Africa
A Study of the Quality of Wikidata
Shenoy, Kartik, Ilievski, Filip, Garijo, Daniel, Schwabe, Daniel, Szekely, Pedro
Wikidata has been increasingly adopted by many communities for a wide variety of applications, which demand high-quality knowledge to deliver successful results. In this paper, we develop a framework to detect and analyze low-quality statements in Wikidata by shedding light on the current practices exercised by the community. We explore three indicators of data quality in Wikidata, based on: 1) community consensus on the currently recorded knowledge, assuming that statements that have been removed and not added back are implicitly agreed to be of low quality; 2) statements that have been deprecated; and 3) constraint violations in the data. We combine these indicators to detect low-quality statements, revealing challenges with duplicate entities, missing triples, violated type rules, and taxonomic distinctions. Our findings complement ongoing efforts by the Wikidata community to improve data quality, aiming to make it easier for users and editors to find and correct mistakes.
What role could AI play in the 'return to work' phase?
As organizations begin strategizing how to bring employees back to the office, employers need to not only greet employees at the door with kindness and compassion, but build compassion into the heart of their return-to-office plans. Intrinsically, I know a compassionate workplace performs better than others; I've witnessed it over the years, especially this last year where we've needed understanding and support more than ever. Research also backs this up. Recently, I've been taking a closer look at how we can do this with artificial intelligence. With almost six decades of research and work in the field, I've seen AI detect facial expressions, detect fraud, create maintenance schedules for aircrafts and cars, understand emotions of customers and customer representatives from call center conversations, and more recently estimate the spread of Covid-19 and its economic impact.
A local approach to parameter space reduction for regression and classification tasks
Romor, Francesco, Tezzele, Marco, Rozza, Gianluigi
Frequently, the parameter space, chosen for shape design or other applications that involve the definition of a surrogate model, present subdomains where the objective function of interest is highly regular or well behaved. So, it could be approximated more accurately if restricted to those subdomains and studied separately. The drawback of this approach is the possible scarcity of data in some applications, but in those, where a quantity of data, moderately abundant considering the parameter space dimension and the complexity of the objective function, is available, partitioned or local studies are beneficial. In this work we propose a new method called local active subspaces (LAS), which explores the synergies of active subspaces with supervised clustering techniques in order to perform a more efficient dimension reduction in the parameter space for the design of accurate response surfaces. We also developed a procedure to exploit the local active subspace information for classification tasks. Using this technique as a preprocessing step onto the parameter space, or output space in case of vectorial outputs, brings remarkable results for the purpose of surrogate modelling.
Neural Ordinary Differential Equation Model for Evolutionary Subspace Clustering and Its Applications
Bai, Mingyuan, Choy, S. T. Boris, Zhang, Junping, Gao, Junbin
The neural ordinary differential equation (neural ODE) model has attracted increasing attention in time series analysis for its capability to process irregular time steps, i.e., data are not observed over equally-spaced time intervals. In multi-dimensional time series analysis, a task is to conduct evolutionary subspace clustering, aiming at clustering temporal data according to their evolving low-dimensional subspace structures. Many existing methods can only process time series with regular time steps while time series are unevenly sampled in many situations such as missing data. In this paper, we propose a neural ODE model for evolutionary subspace clustering to overcome this limitation and a new objective function with subspace self-expressiveness constraint is introduced. We demonstrate that this method can not only interpolate data at any time step for the evolutionary subspace clustering task, but also achieve higher accuracy than other state-of-the-art evolutionary subspace clustering methods. Both synthetic and real-world data are used to illustrate the efficacy of our proposed method.
23% of elite rugby players have brain structure abnormalities, study finds
A highly concerning new study lays bare the danger of repeated head impacts for rugby players. After performing scans of 44 elite adult rugby players, experts found 23 per cent had abnormalities in brain structure, specifically in white matter and blood vessels of the brain. White matter mainly comprises the neural pathways, the long extensions of the nerve cells, and is crucial to our cognitive ability. The study also found 50 per cent of the rugby players had an unexpected reduction in brain volume. Non-profit the Drake Foundation, which backed the study, is now calling for immediate changes in rugby protocols to ensure long-term welfare of elite players.
