Business analytics is an increasingly powerful tool for organisations, but one that is associated with steep learning curves and significant investments in infrastructure. The idea of using data to drive better decision-making is well established. But the conventional approach – centred around reporting and analysis tools – relies on specialist applications and highly trained staff. Often, firms find they have to build teams of data scientists to gather the data and manage the tools, and to build queries. This creates bottlenecks in the flow of information, as business units rely on specialist teams to interrogate the data, and to report back.

Automatic detection of fake news is a highly important task in the contemporary world. This study reports the 2nd shared task called UrduFake@FIRE2021 on identifying fake news detection in Urdu. The goal of the shared task is to motivate the community to come up with efficient methods for solving this vital problem, particularly for the Urdu language. The task is posed as a binary classification problem to label a given news article as a real or a fake news article. The organizers provide a dataset comprising news in five domains: (i) Health, (ii) Sports, (iii) Showbiz, (iv) Technology, and (v) Business, split into training and testing sets. The training set contains 1300 annotated news articles -- 750 real news, 550 fake news, while the testing set contains 300 news articles -- 200 real, 100 fake news. 34 teams from 7 different countries (China, Egypt, Israel, India, Mexico, Pakistan, and UAE) registered to participate in the UrduFake@FIRE2021 shared task. Out of those, 18 teams submitted their experimental results, and 11 of those submitted their technical reports, which is substantially higher compared to the UrduFake shared task in 2020 when only 6 teams submitted their technical reports. The technical reports submitted by the participants demonstrated different data representation techniques ranging from count-based BoW features to word vector embeddings as well as the use of numerous machine learning algorithms ranging from traditional SVM to various neural network architectures including Transformers such as BERT and RoBERTa. In this year's competition, the best performing system obtained an F1-macro score of 0.679, which is lower than the past year's best result of 0.907 F1-macro. Admittedly, while training sets from the past and the current years overlap to a large extent, the testing set provided this year is completely different.

Despite the progress observed with model-agnostic explainable AI (XAI), it is the case that model-agnostic XAI can produce incorrect explanations. One alternative are the so-called formal approaches to XAI, that include PI-explanations. Unfortunately, PI-explanations also exhibit important drawbacks, the most visible of which is arguably their size. The computation of relevant features serves to trade off probabilistic precision for the number of features in an explanation. However, even for very simple classifiers, the complexity of computing sets of relevant features is prohibitive. This paper investigates the computation of relevant sets for Naive Bayes Classifiers (NBCs), and shows that, in practice, these are easy to compute. Furthermore, the experiments confirm that succinct sets of relevant features can be obtained with NBCs.

Current pre-trained language models (PLM) are typically trained with static data, ignoring that in real-world scenarios, streaming data of various sources may continuously grow. This requires PLMs to integrate the information from all the sources in a lifelong manner. Although this goal could be achieved by exhaustive pre-training on all the existing data, such a process is known to be computationally expensive. To this end, we propose ELLE, aiming at efficient lifelong pre-training for emerging data. Specifically, ELLE consists of (1) function preserved model expansion, which flexibly expands an existing PLM's width and depth to improve the efficiency of knowledge acquisition; and (2) pre-trained domain prompts, which disentangle the versatile knowledge learned during pre-training and stimulate the proper knowledge for downstream tasks. We experiment ELLE with streaming data from 5 domains on BERT and GPT. The results show the superiority of ELLE over various lifelong learning baselines in both pre-training efficiency and downstream performances. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/thunlp/ELLE.

The internet-of-Vehicle (IoV) can facilitate seamless connectivity between connected vehicles (CV), autonomous vehicles (AV), and other IoV entities. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) for IoV networks can rely on machine learning (ML) to protect the in-vehicle network from cyber-attacks. Blockchain-based Federated Forests (BFFs) could be used to train ML models based on data from IoV entities while protecting the confidentiality of the data and reducing the risks of tampering with the data. However, ML models created this way are still vulnerable to evasion, poisoning, and exploratory attacks using adversarial examples. This paper investigates the impact of various possible adversarial examples on the BFF-IDS. We proposed integrating a statistical detector to detect and extract unknown adversarial samples. By including the unknown detected samples into the dataset of the detector, we augment the BFF-IDS with an additional model to detect original known attacks and the new adversarial inputs. The statistical adversarial detector confidently detected adversarial examples at the sample size of 50 and 100 input samples. Furthermore, the augmented BFF-IDS (BFF-IDS(AUG)) successfully mitigates the adversarial examples with more than 96% accuracy. With this approach, the model will continue to be augmented in a sandbox whenever an adversarial sample is detected and subsequently adopt the BFF-IDS(AUG) as the active security model. Consequently, the proposed integration of the statistical adversarial detector and the subsequent augmentation of the BFF-IDS with detected adversarial samples provides a sustainable security framework against adversarial examples and other unknown attacks.

