Mining the latent intentions from large volumes of natural language inputs is a key step to help data analysts design and refine Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) for customer service and sales support. We created a flexible and scalable clustering pipeline within the Verint Intent Manager (VIM) that integrates the fine-tuning of language models, a high performing k-NN library and community detection techniques to help analysts quickly surface and organize relevant user intentions from conversational texts. The fine-tuning step is necessary because pre-trained language models cannot encode texts to efficiently surface particular clustering structures when the target texts are from an unseen domain or the clustering task is not topic detection. We describe the pipeline and demonstrate its performance and ability to scale on three real-world text mining tasks. As deployed in the VIM application, this clustering pipeline produces high quality results, improving the performance of data analysts and reducing the time it takes to surface intentions from customer service data, thereby reducing the time it takes to build and deploy IVAs in new domains.

Recently, adversarial machine learning attacks have posed serious security threats against practical audio signal classification systems, including speech recognition, speaker recognition, and music copyright detection. Previous studies have mainly focused on ensuring the effectiveness of attacking an audio signal classifier via creating a small noise-like perturbation on the original signal. It is still unclear if an attacker is able to create audio signal perturbations that can be well perceived by human beings in addition to its attack effectiveness. This is particularly important for music signals as they are carefully crafted with human-enjoyable audio characteristics. In this work, we formulate the adversarial attack against music signals as a new perception-aware attack framework, which integrates human study into adversarial attack design. Specifically, we conduct a human study to quantify the human perception with respect to a change of a music signal. We invite human participants to rate their perceived deviation based on pairs of original and perturbed music signals, and reverse-engineer the human perception process by regression analysis to predict the human-perceived deviation given a perturbed signal. The perception-aware attack is then formulated as an optimization problem that finds an optimal perturbation signal to minimize the prediction of perceived deviation from the regressed human perception model. We use the perception-aware framework to design a realistic adversarial music attack against YouTube's copyright detector. Experiments show that the perception-aware attack produces adversarial music with significantly better perceptual quality than prior work.

There is a growing interest in deep model-based architectures (DMBAs) for solving imaging inverse problems by combining physical measurement models and learned image priors specified using convolutional neural nets (CNNs). For example, well-known frameworks for systematically designing DMBAs include plug-and-play priors (PnP), deep unfolding (DU), and deep equilibrium models (DEQ). While the empirical performance and theoretical properties of DMBAs have been widely investigated, the existing work in the area has primarily focused on their performance when the desired image prior is known exactly. This work addresses the gap in the prior work by providing new theoretical and numerical insights into DMBAs under mismatched CNN priors. Mismatched priors arise naturally when there is a distribution shift between training and testing data, for example, due to test images being from a different distribution than images used for training the CNN prior. They also arise when the CNN prior used for inference is an approximation of some desired statistical estimator (MAP or MMSE). Our theoretical analysis provides explicit error bounds on the solution due to the mismatched CNN priors under a set of clearly specified assumptions. Our numerical results compare the empirical performance of DMBAs under realistic distribution shifts and approximate statistical estimators.

Over the years, the separate fields of motion planning, mapping, and human trajectory prediction have advanced considerably. However, the literature is still sparse in providing practical frameworks that enable mobile manipulators to perform whole-body movements and account for the predicted motion of moving obstacles. Previous optimisation-based motion planning approaches that use distance fields have suffered from the high computational cost required to update the environment representation. We demonstrate that GPU-accelerated predicted composite distance fields significantly reduce the computation time compared to calculating distance fields from scratch. We integrate this technique with a complete motion planning and perception framework that accounts for the predicted motion of humans in dynamic environments, enabling reactive and pre-emptive motion planning that incorporates predicted motions. To achieve this, we propose and implement a novel human trajectory prediction method that combines intention recognition with trajectory optimisation-based motion planning. We validate our resultant framework on a real-world Toyota Human Support Robot (HSR) using live RGB-D sensor data from the onboard camera. In addition to providing analysis on a publicly available dataset, we release the Oxford Indoor Human Motion (Oxford-IHM) dataset and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in human trajectory prediction. The Oxford-IHM dataset is a human trajectory prediction dataset in which people walk between regions of interest in an indoor environment. Both static and robot-mounted RGB-D cameras observe the people while tracked with a motion-capture system.

