Africa
England vs Senegal predictions: World Cup 2022
Former winners England will take on African champions Senegal in the second knockout match on Sunday. Despite star player Sadio Mane's absence, Senegal have been impressive in the World Cup. The Lions of Teranga have scored five goals this tournament and finished behind leaders Netherlands in Group A. England sit on top of the tournament scoring charts with nine goals and finished top of Group B. Kashef, our artificial intelligence (AI) robot, has analysed more than 200 metrics, including the number of wins, goals scored and FIFA rankings, from matches played over the past century to see who is most likely to win. Prediction: England and Senegal have never met. However, based on comparable performance metrics, Kashef has given England, ranked fifth, a 68 percent chance of beating Senegal, ranked 18th.
Constructing Highly Inductive Contexts for Dialogue Safety through Controllable Reverse Generation
Zhang, Zhexin, Cheng, Jiale, Sun, Hao, Deng, Jiawen, Mi, Fei, Wang, Yasheng, Shang, Lifeng, Huang, Minlie
Large pretrained language models can easily produce toxic or biased content, which is prohibitive for practical use. In order to detect such toxic generations, existing methods rely on templates, real-world data extraction, crowdsourcing workers, or automatic generation to construct adversarial contexts that are likely to induce toxic generations. However, what type of context is more likely to induce unsafe responses is still under-explored. In this paper, we identify that context toxicity and context category (e.g., \textit{profanity}, \textit{insult}, \textit{drugs}, etc.) are two important factors to cause safety issues in response generation. Hence, we propose a method called \emph{reverse generation} to construct adversarial contexts conditioned on a given response, with the flexibility to control category, toxicity level, and inductivity of the generated contexts. Via reverse generation, we augment the existing BAD dataset and construct a new dataset BAD+ which contains more than 120K diverse and highly inductive contexts in 12 categories. We test three popular pretrained dialogue models (Blender, DialoGPT, and Plato2) and find that BAD+ can largely expose their safety problems. Furthermore, we show that BAD+ can greatly enhance the safety of generation and reveal the key factors of safety improvement. Our code and dataset is available at \url{https://github.com/thu-coai/Reverse_Generation}.
Design of an All-Purpose Terrace Farming Robot
Mohta, Vibhakar, Patnaik, Adarsh, Panda, Shivam Kumar, Krishnan, Siva Vignesh, Gupta, Abhinav, Shukla, Abhay, Wadhwa, Gauri, Verma, Shrey, Bandopadhyay, Aditya
Automation in farming processes is a growing field of research in both academia and industries. A considerable amount of work has been put into this field to develop systems robust enough for farming. Terrace farming, in particular, provides a varying set of challenges, including robust stair climbing methods and stable navigation in unstructured terrains. We propose the design of a novel autonomous terrace farming robot, Aarohi, that can effectively climb steep terraces of considerable heights and execute several farming operations. The design optimisation strategy for the overall mechanical structure is elucidated. Further, the embedded and software architecture along with fail-safe strategies are presented for a working prototype. Algorithms for autonomous traversal over the terrace steps using the scissor lift mechanism and performing various farming operations have also been discussed. The adaptability of the design to specific operational requirements and modular farm tools allow Aarohi to be customised for a wide variety of use cases.
Retrieval as Attention: End-to-end Learning of Retrieval and Reading within a Single Transformer
Jiang, Zhengbao, Gao, Luyu, Araki, Jun, Ding, Haibo, Wang, Zhiruo, Callan, Jamie, Neubig, Graham
Systems for knowledge-intensive tasks such as open-domain question answering (QA) usually consist of two stages: efficient retrieval of relevant documents from a large corpus and detailed reading of the selected documents to generate answers. Retrievers and readers are usually modeled separately, which necessitates a cumbersome implementation and is hard to train and adapt in an end-to-end fashion. In this paper, we revisit this design and eschew the separate architecture and training in favor of a single Transformer that performs Retrieval as Attention (ReAtt), and end-to-end training solely based on supervision from the end QA task. We demonstrate for the first time that a single model trained end-to-end can achieve both competitive retrieval and QA performance, matching or slightly outperforming state-of-the-art separately trained retrievers and readers. Moreover, end-to-end adaptation significantly boosts its performance on out-of-domain datasets in both supervised and unsupervised settings, making our model a simple and adaptable solution for knowledge-intensive tasks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/jzbjyb/ReAtt.