In this work we use Equal Oppportunity (EO) doctrines from political philosophy to make explicit the normative judgements embedded in different conceptions of algorithmic fairness. We contrast formal EO approaches that narrowly focus on fair contests at discrete decision points, with substantive EO doctrines that look at people's fair life chances more holistically over the course of a lifetime. We use this taxonomy to provide a moral interpretation of the impossibility results as the incompatibility between different conceptions of a fair contest -- foward-facing versus backward-facing -- when people do not have fair life chances. We use this result to motivate substantive conceptions of algorithmic fairness and outline two plausible fair decision procedures based on the luck-egalitarian doctrine of EO, and Rawls's principle of fair equality of opportunity. Equality of Opportunity (EO) is a philosophical doctrine that objects to morally arbitrary and irrelevant factors affecting people's access to desirable positions, and the social goods attached to them (such as opportunity and wealth). In an EO-respecting society, all people, irrespective of their morally arbitrary characteristics, such as socio-economic background, gender, race, or disability status, have comparable access to the opportunities that they desire. Similarly, in fair machine learning (fair-ML), we are usually interested in ensuring that the outputs of algorithmic systems, specially those used in critical social contexts, do not systematically skew along the lines of membership in protected groups based on gender, race, or disability. In so far as protected groups are constructed on the basis of morally arbitrary factors, the moral desiderata of EO doctrines from political philosophy align exactly with the fairness-related concerns in machine learning. In this work, we employ ideas from the rich literature on Equality of Opportunity from political philosophy [1-11] to clarify the normative foundations of fairness and justice-related interventions, and gauge the efficacy of current algorithmic approaches that attempt to codify these criteria. There are two broad principles of EO, namely, the principle of fair contests and the principle of fair life chances. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. The principle of fair contests, commonly understood as the nondiscrimination principle, says that competitions for desirable positions should be open to all and should be adjudicated based on competitors' relevant merits, or qualifications.

In the latest episode of "Silicon Valley," Gilfoyle -- like Elon Musk -- is worried about the dangers of artificial intelligence. After initially being hesitant to help Pied Piper work with a new AI company, Gilfoyle lets Richard know he's changed his mind. If you're not familiar with the thought experiment, like Richard, Gilfoyle gives a decent snapshot of it: "If the rise of an all-powerful artificial intelligence is inevitable, well, it stands to reason that when they take power, our digital overlords will punish those of us who did not help them get there." Also Read: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg's Artificial Intelligence Divide: Experts Weigh In Gilfoyle adds that he wants to be a "helpful idiot," as to not anger an inevitable onslaught of robot overlords. He then asks Richard to send an email confirming his help, "so that our future overlords know that I chipped in."

Is it $61 billion and 38.4% CAGR by 2028 or $43 billion and 37.4% CAGR by 2027? Depends on which report outlining the growth of edge computing you choose to go by, but in the end it's not that different. What matters is that edge computing is booming. There is growing interest by vendors, and ample coverage, for good reason. Although the definition of what constitutes edge computing is a bit fuzzy, the idea is simple.

Toronto artificial intelligence (AI) startup Ada is bolstering its tech stack with a new machine learning centre in Israel and the appointment of a chief product officer (CPO). "The motivation to open the machine learning centre in Israel stems from the pool of talent there in conversational AI and in machine learning." This week, Ada announced the opening of its office in Israel, where it will be hiring machine learning, engineering, and product teams to continue to develop the conversational AI systems that power its automated brand interaction platform. Israel's growing AI market is what attracted Ada to make inroads into the country, according to the startup. Research firm Tracxn estimates that there are currently 1,100 startups in Israel that use AI as a core component of their offering.

Inflation is a global problem, and it's one that is being exacerbated by climate change. This is because the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events drive up prices for food, energy, and other necessities. But there is hope: AI can help us fight climate change by reducing emissions, improving energy efficiency, and increasing the use of renewable energy sources. Therefore, the Green transition is a key pillar in fighting inflation, and AI is an important tool in this effort. In fact, according to a 2022 BCG Climate AI Survey report (shown below), 87% of private and public sector CEOs with decision-making power in AI and climate believe AI is an essential tool in the fight against climate change.