layer comprising a photosensitive dye and a conducting polymer, wherein the conducting polymer is capable of storing energy generated within the cell

Bio-Phototransistors with Immobilized Photosynthetic Proteins

The efficient mechanism of light capture by photosynthetic proteins allows for energy transfer and conversion to electrochemical energy at very low light intensities. In this work, reaction center (RC) proteins, or a core complex consisting of the RC encircled by light harvesting (LH1) proteins (RC-LH1) from photosynthetic bacteria, were immobilized on an insulating layer of an ion-sensitive field-effect transistor (ISFET) to build bio-photodetectors. The orientation of the RC proteins was controlled via application of a hybrid linker made of 10-carboxydecylphosphonic acid and cytochrome c that anchored the RCs to their electron donor side. Bio-phototransistors consisting of either the core RC or the RC-LH1 core complex were tested under white and monochromic light. The difference between the dark and light currents at different wavelengths are well-matched with the absorption spectrum of the photosynthetic proteins. The results show potential for the use of photosynthetic proteins in photodetectors