Artificial Intelligence (AI) is growing by leaps and bounds, with estimated market size of 7.35 billion US dollars. Machine learning (ML) is a field of AI that improves our daily living in various ways. ML involves a group of algorithms that allow software systems to become more accurate and precise in predicting outcomes. Machine learning has been at the forefront of recent years due to impressive advances in computer science, statistics, the development of neural networks, and the improved quality and quantity of datasets. Here we take a deep dive into machine learning examples to give you a better perspective.

In today's China, behemoths like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. are out of favor, but "little giants" are on the rise. That's the designation for a new generation of startups that have been selected under an ambitious government program aimed at fostering a technology industry that can compete with Silicon Valley. These often-obscure companies have demonstrated they're doing something innovative and unique, and they're targeting strategically important sectors like robotics, quantum computing and semiconductors. Wu Gansha won the little giants title for his autonomous driving startup after a government review of his technology. That gave the Beijing company, Uisee, an extra dose of credibility and financial benefits.

Natural disasters ravage the world's cities, valleys, and shores on a regular basis. Deploying precise and efficient computational mechanisms for assessing infrastructure damage is essential to channel resources and minimize the loss of life. Using a dataset that includes labeled pre- and post- disaster satellite imagery, we take a machine learning-based remote sensing approach and train multiple convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to assess building damage on a per-building basis. We present a novel methodology of interpretable deep learning that seeks to explicitly investigate the most useful modalities of information in the training data to create an accurate classification model. We also investigate which loss functions best optimize these models. Our findings include that ordinal-cross entropy loss is the most optimal criterion for optimization to use and that including the type of disaster that caused the damage in combination with pre- and post-disaster training data most accurately predicts the level of damage caused. Further, we make progress in the qualitative representation of which parts of the images that the model is using to predict damage levels, through gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM). Our research seeks to computationally contribute to aiding in this ongoing and growing humanitarian crisis, heightened by anthropogenic climate change.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a result of data ownership and privacy concerns to prevent data from being shared between multiple parties included in a training procedure. Although issues, such as privacy, have gained significant attention in this domain, not much attention has been given to satisfying statistical fairness measures in the FL setting. With this goal in mind, we conduct studies to show that FL is able to satisfy different fairness metrics under different data regimes consisting of different types of clients. More specifically, uncooperative or adversarial clients might contaminate the global FL model by injecting biased or poisoned models due to existing biases in their training datasets. Those biases might be a result of imbalanced training set (Zhang and Zhou 2019), historical biases (Mehrabi et al. 2021a), or poisoned data-points from data poisoning attacks against fairness (Mehrabi et al. 2021b; Solans, Biggio, and Castillo 2020). Thus, we propose a new FL framework that is able to satisfy multiple objectives including various statistical fairness metrics. Through experimentation, we then show the effectiveness of this method comparing it with various baselines, its ability in satisfying different objectives collectively and individually, and its ability in identifying uncooperative or adversarial clients and down-weighing their effect

We present a memory-augmented approach to condition an autoregressive language model on a knowledge graph. We represent the graph as a collection of relation triples and retrieve relevant relations for a given context to improve text generation. Experiments on WikiText-103, WMT19, and enwik8 English datasets demonstrate that our approach produces a better language model in terms of perplexity and bits per character. We also show that relational memory improves coherence, is complementary to token-based memory, and enables causal interventions. Our model provides a simple yet effective way to combine an autoregressive language model with a knowledge graph for a more coherent and logical generation.

We propose a novel statistical inference paradigm for zero-inflated multiway count data that dispenses with the need to distinguish between true and false zero counts. Our approach ignores all zero entries and applies zero-truncated Poisson regression on the positive counts. Inference is accomplished via tensor completion that imposes low-rank structure on the Poisson parameter space. Our main result shows that an $N$-way rank-$R$ parametric tensor $\boldsymbol{\mathscr{M}}\in(0,\infty)^{I\times \cdots\times I}$ generating Poisson observations can be accurately estimated from approximately $IR^2\log_2^2(I)$ non-zero counts for a nonnegative canonical polyadic decomposition. Several numerical experiments are presented demonstrating that our zero-truncated paradigm is comparable to the ideal scenario where the locations of false zero counts are known a priori.

