Africa
Robot Artist Freed By Egyptian Customs After Spy Detention
A British-built robot that uses artificial intelligence and a mechanical arm to create art has been released by customs officials in Egypt ahead of an exhibition this week. Ai-Da, named after the mathematician Ada Lovelace, was seized by officials earlier this month over concerns "her" machinery could contain espionage tools. The device was held for 10 days as the British embassy worked with Cairo on the matter. "The Embassy is glad to see that Ai-Da the artist robot has now been cleared through customs," the UK's embassy in Cairo said in a statement. "Customs clearance procedures can be lengthy, and are required before importation of any artworks or IT equipment."
Artificial Intelligence Has Found an Unknown 'Ghost' Ancestor in The Human Genome
Nobody knows who she was, just that she was different: a teenage girl from over 50,000 years ago of such strange uniqueness she looked to be a'hybrid' ancestor to modern humans that scientists had never seen before. Only recently, researchers have uncovered evidence she wasn't alone. In a 2019 study analysing the complex mess of humanity's prehistory, scientists used artificial intelligence (AI) to identify an unknown human ancestor species that modern humans encountered โ and shared dalliances with โ on the long trek out of Africa millennia ago. "About 80,000 years ago, the so-called Out of Africa occurred, when part of the human population, which already consisted of modern humans, abandoned the African continent and migrated to other continents, giving rise to all the current populations", explained evolutionary biologist Jaume Bertranpetit from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain. As modern humans forged this path into the landmass of Eurasia, they forged some other things too โ breeding with ancient and extinct hominids from other species. Up until recently, these occasional sexual partners were thought to include Neanderthals and Denisovans, the latter of which were unknown until 2010.
Generating Watermarked Adversarial Texts
Li, Mingjie, Wu, Hanzhou, Zhang, Xinpeng
Adversarial example generation has been a hot spot in recent years because it can cause deep neural networks (DNNs) to misclassify the generated adversarial examples, which reveals the vulnerability of DNNs, motivating us to find good solutions to improve the robustness of DNN models. Due to the extensiveness and high liquidity of natural language over the social networks, various natural language based adversarial attack algorithms have been proposed in the literature. These algorithms generate adversarial text examples with high semantic quality. However, the generated adversarial text examples may be maliciously or illegally used. In order to tackle with this problem, we present a general framework for generating watermarked adversarial text examples. For each word in a given text, a set of candidate words are determined to ensure that all the words in the set can be used to either carry secret bits or facilitate the construction of adversarial example. By applying a word-level adversarial text generation algorithm, the watermarked adversarial text example can be finally generated. Experiments show that the adversarial text examples generated by the proposed method not only successfully fool advanced DNN models, but also carry a watermark that can effectively verify the ownership and trace the source of the adversarial examples. Moreover, the watermark can still survive after attacked with adversarial example generation algorithms, which has shown the applicability and superiority.
Applications and Techniques for Fast Machine Learning in Science
Deiana, Allison McCarn, Tran, Nhan, Agar, Joshua, Blott, Michaela, Di Guglielmo, Giuseppe, Duarte, Javier, Harris, Philip, Hauck, Scott, Liu, Mia, Neubauer, Mark S., Ngadiuba, Jennifer, Ogrenci-Memik, Seda, Pierini, Maurizio, Aarrestad, Thea, Bahr, Steffen, Becker, Jurgen, Berthold, Anne-Sophie, Bonventre, Richard J., Bravo, Tomas E. Muller, Diefenthaler, Markus, Dong, Zhen, Fritzsche, Nick, Gholami, Amir, Govorkova, Ekaterina, Hazelwood, Kyle J, Herwig, Christian, Khan, Babar, Kim, Sehoon, Klijnsma, Thomas, Liu, Yaling, Lo, Kin Ho, Nguyen, Tri, Pezzullo, Gianantonio, Rasoulinezhad, Seyedramin, Rivera, Ryan A., Scholberg, Kate, Selig, Justin, Sen, Sougata, Strukov, Dmitri, Tang, William, Thais, Savannah, Unger, Kai Lukas, Vilalta, Ricardo, Krosigk, Belinavon, Warburton, Thomas K., Flechas, Maria Acosta, Aportela, Anthony, Calvet, Thomas, Cristella, Leonardo, Diaz, Daniel, Doglioni, Caterina, Galati, Maria Domenica, Khoda, Elham E, Fahim, Farah, Giri, Davide, Hawks, Benjamin, Hoang, Duc, Holzman, Burt, Hsu, Shih-Chieh, Jindariani, Sergo, Johnson, Iris, Kansal, Raghav, Kastner, Ryan, Katsavounidis, Erik, Krupa, Jeffrey, Li, Pan, Madireddy, Sandeep, Marx, Ethan, McCormack, Patrick, Meza, Andres, Mitrevski, Jovan, Mohammed, Mohammed Attia, Mokhtar, Farouk, Moreno, Eric, Nagu, Srishti, Narayan, Rohin, Palladino, Noah, Que, Zhiqiang, Park, Sang Eon, Ramamoorthy, Subramanian, Rankin, Dylan, Rothman, Simon, Sharma, Ashish, Summers, Sioni, Vischia, Pietro, Vlimant, Jean-Roch, Weng, Olivia
In this community review report, we discuss applications and techniques for fast machine learning (ML) in science -- the concept of integrating power ML methods into the real-time experimental data processing loop to accelerate scientific discovery. The material for the report builds on two workshops held by the Fast ML for Science community and covers three main areas: applications for fast ML across a number of scientific domains; techniques for training and implementing performant and resource-efficient ML algorithms; and computing architectures, platforms, and technologies for deploying these algorithms. We also present overlapping challenges across the multiple scientific domains where common solutions can be found. This community report is intended to give plenty of examples and inspiration for scientific discovery through integrated and accelerated ML solutions. This is followed by a high-level overview and organization of technical advances, including an abundance of pointers to source material, which can enable these breakthroughs.
