Multi-model ensemble analysis integrates information from multiple climate models into a unified projection. However, existing integration approaches based on model averaging can dilute fine-scale spatial information and incur bias from rescaling low-resolution climate models. We propose a statistical approach, called NN-GPR, using Gaussian process regression (GPR) with an infinitely wide deep neural network based covariance function. NN-GPR requires no assumptions about the relationships between models, no interpolation to a common grid, no stationarity assumptions, and automatically downscales as part of its prediction algorithm. Model experiments show that NN-GPR can be highly skillful at surface temperature and precipitation forecasting by preserving geospatial signals at multiple scales and capturing inter-annual variability. Our projections particularly show improved accuracy and uncertainty quantification skill in regions of high variability, which allows us to cheaply assess tail behavior at a 0.44$^\circ$/50 km spatial resolution without a regional climate model (RCM). Evaluations on reanalysis data and SSP245 forced climate models show that NN-GPR produces similar, overall climatologies to the model ensemble while better capturing fine scale spatial patterns. Finally, we compare NN-GPR's regional predictions against two RCMs and show that NN-GPR can rival the performance of RCMs using only global model data as input.

For a subscription service business, there are two ways to drive growth: grow the number of new customers, or increase the lifetime value from the customers that you already have by retaining more of them. Improving customer retention requires the ability to predict which subscribers are likely to cancel (referred to as churn), and to intervene with the right retention offers at the right time. Recently, the use of deep learning algorithms that learn sequential product usage customer behavior to make predictions have begun to offer businesses a more powerful method to pinpoint accounts at risk. This understanding of an account's churn likelihood allows a company to proactively act to save the most valuable customers before they cancel. CSE recently partnered with the finance group of Majid Al Futtaim Ventures (MAF), a leading mall, communities, retail and leisure pioneer across the Middle East, Africa and Asia, to design and deploy a machine learning solution to predict attrition within their consumer credit card customer base. MAF sought to use their customer records – including transaction and incident history plus account profile information – to inform a predictive model.

Spatial-query-by-sketch is an intuitive tool to explore human spatial knowledge about geographic environments and to support communication with scene database queries. However, traditional sketch-based spatial search methods perform insufficiently due to their inability to find hidden multi-scale map features from mental sketches. In this research, we propose a deep convolutional neural network, namely Deep Spatial Scene Network (DeepSSN), to better assess the spatial scene similarity. In DeepSSN, a triplet loss function is designed as a comprehensive distance metric to support the similarity assessment. A positive and negative example mining strategy using qualitative constraint networks in spatial reasoning is designed to ensure a consistently increasing distinction of triplets during the training process. Moreover, we develop a prototype spatial scene search system using the proposed DeepSSN, in which the users input spatial query via sketch maps and the system can automatically augment the sketch training data. The proposed model is validated using multi-source conflated map data including 131,300 labeled scene samples after data augmentation. The empirical results demonstrate that the DeepSSN outperforms baseline methods including k-nearest-neighbors, multilayer perceptron, AlexNet, DenseNet, and ResNet using mean reciprocal rank and precision metrics. This research advances geographic information retrieval studies by introducing a novel deep learning method tailored to spatial scene queries.

Tractable Boolean and arithmetic circuits have been studied extensively in AI for over two decades now. These circuits were initially proposed as "compiled objects," meant to facilitate logical and probabilistic reasoning, as they permit various types of inference to be performed in linear-time and a feed-forward fashion like neural networks. In more recent years, the role of tractable circuits has significantly expanded as they became a computational and semantical backbone for some approaches that aim to integrate knowledge, reasoning and learning. In this article, we review the foundations of tractable circuits and some associated milestones, while focusing on their core properties and techniques that make them particularly useful for the broad aims of neuro-symbolic AI.

This paper proposes a fast and scalable method for uncertainty quantification of machine learning models' predictions. First, we show the principled way to measure the uncertainty of predictions for a classifier based on Nadaraya-Watson's nonparametric estimate of the conditional label distribution. Importantly, the approach allows to disentangle explicitly aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties. The resulting method works directly in the feature space. However, one can apply it to any neural network by considering an embedding of the data induced by the network. We demonstrate the strong performance of the method in uncertainty estimation tasks on a variety of real-world image datasets, such as MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR-100 and several versions of ImageNet.