Dr. Shaoshan Liu is CEO and founder of PerceptIn, an intelligent robotics company. Although the world has witnessed tremendous economic growth and technological advancements in the past few decades, today there are still over 600 million people living in extreme poverty. Most of these people live in the least developed countries (LDCs), and while regular visits to our family doctors have become a routine in our daily lives, people who live in LDCs have very limited or even no access to healthcare. When we examine the details of healthcare expenditure data, the numbers are staggering: Developed countries (e.g., the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD countries) such as the U.S. spend roughly 10% of their GDP on healthcare, yet many LDCs don't even have 5% of their GDP to spare on healthcare. Realizing the seriousness of this problem, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG 3) has declared a universal health goal to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all by 2030.

Technology-as-a-service (TaaS) firm OneConnect Financial Technology has launched an all-in-one digital banking solution, OneCosmo. The solution has been jointly developed with Brazil-based fintech Pismo, with which OneConnect entered into a strategic partnership in April this year. The platform leverages artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and blockchain to form a "highly scalable" and integrated solution for banks and fintechs looking to build digital banking capabilities. OneCosmo offers digital identity verification, core banking, digital payments and digital lending capabilities and allows for integration with third-party services thanks to "highly flexible" APIs and microservices. The platform will also enable financial institutions to leverage real-time data streaming, allowing for greater insight into consumer behaviour through data analysis.

If you're seeing something long and challenging, remember that having an alcoholic drink beforehand is asking for trouble. So be sure to do it. Decorate a room as if you're a set designer, letting your imagination run wild. As William Morris said, bin whatever isn't useful or beautiful. Study your favourite standup and learn their best joke off by heart. It's not just about making your friends laugh: comedy teaches confidence and communication. From Evan Hansen to Alexander Hamilton to Mary Poppins, find a character whose feelings mirror yours – then unleash that emotion. Improvisation isn't just some zany thing comedians do on telly. It's a philosophy, as Pippa Evans' recent book Improv Your Life shows. When you're thrown a curveball, deviate from your standard script.

Electromagnetic (EM) imaging is widely applied in sensing for security, biomedicine, geophysics, and various industries. It is an ill-posed inverse problem whose solution is usually computationally expensive. Machine learning (ML) techniques and especially deep learning (DL) show potential in fast and accurate imaging. However, the high performance of purely data-driven approaches relies on constructing a training set that is statistically consistent with practical scenarios, which is often not possible in EM imaging tasks. Consequently, generalizability becomes a major concern. On the other hand, physical principles underlie EM phenomena and provide baselines for current imaging techniques. To benefit from prior knowledge in big data and the theoretical constraint of physical laws, physics embedded ML methods for EM imaging have become the focus of a large body of recent work. This article surveys various schemes to incorporate physics in learning-based EM imaging. We first introduce background on EM imaging and basic formulations of the inverse problem. We then focus on three types of strategies combining physics and ML for linear and nonlinear imaging and discuss their advantages and limitations. Finally, we conclude with open challenges and possible ways forward in this fast-developing field. Our aim is to facilitate the study of intelligent EM imaging methods that will be efficient, interpretable and controllable.

The 44th International Conference on Software Engineering(ICSE 2022) was held in person from May 22 to May 27, 2022 in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Since ICSE was held as a solely virtual conference for the last two years, the opportunity to interact with other members of the software engineering community in person and to engage in insightful discussions in a physical room was greatly welcomed. Each day was organized into paper sessions, poster sessions, and Birds of a Feather(BoF) sessions, in addition to plenty of time for networking. Each paper session consisted of around 6-10 5 minute talks and time for questions for the authors. The Birds of a Feather sessions allowed for a broader discussion on a topic; the sessions varied in terms of topics and format. In this document, we summarize themes of research that we observed at the conference.

Social media marketing plays a vital role in promoting brand and product values to wide audiences. In order to boost their advertising revenues, global media buying platforms such as Facebook Ads constantly reduce the reach of branded organic posts, pushing brands to spend more on paid media ads. In order to run organic and paid social media marketing efficiently, it is necessary to understand the audience, tailoring the content to fit their interests and online behaviours, which is impossible to do manually at a large scale. At the same time, various personality type categorization schemes such as the Myers-Briggs Personality Type indicator make it possible to reveal the dependencies between personality traits and user content preferences on a wider scale by categorizing audience behaviours in a unified and structured manner. This problem is yet to be studied in depth by the research community, while the level of impact of different personality traits on content recommendation accuracy has not been widely utilised and comprehensively evaluated so far. Specifically, in this work we investigate the impact of human personality traits on the content recommendation model by applying a novel personality-driven multi-view content recommender system called Personality Content Marketing Recommender Engine, or PersiC. Our experimental results and real-world case study demonstrate not just PersiC's ability to perform efficient human personality-driven multi-view content recommendation, but also allow for actionable digital ad strategy recommendations, which when deployed are able to improve digital advertising efficiency by over 420% as compared to the original human-guided approach.