The benefits of analytics are well-documented. Analytics has helped organisations transform retail experiences, map pathways for trains and trucks, discover extraterrestrial life, and even predict diseases. However, over the past few years, organisations across the globe have wrestled with just how much human error has permeated their analytics attempts, often ending with disastrous results. From crashing spacecraft to sinking ships, transferring billions of dollars to unintended recipients, and causing deaths due to overdose of medication, human error in data analysis has far-reaching ramifications for organisations. The reason for human error in data analysis could be many, such as lack of experience, fatigue or loss of attention, lack of knowledge, or the all-too-common biases in interpreting data. However, what's common among these errors is that they are related to humans reading, processing, analysing, and interpreting data.

Background: Recently, a high number of daily positive COVID-19 cases have been reported in regions with relatively high vaccination rates; hence, booster vaccination has become necessary. In addition, infections caused by the different variants and correlated factors have not been discussed in depth. With large variabilities and different co-factors, it is difficult to use conventional mathematical models to forecast the incidence of COVID-19. Methods: Machine learning based on long short-term memory was applied to forecasting the time series of new daily positive cases (DPC), serious cases, hospitalized cases, and deaths. Data acquired from regions with high rates of vaccination, such as Israel, were blended with the current data of other regions in Japan to factor in the potential effects of vaccination. The protection provided by symptomatic infection was also considered in terms of the population effectiveness of vaccination as well as the waning protection and ratio and infectivity of viral variants. To represent changes in public behavior, public mobility and interactions through social media were also included in the analysis. Findings: Comparing the observed and estimated new DPC in Tel Aviv, Israel, the parameters characterizing vaccination effectiveness and the waning protection from infection were well estimated; the vaccination effectiveness of the second dose after 5 months and the third dose after two weeks from infection by the delta variant were 0.24 and 0.95, respectively. Using the extracted parameters regarding vaccination effectiveness, new cases in three prefectures of Japan were replicated.

Model compression methods can reduce model complexity on the premise of maintaining acceptable performance, and thus promote the application of deep neural networks under resource constrained environments. Despite their great success, the selection of suitable compression methods and design of details of the compression scheme are difficult, requiring lots of domain knowledge as support, which is not friendly to non-expert users. To make more users easily access to the model compression scheme that best meet their needs, in this paper, we propose AutoMC, an effective automatic tool for model compression. AutoMC builds the domain knowledge on model compression to deeply understand the characteristics and advantages of each compression method under different settings. In addition, it presents a progressive search strategy to efficiently explore pareto optimal compression scheme according to the learned prior knowledge combined with the historical evaluation information. Extensive experimental results show that AutoMC can provide satisfying compression schemes within short time, demonstrating the effectiveness of AutoMC.

In the realm of image processing and computer vision (CV), machine learning (ML) architectures are widely applied. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) solve a wide range of image processing issues and can solve image compression problem. Compression of images is necessary due to bandwidth and memory constraints. Helpful, redundant, and irrelevant information are three different forms of information found in images. This paper aims to survey recent techniques utilizing mostly lossy image compression using ML architectures including different auto-encoders (AEs) such as convolutional auto-encoders (CAEs), variational auto-encoders (VAEs), and AEs with hyper-prior models, recurrent neural networks (RNNs), CNNs, generative adversarial networks (GANs), principal component analysis (PCA) and fuzzy means clustering. We divide all of the algorithms into several groups based on architecture. We cover still image compression in this survey. Various discoveries for the researchers are emphasized and possible future directions for researchers. The open research problems such as out of memory (OOM), striped region distortion (SRD), aliasing, and compatibility of the frameworks with central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) simultaneously are explained. The majority of the publications in the compression domain surveyed are from the previous five years and use a variety of approaches.