Opinion
Ms. Kinstler is a doctoral candidate in rhetoric and has previously written about technology and culture. "Alexa, are we humans special among other living things?" One sunny day last June, I sat before my computer screen and posed this question to an Amazon device 800 miles away, in the Seattle home of an artificial intelligence researcher named Shanen Boettcher. But after some cajoling from Mr. Boettcher (Alexa was having trouble accessing a script that he had provided), she revised her response. "I believe that animals have souls, as do plants and even inanimate objects," she said. "But the divine essence of the human soul is what sets the human being above and apart. Mr. Boettcher, a former Microsoft general manager who is now pursuing a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and spirituality at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, asked me to rate Alexa's response on a scale from 1 to 7. I gave it a 3 -- I wasn't sure that we humans should be set "above and apart" from other ...
Artificial Intelligence: Coming Soon to a Barnyard Near You
In a recent McKinsey Future of Work podcast interview with Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott, the CTO revealed that artificial intelligence (AI) is about to go prime time and will begin showing up in the most unlikely of places – including our nation's farm fields Once a mysterious science being beta-tested by only Fortune 100 companies, AI is rapidly becoming more democratic, inclusive, and utilitarian – to even those residing in under-served communities. It's also becoming a versatile tool that can branch out to myriad market sectors, including one of our oldest – agriculture. Scott recently published a book entitled Reprogramming the American Dream: From Rural America to Silicon Valley – Making AI Serve Us All. The findings come from his personal experiences with AI being implemented to service populations in rural towns and working-class communities, rather than just hi-tech cities or corner offices. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on Microsoft's FarmBeats program – a platform that leverages AI to improve farming outcomes.
Russia unveils new 'Checkmate' stealth fighter jet at air show
Fox News correspondent Lucas Tomlinson has the details from the Pentagon on'Special Report' Russian President Vladimir Putin inspected the country's newly unveiled "Checkmate" warplane on Tuesday. The prototype of the Sukhoi fifth-generation stealth fighter was revealed at the MAKS-2021 International Aviation and Space Salon, Reuters reported. The show opened Tuesday in Zhukovsky, outside Moscow. Fifth-generation refers to the jet's stealth characteristics, a capability to cruise at supersonic speed as well as artificial intelligence to assist the pilots, among other advanced features. "What we saw in Zhukovsky today demonstrates that the Russian aviation has a big potential for development and our aircraft making industries continue to create new competitive aircraft designs," Putin said in a speech at the show.
Firms don't use artificial intelligence much, so the current hype is tripe - Workplace Insight
Many governments are increasingly approaching artificial intelligence with an almost religious zeal. By 2018 at least 22 countries around the world, and also the EU, had launched grand national strategies for making AI part of their business development, while many more had announced ethical frameworks for how it should be allowed to develop. The latest is Ireland, which has just announced its national artificial intelligence strategy, "AI – Here for Good". It aims to become "an international leader in using AI to benefit our economy and society, through a people-centred, ethical approach to its development, adoption and use". This is to be obtained via eight policy commandments, including increasing trust in and understanding of AI by using an "AI ambassador" – a veritable AI high priest – to spread the message around the country.
Nigeria to now deploy robots and artificial intelligence to fight criminals -- Senate
The Senate on Wednesday, July 14, said that the Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy has established a centre for artificial intelligence and robotics to deploy the use of robots and artificial intelligence in combating crime and criminality in Nigeria. The Senate stated this during the consideration of a report on'the spate of growing insecurity in Nigeria. The report was submitted by the Joint Committee on Legislative Compliance and Communications. The Chairman of the Joint Committee, Senator Adelere Adeyemi Oriolowo (APC, Osun West), in his presentation, said there were programmes and projects by the Ministry and its agencies to support security agencies in fighting crime. Oloriowo disclosed that a total of twenty-three Emergency Communication Centres using the 112 code have been commissioned, with an additional 12 almost ready for commissioning.