AI is at play on a global stage, and local developers are stealing the show. Grassroot communities are essential to driving AI innovation, according to Kate Kallot, head of emerging areas at NVIDIA. On its opening day, Kallot gave a keynote speech at the largest AI Expo Africa to date, addressing a virtual crowd of 10,000 people. She highlighted how AI can fuel technological and creative revolutions around the world. Kallot also shared how NVIDIA supports developers in emerging markets to build and scale their AI projects, including through the NVIDIA Developer Program, which has more than 2.5 million members; the NVIDIA Inception Program, which offers go-to-market support, expertise and technology for AI, data science and HPC startups; and the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute, which offers educational resources for anyone who wants to learn about all things AI. "I hope to inspire you on ways to fuel your own applications and help advance the African AI revolution," Kallot said.

An artificial intelligence (AI) tool was able to distinguish, with great accuracy, Parkinson's patients from healthy peers by analyzing short videos of facial expressions, particularly smiles, a small study shows. The predictive accuracy of the new tool was comparable to that of video analysis that uses motor tasks to detect Parkinson's, pinpointing facial expressions as a potential digital, diagnostic biomarker of the disease. This type of biomarker could allow remote diagnosis without the need for personal interaction and extensive testing. This would be particularly relevant in situations such as a pandemic, in cases of reduced mobility, or in underdeveloped countries where few neurologists exist but most people have access to a phone with a camera, researchers noted. The study, "Facial expressions can detect Parkinson's disease: preliminary evidence from videos collected online," was published as a brief communication in the journal npj Digital Medicine.

Paraphrase generation is an important task in natural language processing. Previous works focus on sentence-level paraphrase generation, while ignoring document-level paraphrase generation, which is a more challenging and valuable task. In this paper, we explore the task of document-level paraphrase generation for the first time and focus on the inter-sentence diversity by considering sentence rewriting and reordering. We propose CoRPG (Coherence Relationship guided Paraphrase Generation), which leverages graph GRU to encode the coherence relationship graph and get the coherence-aware representation for each sentence, which can be used for re-arranging the multiple (possibly modified) input sentences. We create a pseudo document-level paraphrase dataset for training CoRPG. Automatic evaluation results show CoRPG outperforms several strong baseline models on the BERTScore and diversity scores. Human evaluation also shows our model can generate document paraphrase with more diversity and semantic preservation.

Integrating outside knowledge for reasoning in visio-linguistic tasks such as visual question answering (VQA) is an open problem. Given that pretrained language models have been shown to include world knowledge, we propose to use a unimodal (text-only) train and inference procedure based on automatic off-the-shelf captioning of images and pretrained language models. Our results on a visual question answering task which requires external knowledge (OK-VQA) show that our text-only model outperforms pretrained multimodal (image-text) models of comparable number of parameters. In contrast, our model is less effective in a standard VQA task (VQA 2.0) confirming that our text-only method is specially effective for tasks requiring external knowledge. In addition, we show that our unimodal model is complementary to multimodal models in both OK-VQA and VQA 2.0, and yield the best result to date in OK-VQA among systems not using external knowledge graphs, and comparable to systems that do use them. Our qualitative analysis on OK-VQA reveals that automatic captions often fail to capture relevant information in the images, which seems to be balanced by the better inference ability of the text-only language models. Our work opens up possibilities to further improve inference in visio-linguistic tasks.

We propose an Ontology-Based Information Extraction (OBIE) system to automate the extraction of the criteria and values applied in Land Use Suitability Analysis (LUSA) from bylaw and regulation documents related to the geographic area of interest. The results obtained by our proposed LUSA OBIE system (land use suitability criteria and their values) are presented as an ontology populated with instances of the extracted criteria and property values. This latter output ontology is incorporated into a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) model applied for constructing suitability maps for different kinds of land uses. The resulting maps may be the final desired product or can be incorporated into the cellular automata urban modeling and simulation for predicting future urban growth. A case study has been conducted where the output from LUSA OBIE is applied to help produce a suitability map for the City of Regina, Saskatchewan, to assist in the identification of suitable areas for residential development. A set of Saskatchewan bylaw and regulation documents were downloaded and input to the LUSA OBIE system. We accessed the extracted information using both the populated LUSA ontology and the set of annotated documents. In this regard, the LUSA OBIE system was effective in producing a final suitability map.

Deep Learning (DL) components are routinely integrated into software systems that need to perform complex tasks such as image or natural language processing. The adequacy of the test data used to test such systems can be assessed by their ability to expose artificially injected faults (mutations) that simulate real DL faults. In this paper, we describe an approach to automatically generate new test inputs that can be used to augment the existing test set so that its capability to detect DL mutations increases. Our tool DeepMetis implements a search based input generation strategy. To account for the non-determinism of the training and the mutation processes, our fitness function involves multiple instances of the DL model under test. Experimental results show that \tool is effective at augmenting the given test set, increasing its capability to detect mutants by 63% on average. A leave-one-out experiment shows that the augmented test set is capable of exposing unseen mutants, which simulate the occurrence of yet undetected faults.

Part of speech (POS) tagging is a familiar NLP task. State of the art taggers routinely achieve token-level accuracies of over 97% on news body text, evidence that the problem is well understood. However, the register of English news headlines, "headlinese", is very different from the register of long-form text, causing POS tagging models to underperform on headlines. In this work, we automatically annotate news headlines with POS tags by projecting predicted tags from corresponding sentences in news bodies. We train a multi-domain POS tagger on both long-form and headline text and show that joint training on both registers improves over training on just one or naively concatenating training sets. We evaluate on a newly-annotated corpus of over 5,248 English news headlines from the Google sentence compression corpus, and show that our model yields a 23% relative error reduction per token and 19% per headline. In addition, we demonstrate that better headline POS tags can improve the performance of a syntax-based open information extraction system. We make POSH, the POS-tagged Headline corpus, available to encourage research in improved NLP models for news headlines.

In this paper, deep neural network (DNN) is integrated with spatial modulation-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (SM-OFDM) technique for end-to-end data detection over Rayleigh fading channel. This proposed system directly demodulates the received symbols, leaving the channel estimation done only implicitly. Furthermore, an ensemble network is also proposed for this system. Simulation results show that the proposed DNN detection scheme has a significant advantage over classical methods when the pilot overhead and cyclic prefix (CP) are reduced, owing to its ability to learn and adjust to complicated channel conditions. Finally, the ensemble network is shown to improve the generalization of the proposed scheme, while also showing a slight improvement in its performance.

When developing new technologies, we must ensure that they operate fairly. At a time when identity is increasingly being used as the key to digital access, any technology based on identity must function fairly and equally for everyone, regardless of race, age, gender, or other characteristics leading to human physical diversity. While digital services have proliferated across many industries, this issue is particularly relevant in the financial sector, as Covid-19 accelerates a shift towards automated platforms delivered remotely by banks and other providers – with biases in AI having stark implications for unfairly rewarding certain groups over others. How does AI bias creep into machine learning models? Algorithmic decision making relies on machine learning techniques that recognise patterns from historical data.

Robotics is a fast-growing industry. A recent report from GlobalData forecasts that it will pass the $500bn mark in 2030, after a decade of double-digit annual growth. That's an impressive figure for an industry that generated global revenue of just $45bn in 2020. Most of the value generated by robotics comes from service robots, a broad category that includes consumer robots, as well as robots used in logistics, healthcare, security, and many other areas of the service sector. However, industrial robots will grow at a faster rate in the 2020s.