Africa
Optimizing robotic swarm based construction tasks
Liyanage, Teshan, Fernando, Subha
Social insects in nature such as ants, termites and bees construct their colonies collaboratively in a very efficient process. In these swarms, each insect contributes to the construction task individually showing redundant and parallel behavior of individual entities. But the robotics adaptations of these swarm's behaviors haven't yet made it to the real world at a large enough scale of commonly being used due to the limitations in the existing approaches to the swarm robotics construction. This paper presents an approach that combines the existing swarm construction approaches which results in a swarm robotic system, capable of constructing a given 2 dimensional shape in an optimized manner.
Identifiability of AMP chain graph models
Wang, Yuhao, Bhattacharyya, Arnab
We study identifiability of Andersson-Madigan-Perlman (AMP) chain graph models, which are a common generalization of linear structural equation models and Gaussian graphical models. AMP models are described by DAGs on chain components which themselves are undirected graphs. For a known chain component decomposition, we show that the DAG on the chain components is identifiable if the determinants of the residual covariance matrices of the chain components are monotone non-decreasing in topological order. This condition extends the equal variance identifiability criterion for Bayes nets, and it can be generalized from determinants to any super-additive function on positive semidefinite matrices. When the component decomposition is unknown, we describe conditions that allow recovery of the full structure using a polynomial time algorithm based on submodular function minimization. We also conduct experiments comparing our algorithm's performance against existing baselines.
Latent Correlation-Based Multiview Learning and Self-Supervision: A Unifying Perspective
Lyu, Qi, Fu, Xiao, Wang, Weiran, Lu, Songtao
Multiple views of data, both naturally acquired (e.g., image and audio) and artificially produced (e.g., via adding different noise to data samples), have proven useful in enhancing representation learning. Natural views are often handled by multiview analysis tools, e.g., (deep) canonical correlation analysis [(D)CCA], while the artificial ones are frequently used in self-supervised learning (SSL) paradigms, e.g., SimCLR and Barlow Twins. Both types of approaches often involve learning neural feature extractors such that the embeddings of data exhibit high cross-view correlations. Although intuitive, the effectiveness of correlation-based neural embedding is only empirically validated. This work puts forth a theory-backed framework for unsupervised multiview learning. Our development starts with proposing a multiview model, where each view is a nonlinear mixture of shared and private components. Consequently, the learning problem boils down to shared/private component identification and disentanglement. Under this model, latent correlation maximization is shown to guarantee the extraction of the shared components across views (up to certain ambiguities). In addition, the private information in each view can be provably disentangled from the shared using proper regularization design. The method is tested on a series of tasks, e.g., downstream clustering, which all show promising performance. Our development also provides a unifying perspective for understanding various DCCA and SSL schemes.
Central Kurdish machine translation: First large scale parallel corpus and experiments
Amini, Zhila, Mohammadamini, Mohammad, Hosseini, Hawre, Mansouri, Mehran, Jaff, Daban
While the computational processing of Kurdish has experienced a relative increase, the machine translation of this language seems to be lacking a considerable body of scientific work. This is in part due to the lack of resources especially curated for this task. In this paper, we present the first large scale parallel corpus of Central Kurdish-English, Awta, containing 229,222 pairs of manually aligned translations. Our corpus is collected from different text genres and domains in an attempt to build more robust and real-world applications of machine translation. We make a portion of this corpus publicly available in order to foster research in this area. Further, we build several neural machine translation models in order to benchmark the task of Kurdish machine translation. Additionally, we perform extensive experimental analysis of results in order to identify the major challenges that Central Kurdish machine translation faces. These challenges include language-dependent and-independent ones as categorized in this paper, the first group of which are aware of Central Kurdish linguistic properties on different morphological, syntactic and semantic levels. Our best performing systems achieve 22.72 and 16.81 in BLEU score for Ku$\rightarrow$EN and En$\rightarrow$Ku, respectively.
MatES: Web-based Forward Chaining Expert System for Maternal Care
Misgna, Haile, Ahmed, Moges, Kumar, Anubhav
The solution to prevent maternal complications are known and preventable by trained health professionals. But in countries like Ethiopia where the patient to physician ratio is 1 doctor to 1000 patients, maternal mortality and morbidity rate is high. To fill the gap of highly trained health professionals, Ethiopia introduced health extension programs. Task shifting to health extension workers (HEWs) contributed in decreasing mortality and morbidity rate in Ethiopia. Knowledge-gap has been one of the major challenges to HEWs. The reasons are trainings are not given in regular manner, there is no midwife, gynecologists or doctors around for consultation, and all guidelines are paper-based which are easily exposed to damage. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a web-based expert system for maternal care. We only targeted the major 10 diseases and complication of maternal health issues seen in Sub-Saharan Africa. The expert system can be accessed through the use of web browsers from computers as well as smart phones. Forward chaining rule-based expert system is used in order to give suggestions and create a new knowledge from the knowledge-base. This expert system can be used to train HEWs in the field of maternal health. Keywords: expert system, maternal care, forward-chaining, rule-based expert system, PHLIPS
Query Embedding on Hyper-relational Knowledge Graphs
Alivanistos, Dimitrios, Berrendorf, Max, Cochez, Michael, Galkin, Mikhail
Multi-hop logical reasoning is an established problem in the field of representation learning on knowledge graphs (KGs). It subsumes both one-hop link prediction as well as other more complex types of logical queries. Existing algorithms operate only on classical, triple-based graphs, whereas modern KGs often employ a hyper-relational modeling paradigm. In this paradigm, typed edges may have several key-value pairs known as qualifiers that provide fine-grained context for facts. In queries, this context modifies the meaning of relations, and usually reduces the answer set. Hyper-relational queries are often observed in real-world KG applications, and existing approaches for approximate query answering cannot make use of qualifier pairs. In this work, we bridge this gap and extend the multi-hop reasoning problem to hyper-relational KGs allowing to tackle this new type of complex queries. Building upon recent advancements in Graph Neural Networks and query embedding techniques, we study how to embed and answer hyper-relational conjunctive queries. Besides that, we propose a method to answer such queries and demonstrate in our experiments that qualifiers improve query answering on a diverse set of query patterns.
