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Internship - Data Science (For Current Students) at Visa - Johannesburg, South Africa

#artificialintelligence

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

#artificialintelligence

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

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

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

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

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.


Ghana vs Uruguay, S Korea vs Portugal predictions: World Cup 2022

Al Jazeera

For the second time in this tournament, 24th-ranked Japan delivered one of the most momentous comebacks in World Cup history by defeating seventh-ranked Spain 2-1. Consequently, four-time champions Germany were eliminated at the group stage of a second straight World Cup, despite a 4-2 victory over Costa Rica. For today's first two matches, 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. Prediction: Ghana and Uruguay have met only once before, during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. After a 1-1 draw between both sides, Ghana went on to lose 2-4 in a penalty shootout.


Cameroon vs Brazil predictions: World Cup 2022

Al Jazeera

Kashef, our artificial intelligence (AI) robot, has been crunching the numbers to predict the results of each game, all the way to the finals. For today's matches, Kashef has analysed more than 200 metrics including the number of wins, goals scored, FIFA rankings and more, from matches played over the past century. Prediction: Cameroon have everything to play for to stand any chance of progressing through to the round of 16. Unfortunately for them, they will have to beat five-time World Cup champions Brazil, who have already qualified. While Kashef has given the Indomitable Lions only a five percent chance of beating Brazil, a victory is not impossible.


ViTAL: Vision-Based Terrain-Aware Locomotion for Legged Robots

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This work is on vision-based planning strategies for legged robots that separate locomotion planning into foothold selection and pose adaptation. Current pose adaptation strategies optimize the robot's body pose relative to given footholds. If these footholds are not reached, the robot may end up in a state with no reachable safe footholds. Therefore, we present a Vision-Based Terrain-Aware Locomotion (ViTAL) strategy that consists of novel pose adaptation and foothold selection algorithms. ViTAL introduces a different paradigm in pose adaptation that does not optimize the body pose relative to given footholds, but the body pose that maximizes the chances of the legs in reaching safe footholds. ViTAL plans footholds and poses based on skills that characterize the robot's capabilities and its terrain-awareness. We use the 90 kg HyQ and 140 kg HyQReal quadruped robots to validate ViTAL, and show that they are able to climb various obstacles including stairs, gaps, and rough terrains at different speeds and gaits. We compare ViTAL with a baseline strategy that selects the robot pose based on given selected footholds, and show that ViTAL outperforms the baseline.


Progress and Challenges for the Application of Machine Learning for Neglected Tropical Diseases

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) continue to affect the livelihood of individuals in countries in the Southeast Asia and Western Pacific region. These diseases have been long existing and have caused devastating health problems and economic decline to people in low- and middle-income (developing) countries. An estimated 1.7 billion of the world's population suffer one or more NTDs annually, this puts approximately one in five individuals at risk for NTDs. In addition to health and social impact, NTDs inflict significant financial burden to patients, close relatives, and are responsible for billions of dollars lost in revenue from reduced labor productivity in developing countries alone. There is an urgent need to better improve the control and eradication or elimination efforts towards NTDs. This can be achieved by utilizing machine learning tools to better the surveillance, prediction and detection program, and combat NTDs through the discovery of new therapeutics against these pathogens. This review surveys the current application of machine learning tools for NTDs and the challenges to elevate the state-of-the-art of NTDs surveillance, management, and treatment.


A Deep Learning Architecture for Passive Microwave Precipitation Retrievals using CloudSat and GPM Data

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper presents an algorithm that relies on a series of dense and deep neural networks for passive microwave retrieval of precipitation. The neural networks learn from coincidences of brightness temperatures from the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Microwave Imager (GMI) with the active precipitating retrievals from the Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR) onboard GPM as well as those from the {CloudSat} Profiling Radar (CPR). The algorithm first detects the precipitation occurrence and phase and then estimates its rate, while conditioning the results to some key ancillary information including parameters related to cloud microphysical properties. The results indicate that we can reconstruct the DPR rainfall and CPR snowfall with a detection probability of more than 0.95 while the probability of a false alarm remains below 0.08 and 0.03, respectively. Conditioned to the occurrence of precipitation, the unbiased root mean squared error in estimation of rainfall (snowfall) rate using DPR (CPR) data is less than 0.8 (0.1) mm/hr over oceans and land. Beyond methodological developments, comparing the results with ERA5 reanalysis and official GPM products demonstrates that the uncertainty in global satellite snowfall retrievals continues to be large while there is a good agreement among rainfall products. Moreover, the results indicate that CPR active snowfall data can improve passive microwave estimates of global snowfall while the current CPR rainfall retrievals should only be used for detection and not estimation of rates.


Semantics-Preserved Distortion for Personal Privacy Protection in Information Management

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Although machine learning and especially deep learning methods have played an important role in the field of information management, privacy protection is an important and concerning topic in current machine learning models. In information management field, a large number of texts containing personal information are produced by users every day. As the model training on information from users is likely to invade personal privacy, many methods have been proposed to block the learning and memorizing of the sensitive data in raw texts. In this paper, we try to do this more linguistically via distorting the text while preserving the semantics. In practice, we leverage a recently our proposed metric, Neighboring Distribution Divergence, to evaluate the semantic preservation during the distortion. Based on the metric, we propose two frameworks for semantics-preserved distortion, a generative one and a substitutive one. We conduct experiments on named entity recognition, constituency parsing, and machine reading comprehension tasks. Results from our experiments show the plausibility and efficiency of our distortion as a method for personal privacy protection. Moreover, we also evaluate the attribute attack on three privacy-related tasks in the current natural language processing field, and the results show the simplicity and effectiveness of our data-based improvement approach compared to the structural improvement approach. Further, we also investigate the effects of privacy protection in specific medical information management in this work and show that the medical information pre-training model using our approach can effectively reduce the memory of patients and symptoms, which fully demonstrates the practicality of our approach.