Neural ODE and DAE Modules for Power System Dynamic Modeling
Xiao, Tannan, Chen, Ying, He, Tirui, Guan, Huizhe
The time-domain simulation is the fundamental tool for power system transient stability analysis. Accurate and reliable simulations rely on accurate dynamic component modeling. In practical power systems, dynamic component modeling has long faced the challenges of model determination and model calibration, especially with the rapid development of renewable generation and power electronics. In this paper, based on the general framework of neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs), a modified neural ODE module and a neural differential-algebraic equations (DAEs) module for power system dynamic component modeling are proposed. The modules adopt an autoencoder to raise the dimension of state variables, model the dynamics of components with artificial neural networks (ANNs), and keep the numerical integration structure. In the neural DAE module, an additional ANN is used to calculate injection currents. The neural models can be easily integrated into time-domain simulations. With datasets consisting of sampled curves of input variables and output variables, the proposed modules can be used to fulfill the tasks of parameter inference, physics-data-integrated modeling, black-box modeling, etc., and can be easily integrated into power system dynamic simulations. Some simple numerical tests are carried out in the IEEE-39 system and prove the validity and potentiality of the proposed modules.
SSMF: Shifting Seasonal Matrix Factorization
Kawabata, Koki, Bhatia, Siddharth, Liu, Rui, Wadhwa, Mohit, Hooi, Bryan
Given taxi-ride counts information between departure and destination locations, how can we forecast their future demands? In general, given a data stream of events with seasonal patterns that innovate over time, how can we effectively and efficiently forecast future events? In this paper, we propose Shifting Seasonal Matrix Factorization approach, namely SSMF, that can adaptively learn multiple seasonal patterns (called regimes), as well as switching between them. Our proposed method has the following properties: (a) it accurately forecasts future events by detecting regime shifts in seasonal patterns as the data stream evolves; (b) it works in an online setting, i.e., processes each observation in constant time and memory; (c) it effectively realizes regime shifts without human intervention by using a lossless data compression scheme. We demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods by accurately forecasting upcoming events on three real-world data streams.
SciCap: Generating Captions for Scientific Figures
Hsu, Ting-Yao, Giles, C. Lee, Huang, Ting-Hao 'Kenneth'
Researchers use figures to communicate rich, complex information in scientific papers. The captions of these figures are critical to conveying effective messages. However, low-quality figure captions commonly occur in scientific articles and may decrease understanding. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end neural framework to automatically generate informative, high-quality captions for scientific figures. To this end, we introduce SCICAP, a large-scale figure-caption dataset based on computer science arXiv papers published between 2010 and 2020. After pre-processing - including figure-type classification, sub-figure identification, text normalization, and caption text selection - SCICAP contained more than two million figures extracted from over 290,000 papers. We then established baseline models that caption graph plots, the dominant (19.2%) figure type. The experimental results showed both opportunities and steep challenges of generating captions for scientific figures.
Generative Adversarial Graph Convolutional Networks for Human Action Synthesis
Degardin, Bruno, Neves, Joรฃo, Lopes, Vasco, Brito, Joรฃo, Yaghoubi, Ehsan, Proenรงa, Hugo
Synthesising the spatial and temporal dynamics of the human body skeleton remains a challenging task, not only in terms of the quality of the generated shapes, but also of their diversity, particularly to synthesise realistic body movements of a specific action (action conditioning). In this paper, we propose Kinetic-GAN, a novel architecture that leverages the benefits of Generative Adversarial Networks and Graph Convolutional Networks to synthesise the kinetics of the human body. The proposed adversarial architecture can condition up to 120 different actions over local and global body movements while improving sample quality and diversity through latent space disentanglement and stochastic variations. Our experiments were carried out in three well-known datasets, where Kinetic-GAN notably surpasses the state-of-the-art methods in terms of distribution quality metrics while having the Figure 1: Synthetic set of actions generated by our graph ability to synthesise more than one order of magnitude regarding convolutional generator trained on NTU RGB D [32] (first the number of different actions.
Applying Regression Conformal Prediction with Nearest Neighbors to time series data
Tajmouati, Samya, Wahbi, Bouazza El, Dakkoun, Mohammed
In this paper, we apply conformal prediction to time series data. Conformal prediction isa method that produces predictive regions given a confidence level. The regions outputs arealways valid under the exchangeability assumption. However, this assumption does not holdfor the time series data because there is a link among past, current, and future observations.Consequently, the challenge of applying conformal predictors to the problem of time seriesdata lies in the fact that observations of a time series are dependent and therefore do notmeet the exchangeability assumption. This paper aims to present a way of constructingreliable prediction intervals by using conformal predictors in the context of time series. Weuse the nearest neighbors method based on the fast parameters tuning technique in theweighted nearest neighbors (FPTO-WNN) approach as the underlying algorithm. Dataanalysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Top 10 Amazing Python Developers to Follow in 2021
Python is one of the most widely used programming languages in the world, and for good reason. Because of its vast libraries and flexible structure, it's simple to learn, has consistent and easy-to-parse syntax, and is utilized for artificial intelligence applications. The platform's spectacular ascent has sparked a devoted community, fueled in no little part by its adoption by big companies such as DropBox, Reddit, and Instagram, to name a few. Check out this list of Python developers to follow if you're seeking Python programmers who are leading the charge. The people on this list have solid technical credentials, are constantly adding new and interesting features to the platform, and have a strong social media presence.