Machine learning methods for postprocessing ensemble forecasts of wind gusts: A systematic comparison
Schulz, Benedikt, Lerch, Sebastian
Postprocessing ensemble weather predictions to correct systematic errors has become a standard practice in research and operations. However, only few recent studies have focused on ensemble postprocessing of wind gust forecasts, despite its importance for severe weather warnings. Here, we provide a comprehensive review and systematic comparison of eight statistical and machine learning methods for probabilistic wind gust forecasting via ensemble postprocessing, that can be divided in three groups: State of the art postprocessing techniques from statistics (ensemble model output statistics (EMOS), member-by-member postprocessing, isotonic distributional regression), established machine learning methods (gradient-boosting extended EMOS, quantile regression forests) and neural network-based approaches (distributional regression network, Bernstein quantile network, histogram estimation network). The methods are systematically compared using six years of data from a high-resolution, convection-permitting ensemble prediction system that was run operationally at the German weather service, and hourly observations at 175 surface weather stations in Germany. While all postprocessing methods yield calibrated forecasts and are able to correct the systematic errors of the raw ensemble predictions, incorporating information from additional meteorological predictor variables beyond wind gusts leads to significant improvements in forecast skill. In particular, we propose a flexible framework of locally adaptive neural networks with different probabilistic forecast types as output, which not only significantly outperform all benchmark postprocessing methods but also learn physically consistent relations associated with the diurnal cycle, especially the evening transition of the planetary boundary layer.
Artificial Intelligence in the Pharmaceutical market worth US$27,156.1 Million in 2031. Visiongain Research Inc.
Visiongain has published a new report on "AI in Pharmaceuticals Market 2021-2031". Embracing Technology to Revolutionize Pharmaceutical Industry There are other fields where the R&D process can be influenced by AI and machine learning. Better approaches to predict chemicals' properties in order to reduce the number of substances that need to be synthesized is obviously an opportunity. This would allow for the consideration of a larger chemical universe and enrich the'chemical palette' open to medicinal chemists. Another field where researchers are starting to use AI and machine learning is mining genomic, proteomic, and metabolic data for improved disease biomarkers and medication efficacy surrogate markers.
The promise and perils of Artificial Intelligence partnerships
"A period that had been broadly described as engagement has come to an end," Kurt Campbell, the Indo-Pacific Coordinator at the United States (US) National Security Council, told a virtual audience in May on the subject of US-China relations. "The dominant paradigm is going to be competition." On several occasions, Campbell has highlighted that one of the major arenas of this competition will concern technology. This is increasingly reflected in US national security structures. Today, there is both a senior director and coordinator for technology and national security at the White House; the National Economic Council has briefed the Cabinet on supply chain resilience; and the focus of Department of Defense policy reviews have been on emerging military technologies.
Experts Doubt Ethical AI Design Will Be Broadly Adopted as the Norm Within the Next Decade
This is the 12th "Future of the Internet" canvassing Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center have conducted together to get expert views about important digital issues. In this case, the questions focused on the prospects for ethical artificial intelligence (AI) by the year 2030. This is a nonscientific canvassing based on a nonrandom sample; this broad array of opinions about where current trends may lead in the next decade represents only the points of view of the individuals who responded to the queries. Pew Research and Elon's Imagining the Internet Center built a database of experts to canvass from a wide range of fields, choosing to invite people from several sectors, including professionals and policy people based in government bodies, nonprofits and foundations, technology businesses, think tanks and in networks of interested academics and technology innovators. The predictions reported here came in response to a set of questions in an online canvassing conducted between June 30 and July 27, 2020. In all, 602 technology innovators and developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded to at least one of the questions covered in this report. More on the methodology underlying this canvassing and the participants can be found in the final section. Artificial intelligence systems "understand" and shape a lot of what happens in people's lives. AI applications "speak" to people and answer questions when the name of a digital voice assistant is called out. They run the chatbots that handle customer-service issues people have with companies. They help diagnose cancer and other medical conditions. They scour the use of credit cards for signs of fraud, and they determine who could be a credit risk. They help people drive from point A to point B and update traffic information to shorten travel times. They are the operating system of driverless vehicles. They sift applications to make recommendations about job candidates. They determine the material that is offered up in people's newsfeeds and video choices. They recognize people's faces, translate languages and suggest how to complete people's sentences or search queries. They can "read" people's emotions. They beat them at sophisticated games.