Publications by authors named "Andrea Ferrario"

We address an open problem in the philosophy of artificial intelligence (AI): how to justify the epistemic attitudes we have towards the trustworthiness of AI systems. The problem is important, as providing reasons to believe that AI systems are worthy of trust is key to appropriately rely on these systems in human-AI interactions. In our approach, we consider the trustworthiness of an AI as a time-relative, composite property of the system with two distinct facets.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Large language model (LLM)-powered services are gaining popularity in various applications due to their exceptional performance in many tasks, such as sentiment analysis and answering questions. Recently, research has been exploring their potential use in digital health contexts, particularly in the mental health domain. However, implementing LLM-enhanced conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) presents significant ethical, technical, and clinical challenges.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Large language models (LLMs) have now entered the realm of medical ethics. In a recent study, Balas examined the performance of GPT-4, a commercially available LLM, assessing its performance in generating responses to diverse medical ethics cases. Their findings reveal that GPT-4 demonstrates an ability to identify and articulate complex medical ethical issues, although its proficiency in encoding the depth of real-world ethical dilemmas remains an avenue for improvement.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Reminiscence is the act of recalling or telling others about relevant personal past experiences. It is an important activity for all individuals, young and old alike. In fact, reminiscence can serve different functions that can support or be detrimental to one's well-being.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In the intensive care unit, it can be challenging to determine which interventions align with the patients' preferences since patients are often incapacitated and other sources, such as advance directives and surrogate input, are integral. Managing treatment decisions in this context requires a process of shared decision-making and a keen awareness of the preference-sensitive instances over the course of treatment. The present paper examines the need for the development of preference-sensitive decision timelines, and, taking aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage as a use case, proposes a model of one such timeline to illustrate their potential form and value.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Ambiguous sensory information can lead to spontaneous alternations between perceptual states, recently shown to extend to tactile perception. The authors recently proposed a simplified form of tactile rivalry which evokes two competing percepts for a fixed difference in input amplitudes across antiphase, pulsatile stimulation of the left and right fingers. This study addresses the need for a tactile rivalry model that captures the dynamics of perceptual alternations and that incorporates the structure of the somatosensory system.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Work stress places a heavy economic and disease burden on society. Recent technological advances include digital health interventions for helping employees prevent and manage their stress at work effectively. Although such digital solutions come with an array of ethical risks, especially if they involve biomedical big data, the incorporation of employees' values in their design and deployment has been widely overlooked.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background And Objective: Work-related stress affects a large part of today's workforce and is known to have detrimental effects on physical and mental health. Continuous and unobtrusive stress detection may help prevent and reduce stress by providing personalised feedback and allowing for the development of just-in-time adaptive health interventions for stress management. Previous studies on stress detection in work environments have often struggled to adequately reflect real-world conditions in controlled laboratory experiments.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Developing spinal circuits generate patterned motor outputs while many neurons with high membrane resistances are still maturing. In the spinal cord of hatchling frog tadpoles of unknown sex, we found that the firing reliability in swimming of inhibitory interneurons with commissural and ipsilateral ascending axons was negatively correlated with their cellular membrane resistance. Further analyses showed that neurons with higher resistances had outward rectifying properties, low firing thresholds, and little delay in firing evoked by current injections.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are quickly gaining ground in healthcare and clinical decision-making. However, it is still unclear in what way AI can or should support decision-making that is based on incapacitated patients' values and goals of care, which often requires input from clinicians and loved ones. Although the use of algorithms to predict patients' most likely preferred treatment has been discussed in the medical ethics literature, no example has been realised in clinical practice.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Despite the presumed value of advance directives, research to demonstrate impact has shown mixed results. For advance directives to serve their role promoting patient autonomy, it is important that patients be informed decision makers. The capacity to make decisions depends upon understanding, appreciation, reasoning, and communication.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Relying on shared tasks and stimuli to conduct research can enhance the replicability of findings and allow a community of researchers to collect large data sets across multiple experiments. This approach is particularly relevant for experiments in spatial navigation, which often require the development of unfamiliar large-scale virtual environments to test participants. One challenge with shared platforms is that undetected technical errors, rather than being restricted to individual studies, become pervasive across many studies.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Undetectable measurable residual disease (uMRD) is achievable in patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) with the BCL2-inhibitor venetoclax alone or combined with the Bruton's tyrosine kinase inhibitor ibrutinib. This phase 2, multicenter, MRD-driven study was designed to discontinue treatment upon reaching uMRD4 (<10-4) in patients with relapsed/refractory CLL receiving venetoclax monotherapy or after the addition of ibrutinib. Primary end point of the study was proportion of uMRD4 with venetoclax ± ibrutinib.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Language use and social interactions have demonstrated a close relationship with cognitive measures. It is important to improve the understanding of language use and behavioral indicators from social context to study the early prediction of cognitive decline among healthy populations of older adults.

Objective: This study aimed at predicting an important cognitive ability, working memory, of 98 healthy older adults participating in a 4-day-long naturalistic observation study.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

How does the brain process sensory stimuli, and decide whether to initiate locomotor behaviour? To investigate this question we develop two whole body computer models of a tadpole. The "Central Nervous System" (CNS) model uses evidence from whole-cell recording to define 2300 neurons in 12 classes to study how sensory signals from the skin initiate and stop swimming. In response to skin stimulation, it generates realistic sensory pathway spiking and shows how hindbrain sensory memory populations on each side can compete to initiate reticulospinal neuron firing and start swimming.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In this paper we argue that transparency of machine learning algorithms, just as explanation, can be defined at different levels of abstraction. We criticize recent attempts to identify the explanation of black box algorithms with making their decisions (post-hoc) interpretable, focusing our discussion on counterfactual explanations. These approaches to explanation simplify the real nature of the black boxes and risk misleading the public about the normative features of a model.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In their article 'Who is afraid of black box algorithms? On the epistemological and ethical basis of trust in medical AI', Durán and Jongsma discuss the epistemic and ethical challenges raised by black box algorithms in medical practice. The opacity of black box algorithms is an obstacle to the trustworthiness of their outcomes. Moreover, the use of opaque algorithms is not normatively justified in medical practice.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In the auditory streaming paradigm, alternating sequences of pure tones can be perceived as a single galloping rhythm (integration) or as two sequences with separated low and high tones (segregation). Although studied for decades, the neural mechanisms underlining this perceptual grouping of sound remains a mystery. With the aim of identifying a plausible minimal neural circuit that captures this phenomenon, we propose a firing rate model with two periodically forced neural populations coupled by fast direct excitation and slow delayed inhibition.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF