WASHINGTON, Sept. 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The growing demand for AI-powered services in the form of Application Programming Interface (API) and Software Development Kit (SDK) and the growing number of innovative start-ups are some of the factors anticipated to drive the market. The Global Market revenue was valued at USD 5.9 Billion in 2021. The Global Artificial Intelligence as a Service Market size is forecast to reach USD 52.8 Billion by 2028 and is expected to grow to exhibit a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 44.1% during the forecast period; states Vantage Market Research, in a report, titled "Artificial Intelligence as a Service Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report by Technology (Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing), by Verticals (Government, Banking Financial Services & Insurance (BFSI), Healthcare, Manufacturing, Retail, Telecommunication), by Region (North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East & Africa) - Global Industry Assessment (2016 - 2021) & Forecast (2022 - 2028)". The banking, financial services, and insurance sectors experience significant expansion during the forecast period. A significant amount of client data or transaction records are produced due to the growing digital revolution in banking and the increased use of the mobile payment, e-banking, real-time money transfers, and mobile banking applications.

The graph represents a network of 2,070 Twitter users whose tweets in the requested range contained "iot ai", or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets. The network was obtained from the NodeXL Graph Server on Wednesday, 17 August 2022 at 11:27 UTC. The requested start date was Wednesday, 17 August 2022 at 00:01 UTC and the maximum number of tweets (going backward in time) was 7,500. The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 1-day, 18-hour, 9-minute period from Monday, 15 August 2022 at 05:51 UTC to Wednesday, 17 August 2022 at 00:00 UTC. Additional tweets that were mentioned in this data set were also collected from prior time periods.

Convergint, a global leader in service-based systems integration, announced it has acquired MVP Tech, a leading UAE-based security and IT systems contractor serving private enterprises and government clients for the past two decades. The acquisition will add more than 200 colleagues to Convergint and expand the company's presence to countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Middle East. "By joining forces with Convergint, we now have the opportunity to expand our engineering-driven philosophy and to further elevate our service capabilities, for both our local and multinational customers" Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Dubai, MVP Tech has three offices across the United Arab Emirates and Iraq with near-future expansion plans into KSA. The company's diverse and multinational colleagues are comprised of 80% technical individuals with a proven industry background, managing and delivering projects with one of the largest on-the-ground workforces in the market. MVP Tech's mission is to deliver next-generation intelligence and interconnectivity across verticals such as critical infrastructure, hospitality, luxury retail and malls, and energy infrastructure.

Language identification is critical for many downstream tasks in automatic speech recognition (ASR), and is beneficial to integrate into multilingual end-to-end ASR as an additional task. In this paper, we propose to modify the structure of the cascaded-encoder-based recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T) model by integrating a per-frame language identifier (LID) predictor. RNN-T with cascaded encoders can achieve streaming ASR with low latency using first-pass decoding with no right-context, and achieve lower word error rates (WERs) using second-pass decoding with longer right-context. By leveraging such differences in the right-contexts and a streaming implementation of statistics pooling, the proposed method can achieve accurate streaming LID prediction with little extra test-time cost. Experimental results on a voice search dataset with 9 language locales shows that the proposed method achieves an average of 96.2% LID prediction accuracy and the same second-pass WER as that obtained by including oracle LID in the input.

Language is not only used to transmit neutral information; we often seek to persuade by arguing in favor of a particular view. Persuasion raises a number of challenges for classical accounts of belief updating, as information cannot be taken at face value. How should listeners account for a speaker's "hidden agenda" when incorporating new information? Here, we extend recent probabilistic models of recursive social reasoning to allow for persuasive goals and show that our model provides a pragmatic account for why weakly favorable arguments may backfire, a phenomenon known as the weak evidence effect. Critically, this model predicts a systematic relationship between belief updates and expectations about the information source: weak evidence should only backfire when speakers are expected to act under persuasive goals and prefer the strongest evidence. We introduce a simple experimental paradigm called the Stick Contest to measure the extent to which the weak evidence effect depends on speaker expectations, and show that a pragmatic listener model accounts for the empirical data better than alternative models. Our findings suggest further avenues for rational models of social reasoning to illuminate classical decision-making phenomena.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved extraordinary enhancements in various areas including the fields medical imaging and network neuroscience where they displayed a high accuracy in diagnosing challenging neurological disorders such as autism. In the face of medical data scarcity and high-privacy, training such data-hungry models remains challenging. Federated learning brings an efficient solution to this issue by allowing to train models on multiple datasets, collected independently by different hospitals, in fully data-preserving manner. Although both state-of-the-art GNNs and federated learning techniques focus on boosting classification accuracy, they overlook a critical unsolved problem: investigating the reproducibility of the most discriminative biomarkers (i.e., features) selected by the GNN models within a federated learning paradigm. Quantifying the reproducibility of a predictive medical model against perturbations of training and testing data distributions presents one of the biggest hurdles to overcome in developing translational clinical applications. To the best of our knowledge, this presents the first work investigating the reproducibility of federated GNN models with application to classifying medical imaging and brain connectivity datasets. We evaluated our framework using various GNN models trained on medical imaging and connectomic datasets. More importantly, we showed that federated learning boosts both the accuracy and reproducibility of GNN models in such medical learning tasks.

The rise of social media platforms provides an unbounded, infinitely rich source of aggregate knowledge of the world around us, both historic and real-time, from a human perspective. The greatest challenge we face is how to process and understand this raw and unstructured data, go beyond individual observations and see the "big picture"--the domain of Situation Awareness. We provide an extensive survey of Artificial Intelligence research, focusing on microblog social media data with applications to Situation Awareness, that gives the seminal work and state-of-the-art approaches across six thematic areas: Crime, Disasters, Finance, Physical Environment, Politics, and Health and Population. We provide a novel, unified methodological perspective, identify key results and challenges, and present ongoing research directions.

In detecting malicious websites, a common approach is the use of blacklists which are not exhaustive in themselves and are unable to generalize to new malicious sites. Detecting newly encountered malicious websites automatically will help reduce the vulnerability to this form of attack. In this study, we explored the use of ten machine learning models to classify malicious websites based on lexical features and understand how they generalize across datasets. Specifically, we trained, validated, and tested these models on different sets of datasets and then carried out a cross-datasets analysis. From our analysis, we found that K-Nearest Neighbor is the only model that performs consistently high across datasets. Other models such as Random Forest, Decision Trees, Logistic Regression, and Support Vector Machines also consistently outperform a baseline model of predicting every link as malicious across all metrics and datasets. Also, we found no evidence that any subset of lexical features generalizes across models or datasets. This research should be relevant to cybersecurity professionals and academic researchers as it could form the basis for real-life detection systems or further research work.

Image binarization techniques are being popularly used in enhancement of noisy and/or degraded images catering different Document Image Anlaysis (DIA) applications like word spotting, document retrieval, and OCR. Most of the existing techniques focus on feeding pixel images into the Convolution Neural Networks to accomplish document binarization, which may not produce effective results when working with compressed images that need to be processed without full decompression. Therefore in this research paper, the idea of document image binarization directly using JPEG compressed stream of document images is proposed by employing Dual Discriminator Generative Adversarial Networks (DD-GANs). Here the two discriminator networks - Global and Local work on different image ratios and use focal loss as generator loss. The proposed model has been thoroughly tested with different versions of DIBCO dataset having challenges like holes, erased or smudged ink, dust, and misplaced fibres. The model proved to be highly robust, efficient both in terms of time and space complexities, and also resulted in state-of-the-art performance in JPEG compressed domain.

Traditional intent classification models are based on a pre-defined intent set and only recognize limited in-domain (IND) intent classes. But users may input out-of-domain (OOD) queries in a practical dialogue system. Such OOD queries can provide directions for future improvement. In this paper, we define a new task, Generalized Intent Discovery (GID), which aims to extend an IND intent classifier to an open-world intent set including IND and OOD intents. We hope to simultaneously classify a set of labeled IND intent classes while discovering and recognizing new unlabeled OOD types incrementally. We construct three public datasets for different application scenarios and propose two kinds of frameworks, pipeline-based and end-to-end for future work. Further, we conduct exhaustive experiments and qualitative analysis to comprehend key challenges and provide new guidance for future GID research.