The convenient access to copious multi-faceted data has encouraged machine learning researchers to reconsider correlation-based learning and embrace the opportunity of causality-based learning, i.e., causal machine learning (causal learning). Recent years have therefore witnessed great effort in developing causal learning algorithms aiming to help AI achieve human-level intelligence. Due to the lack-of ground-truth data, one of the biggest challenges in current causal learning research is algorithm evaluations. This largely impedes the cross-pollination of AI and causal inference, and hinders the two fields to benefit from the advances of the other. To bridge from conventional causal inference (i.e., based on statistical methods) to causal learning with big data (i.e., the intersection of causal inference and machine learning), in this survey, we review commonly-used datasets, evaluation methods, and measures for causal learning using an evaluation pipeline similar to conventional machine learning. We focus on the two fundamental causal-inference tasks and causality-aware machine learning tasks. Limitations of current evaluation procedures are also discussed. We then examine popular causal inference tools/packages and conclude with primary challenges and opportunities for benchmarking causal learning algorithms in the era of big data. The survey seeks to bring to the forefront the urgency of developing publicly available benchmarks and consensus-building standards for causal learning evaluation with observational data. In doing so, we hope to broaden the discussions and facilitate collaboration to advance the innovation and application of causal learning.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents opportunities to develop tools and techniques for addressing some of the major global challenges and deliver solutions with significant social and economic impacts. The application of AI has far-reaching implications for the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in general and sustainable urban development in particular. However, existing attempts to understand and use the opportunities offered by AI for SDG 11 have been explored sparsely, and the shortage of empirical evidence about the practical application of AI remains. In this chapter, we analyze the contribution of AI to support the progress of SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities). We address the knowledge gap by empirically analyzing the AI systems (N 29) from the AI SDG database and the Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) database. Our analysis revealed that AI systems have indeed contributed to advancing sustainable cities in several ways (e.g., waste management, air quality monitoring, disaster response management, transportation management), but many projects are still working for citizens and not with them. This snapshot of AI's impact on SDG11 is inherently partial yet useful to advance our understanding as we move towards more mature systems and research on the impact of AI systems for the social good. Introduction Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to mitigate several issues facing cities, such as road safety, waste management, air pollution, and disaster risk reduction (Gupta et al., 2021). Examples of recent AI systems for improved well-being in cities include a tool for semi-automatic digitization of sketch maps to support the inclusion of indigenous communities through the documentation of their land rights (Degbelo et al., 2021; Chipofya et al., 2020), a system for traffic monitoring based on Wireless Signals (Gupta et al., 2018), approaches for efficient waste management (Barns, 2019), air quality modelling (Gupta et al., 2018) and urban health monitoring systems (Allam and Jones, 2020).

This story was contributed to TechCabal by Conrad Onyango/bird. African governments are ramping up national strategies on the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a fresh hunt for crucial data that would help improve public service delivery and governance. AI is no longer a preserve of the private sector as Africa's public sector hops on a global trend where governments join the hunt for robust data to transform how they deliver services to an increasingly tech-savvy population. Oxford Insights in its'Government AI Readiness Index 2021,' shows governments across the continent are turning to AI to improve their public services and gain strategic economic advantages. More governments, the report says, are building up AI ecosystems-backed by national strategies to capitalize on a 10-year global boom that has seen private sector firms commercialize AI research and development.

Artificial intelligence has probably already made decisions about your life. It might have decided whether your insurance claim was accepted or rejected as fraudulent. It may have assessed your credit score, predicting if you were worthy of a loan or deemed too high risk. It could even have watched you drive, detecting if you are flouting the road rules and should be fined. And if AI hasn't already made a decision that affects your life, it almost certainly will, whether that be shaping what you see on social media or keeping tabs on you while you work from home with tracking software or some other application.

The problem of determining if a military unit has correctly understood an order and is properly executing on it is one that has bedeviled military planners throughout history. The advent of advanced language models such as OpenAI's GPT-series offers new possibilities for addressing this problem. This paper presents a mechanism to harness the narrative output of large language models and produce diagrams or "maps" of the relationships that are latent in the weights of such models as the GPT-3. The resulting "Neural Narrative Maps" (NNMs), are intended to provide insight into the organization of information, opinion, and belief in the model, which in turn provide means to understand intent and response in the context of physical distance. This paper discusses the problem of mapping information spaces in general, and then presents a concrete implementation of this concept in the context of OpenAI's GPT-3 language model for determining if a subordinate is following a commander's intent in a high-risk situation. The subordinate's locations within the NNM allow a novel capability to evaluate the intent of the subordinate with respect to the commander. We show that is is possible not only to determine if they are nearby in narrative space, but also how they are oriented, and what "trajectory" they are on. Our results show that our method is able to produce high-quality maps, and demonstrate new ways of evaluating intent more generally. N the 1979 motion picture Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard (played by Martin Sheen) is sent on a mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando), a highly decorated officer who, in the words of the general authorizing the mission, has gone from "one of the most outstanding officers this country has ever produced" to someone "out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct." The movie explores the paradoxes in war, where some illegal acts are embraced by the command structure, some tolerated, and some are to be terminated, "with extreme prejudice." Willard has to navigate these conflicts as he moves towards Kurtz' compound deep in Cambodia. Apocalypse Now provides an example of the difficulty that any intent-aware system must face in a military context [1]. Not only does the system need to determine if an order is being followed, it should also determine if the order itself is valid, so that the warriors implementing the order are not placed in ethical dilemmas. This is the goal that we attempt to address in this paper, with the concept of Neural Narrative Mapping (NNM). By placing narrative elements at coordinates in a virtual space, we can determine sophisticated relationships between concepts that go well beyond textual comparison.