Africa
How Valencia crushed Covid with AI
When Covid-19 hit Spain last spring, the country quickly hit breaking point. In Madrid, doctors described an "avalanche" of patients as they practised "combat medicine" and emergency triage in intensive care units that were operating on a war-like footing. The first Covid-19 death was recorded on March 1. A month later, just under a thousand people were dying each day. Ambulances choked hospital approach roads and ice rinks were transformed into morgues.
Start AI in 2021 -- Become an expert from nothing, for free!
Note that there is also a repository of this article with all the resources clearly identified for you to follow in order as well. In my opinion, the best way to start learning anything is with short YouTube video introductions. This field is no exception. There are thousands of amazing videos and playlists that teach important machine learning concepts for free on this platform, and you should definitely take advantage of them. Here, I list a few of the best videos I found that will give you a great first introduction to the terms you need to know to get started in the field.
New AI system fills rifle sights with extensive, easy-to-digest info
When soldiers look through the sights of their assault rifles with the Elbit System's new artificial intelligence data platform, their view is transformed to resemble a first-person shooter video game. Shooters push buttons on a grip to toggle among layers of information about their surroundings, including motion detection, range, ammunition levels and more data that's just a click away. ARCAS, which the Israel-based company is featuring at the DSEI conference in London, incorporates a microcomputer in the weapon to process data and provide a graphical user interface to display the information in the rifle's electro-optical sight and through an optional helmet-mounted eyepiece. The demo used ARCAS systems mounted on M-4s, with testers shooting at stationary targets. The use of ideas from the gaming world is clear when putting the sight up to the eye.
Initialization for Nonnegative Matrix Factorization: a Comprehensive Review
Hafshejani, Sajad Fathi, Moaberfard, Zahra
Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has become a popular method for representing meaningful data by extracting a non-negative basis feature from an observed non-negative data matrix. Some of the unique features of this method in identifying hidden data put this method amongst the powerful methods in the machine learning area. The NMF is a known non-convex optimization problem and the initial point has a significant effect on finding an efficient local solution. In this paper, we investigate the most popular initialization procedures proposed for NMF so far. We describe each method and present some of their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, some numerical results to illustrate the performance of each algorithm are presented.
Distributionally Robust Multilingual Machine Translation
Zhou, Chunting, Levy, Daniel, Li, Xian, Ghazvininejad, Marjan, Neubig, Graham
Multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) learns to translate multiple language pairs with a single model, potentially improving both the accuracy and the memory-efficiency of deployed models. However, the heavy data imbalance between languages hinders the model from performing uniformly across language pairs. In this paper, we propose a new learning objective for MNMT based on distributionally robust optimization, which minimizes the worst-case expected loss over the set of language pairs. We further show how to practically optimize this objective for large translation corpora using an iterated best response scheme, which is both effective and incurs negligible additional computational cost compared to standard empirical risk minimization. We perform extensive experiments on three sets of languages from two datasets and show that our method consistently outperforms strong baseline methods in terms of average and per-language performance under both many-to-one and one-to-many translation settings.
Tactile Image-to-Image Disentanglement of Contact Geometry from Motion-Induced Shear
Gupta, Anupam K., Aitchison, Laurence, Lepora, Nathan F.
Robotic touch, particularly when using soft optical tactile sensors, suffers from distortion caused by motion-dependent shear. The manner in which the sensor contacts a stimulus is entangled with the tactile information about the geometry of the stimulus. In this work, we propose a supervised convolutional deep neural network model that learns to disentangle, in the latent space, the components of sensor deformations caused by contact geometry from those due to sliding-induced shear. The approach is validated by reconstructing unsheared tactile images from sheared images and showing they match unsheared tactile images collected with no sliding motion. In addition, the unsheared tactile images give a faithful reconstruction of the contact geometry that is not possible from the sheared data, and robust estimation of the contact pose that can be used for servo control sliding around various 2D shapes. Finally, the contact geometry reconstruction in conjunction with servo control sliding were used for faithful full object reconstruction of various 2D shapes. The methods have broad applicability to deep learning models for robots with a shear-sensitive sense of touch.
A brief history of AI: how to prevent another winter (a critical review)
Toosi, Amirhosein, Bottino, Andrea, Saboury, Babak, Siegel, Eliot, Rahmim, Arman
The field of artificial intelligence (AI), regarded as one of the most enigmatic areas of science, has witnessed exponential growth in the past decade including a remarkably wide array of applications, having already impacted our everyday lives. Advances in computing power and the design of sophisticated AI algorithms have enabled computers to outperform humans in a variety of tasks, especially in the areas of computer vision and speech recognition. Yet, AI's path has never been smooth, having essentially fallen apart twice in its lifetime ('winters' of AI), both after periods of popular success ('summers' of AI). We provide a brief rundown of AI's evolution over the course of decades, highlighting its crucial moments and major turning points from inception to the present. In doing so, we attempt to learn, anticipate the future, and discuss what steps may be taken to prevent another 'winter'.
Highly Parallel Autoregressive Entity Linking with Discriminative Correction
De Cao, Nicola, Aziz, Wilker, Titov, Ivan
Generative approaches have been recently shown to be effective for both Entity Disambiguation and Entity Linking (i.e., joint mention detection and disambiguation). However, the previously proposed autoregressive formulation for EL suffers from i) high computational cost due to a complex (deep) decoder, ii) non-parallelizable decoding that scales with the source sequence length, and iii) the need for training on a large amount of data. In this work, we propose a very efficient approach that parallelizes autoregressive linking across all potential mentions and relies on a shallow and efficient decoder. Moreover, we augment the generative objective with an extra discriminative component, i.e., a correction term which lets us directly optimize the generator's ranking. When taken together, these techniques tackle all the above issues: our model is >70 times faster and more accurate than the previous generative method, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches on the standard English dataset AIDA-CoNLL. Source code available at https://github.com/nicola-decao/efficient-autoregressive-EL
Investment Is On! Top 5 Tech Stocks to Buy on September 7, 2021
Major disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, IoT, and many other have helped tech companies to offer a wide range of technical products and services across the world. This has increased the demand for tech stocks among investors in these recent years. Some tech stocks are established names whereas some are rising high gradually in Industry 4.0. Analytics Insight provides a list of the top 5 tech stocks, according to Yahoo Finance. Fiverr International Ltd. is an Israel-based tech company focused on offering a platform to allow sellers and buyers in exchanging products and services.
Palindrome creates SA-first smart HIV patient and practitioner care solution
Palindrome Data, a data science implementer that specialises in alternative data and machine learning tools for community development, has created what it believes to be South Africa's first suite of digital and paper-based HIV tools backed by machine learning, designed to help frontline healthcare workers triage at-risk patients. The solution, leveraging machine learning and multiple data sources, is designed to be used in both digital and paper-based environments so that healthcare workers can identify and manage high-risk patients and relevant interventions to increase HIV treatment retention and mitigate the risk of loss to follow-up (LTFU). The solution can correctly predict a patient's viral load (suppressed versus unsuppressed) for three out of four patients; and can anticipate two out of three times when a patient will drop out of care. "The biggest obstacle facing HIV patients is dealing with an overburdened healthcare system that can't afford to take the time to deal with their unique challenges," says Lucien De Voux, director of market strategy at Palindrome Data. "There is a need to retain and engage patients in a relevant way.