An LSTM model for Twitter Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis on social media such as Twitter provides organizations and individuals an effective way to monitor public emotions towards them and their competitors. As a result, sentiment analysis has become an important and challenging task. In this work, we have collected seven publicly available and manually annotated twitter sentiment datasets. We create a new training and testing dataset from the collected datasets. We develop an LSTM model to classify sentiment of a tweet and evaluate the model with the new dataset.
Israel launches $17m self-driving public bus project - Al-Monitor: Independent, trusted coverage of the Middle East
Four consortia of international and Israeli companies have been chosen to operate a two-year pilot program to test autonomous public transportation in Israel. The Nov. 7 announcement by the Transportation Ministry and the Israel Innovation Authority follows a call for proposals issued in September 2021. In additional to Israel, the consortia includes companies from France, the U.S., Turkey and Noway. The first phase of the NIS61 million ($17.75 million) pilot will consist of experiments at test and operational sites, while the second will be conducted under a temporary license along public transportation lanes. The pilot follows Knesset legislation approved in March 2022 to develop a knowledge base regarding the safety of independent vehicles.
Internship - Data Science (For Current Students) at Visa - Johannesburg, South Africa
As the world's leader in digital payments technology, Visa's mission is to connect the world through the most creative, reliable and secure payment network - enabling individuals, businesses, and economies to thrive. Our advanced global processing network, VisaNet, provides secure and reliable payments around the world, and is capable of handling more than 65,000 transaction messages a second. The company's dedication to innovation drives the rapid growth of connected commerce on any device, and fuels the dream of a cashless future for everyone, everywhere. As the world moves from analog to digital, Visa is applying our brand, products, people, network and scale to reshape the future of commerce. At Visa, your individuality fits right in.
Head, Data Engineering at Standard Bank Group - Johannesburg, South Africa
Standard Bank Group is a leading Africa-focused financial services group, and an innovative player on the global stage, that offers a variety of career-enhancing opportunities – plus the chance to work alongside some of the sector's most talented, motivated professionals. Our clients range from individuals, to businesses of all sizes, high net worth families and large multinational corporates and institutions. Bringing true, meaningful value to our clients and the communities we serve and creating a real sense of purpose for you. To own and account for a large application platform or a collection of application platforms that deliver a capability/service. To deliver deep specialist technical expertise, leadership in the design, build, securing, monitoring of data pipelines and data stores to applicable architecture, solution designs, standards, and governance requirements.
End-to-End Neural Discourse Deixis Resolution in Dialogue
We adapt Lee et al.'s (2018) span-based entity coreference model to the task of end-to-end discourse deixis resolution in dialogue, specifically by proposing extensions to their model that exploit task-specific characteristics. The resulting model, dd-utt, achieves state-of-the-art results on the four datasets in the CODI-CRAC 2021 shared task.
Quantum Federated Learning with Entanglement Controlled Circuits and Superposition Coding
Yun, Won Joon, Kim, Jae Pyoung, Baek, Hankyul, Jung, Soyi, Park, Jihong, Bennis, Mehdi, Kim, Joongheon
While witnessing the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era and beyond, quantum federated learning (QFL) has recently become an emerging field of study. In QFL, each quantum computer or device locally trains its quantum neural network (QNN) with trainable gates, and communicates only these gate parameters over classical channels, without costly quantum communications. Towards enabling QFL under various channel conditions, in this article we develop a depth-controllable architecture of entangled slimmable quantum neural networks (eSQNNs), and propose an entangled slimmable QFL (eSQFL) that communicates the superposition-coded parameters of eS-QNNs. Compared to the existing depth-fixed QNNs, training the depth-controllable eSQNN architecture is more challenging due to high entanglement entropy and inter-depth interference, which are mitigated by introducing entanglement controlled universal (CU) gates and an inplace fidelity distillation (IPFD) regularizer penalizing inter-depth quantum state differences, respectively. Furthermore, we optimize the superposition coding power allocation by deriving and minimizing the convergence bound of eSQFL. In an image classification task, extensive simulations corroborate the effectiveness of eSQFL in terms of prediction accuracy, fidelity, and entropy compared to Vanilla QFL as well as under different channel conditions and various data distributions.