New forecasts from Transforma Insights point at an explosion in the use of Artificial Intelligence for improving enterprise processes and critical systems. The devil is, as ever, in the detail, but the headline is that adoption of AI, measured in'instances' is set to grow ten-fold in the next decade. At Transforma Insights we are currently in the process of pulling together a set of forecasts of the Artificial Intelligence market, and preparing for our webinar on the 16th February. In this blog post we have a peek at the first sets of data coming from the report. We have pulled out a couple of highlights of the research to give a flavour of the granularity of the data, the topics we'll be looking at in the webinar and the key emerging themes.

Remember Skynet, the artificial intelligence that wanted to wipe out humanity in the Terminator movies? Now that is an example of AI gone wrong. Luckily, this will not be the case for us in 2022. AI today is by far not as advanced yet. But the movie does raise a couple of interesting questions.

Data Science is an exciting field for knowledge workers because it increasingly intersects with the future of how industries, society, governance and policy will function. While it's one of those vague terms thrown around a lot for students, it's actually fairly simple to define. Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge and insights from structured and unstructured data, and apply knowledge and actionable insights from data across a broad range of application domains. Data science is thus related to an explosion of Big Data and optimizing it for human progress, machine learning and AI systems. I'm not an expert in the field by any means, just a futurist analyst, and what I see is an explosion in data science jobs globally and new talent getting into the field, people who will build the companies of tomorrow. Many of those jobs will actually be in companies that do not exist yet in South and South-East Asia and China.

State-of-the-art sign language generation frameworks lack expressivity and naturalness which is the result of only focusing manual signs, neglecting the affective, grammatical and semantic functions of facial expressions. The purpose of this work is to augment semantic representation of sign language through grounding facial expressions. We study the effect of modeling the relationship between text, gloss, and facial expressions on the performance of the sign generation systems. In particular, we propose a Dual Encoder Transformer able to generate manual signs as well as facial expressions by capturing the similarities and differences found in text and sign gloss annotation. We take into consideration the role of facial muscle activity to express intensities of manual signs by being the first to employ facial action units in sign language generation. We perform a series of experiments showing that our proposed model improves the quality of automatically generated sign language.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has considerably advanced over the past decade. At the same time, state-of-the-art RL algorithms require a large computational budget in terms of training time to converge. Recent work has started to approach this problem through the lens of quantum computing, which promises theoretical speed-ups for several traditionally hard tasks. In this work, we examine a class of hybrid quantumclassical RL algorithms that we collectively refer to as variational quantum deep Q-networks (VQ-DQN). We show that VQ-DQN approaches are subject to instabilities that cause the learned policy to diverge, study the extent to which this afflicts reproduciblity of established results based on classical simulation, and perform systematic experiments to identify potential explanations for the observed instabilities. Additionally, and in contrast to most existing work on quantum reinforcement learning, we execute RL algorithms on an actual quantum processing unit (an IBM Quantum Device) and investigate differences in behaviour between simulated and physical quantum systems that suffer from implementation deficiencies. Our experiments show that, contrary to opposite claims in the literature, it cannot be conclusively decided if known quantum approaches, even if simulated without physical imperfections, can provide an advantage as compared to classical approaches. Finally, we provide a robust, universal and well-tested implementation of VQ-DQN as a reproducible testbed for future experiments.

We give exponential statistical query (SQ) lower bounds for learning two-hidden-layer ReLU networks with respect to Gaussian inputs in the standard (noise-free) model. No general SQ lower bounds were known for learning ReLU networks of any depth in this setting: previous SQ lower bounds held only for adversarial noise models (agnostic learning) or restricted models such as correlational SQ. Prior work hinted at the impossibility of our result: Vempala and Wilmes showed that general SQ lower bounds cannot apply to any real-valued family of functions that satisfies a simple non-degeneracy condition. To circumvent their result, we refine a lifting procedure due to Daniely and Vardi that reduces Boolean PAC learning problems to Gaussian ones. We show how to extend their technique to other learning models and, in many well-studied cases, obtain a more efficient reduction. As such, we also prove new cryptographic hardness results for PAC learning two-hidden-layer ReLU networks, as well as new lower bounds for learning constant-depth ReLU networks from membership queries.

The EU strikes again with a new set of regulations that take aim at the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to address the variety of risks associated with the societal adoption of AI. Like its sibling the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) actually has teeth, with fines rising to €30 million, or 6% of global revenue. Is the answer to delete all your AI systems to minimize your risk to zero, or continue using AI for a competitive edge? Can you manage the recurring costs required to maintain compliance with the AIA even as the technology itself increases your bottomline? Take the famous UK pub chain JD Wetherspoon, founded by British businessman Tim Martin in 1979 who has been an outspoken critic of the EU and a Brexit campaigner. Their response to personal identifiable information (PII) protection, legislated by the GDPR in 2017, was to delete their entire CRM database.

This article proposes an architecture, which allows the prediction of intention by internally simulating perceptual states represented by action pattern vectors. To this end, associative self-organising neural networks (A-SOM) is utilised to build a hierarchical cognitive architecture for recognition and simulation of the skeleton based human actions. The abilities of the proposed architecture in recognising and predicting actions is evaluated in experiments using three different datasets of 3D actions. Based on the experiments of this article, applying internally simulated perceptual states represented by action pattern vectors improves the performance of the recognition task in all experiments. Furthermore, internal simulation of perception addresses the problem of having limited access to the sensory input, and also the future prediction of the consecutive perceptual sequences. The performance of the system is compared and discussed with similar architecture using self-organizing neural networks (SOM).

The task of Outside Knowledge Visual Question Answering (OKVQA) requires an automatic system to answer natural language questions about pictures and images using external knowledge. We observe that many visual questions, which contain deictic referential phrases referring to entities in the image, can be rewritten as "non-grounded" questions and can be answered by existing text-based question answering systems. This allows for the reuse of existing text-based Open Domain Question Answering (QA) Systems for visual question answering. In this work, we propose a potentially data-efficient approach that reuses existing systems for (a) image analysis, (b) question rewriting, and (c) text-based question answering to answer such visual questions. Given an image and a question pertaining to that image (a visual question), we first extract the entities present in the image using pre-trained object and scene classifiers. Using these detected entities, the visual questions can be rewritten so as to be answerable by open domain QA systems. We explore two rewriting strategies: (1) an unsupervised method using BERT for masking and rewriting, and (2) a weakly supervised approach that combines adaptive rewriting and reinforcement learning techniques to use the implicit feedback from the QA system. We test our strategies on the publicly available OKVQA dataset and obtain a competitive performance with state-of-the-art models while using only 10% of the training data.

In a number of application domains, one observes a sequence of network data; for example, repeated measurements between users interactions in social media platforms, financial correlation networks over time, or across subjects, as in multi-subject studies of brain connectivity. One way to analyze such data is by stacking networks into a third-order array or tensor. We propose a principal components analysis (PCA) framework for sequence network data, based on a novel decomposition for semi-symmetric tensors. We derive efficient algorithms for computing our proposed "Coupled CP" decomposition and establish estimation consistency of our approach under an analogue of the spiked covariance model with rates the same as the matrix case up to a logarithmic term. Our framework inherits many of the strengths of classical PCA and is suitable for a wide range of unsupervised learning tasks, including identifying principal networks, isolating meaningful changepoints or outliers across observations, and for characterizing the "variability network" of the most varying edges. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal on simulated data and on examples from political science and financial economics. The proof techniques used to establish our main consistency results are surprisingly straight-forward and may find use in a variety of other matrix and tensor decomposition problems.