Africa
lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job
Adeva partners with companies to scale engineering teams on-demand. AgentFire - Hyper local real estate websites powered by Wordpress. Aha! - Aha! is roadmapping software for PMs who want their mojo back. AirTreks - Multi-stop international flight planner with a distributed team. We are strategists, researchers, designers, and developers who craft custom digital experiences for publishers, nonprofit institutions, museums, and brands. ALICE empowers the world's best hotels to deliver a remarkable guest experience. Makes software that helps teachers make e-learning courses. AT&T - Nearly 20% of the eligible workforce works remotely. Authentic F & F - Independent design and technology studio based in Denver and Minnesota Aurity - 100% remote company, specializing in React and React Native.
How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Media & Communications
New media can be defined as a highly interactive digital technology which allows people to interact anywhere anytime. This has evolved as a non-tangible channel for communication on the preset of growth in Information Technology. The ability to transform content to a digitized format allowed new-age media to take shape within the internet. Accessibility through hand-held devices like mobile platforms, personal computers, digital devices, and virtual computing machines has aided the growth of new-age media. The medium of new media is not just restricted to social networking platforms, blogs, online newspapers, digital games and virtual reality, but any aspect of communication that can be communicated real-time, processed, stored and delivered in formats of data instantaneously.
Intelligent Agent for Hurricane Emergency Identification and Text Information Extraction from Streaming Social Media Big Data
Huang, Jingwei, Khallouli, Wael, Rabadi, Ghaith, Seck, Mamadou
This paper presents our research on leveraging social media Big Data and AI to support hurricane disaster emergency response. The current practice of hurricane emergency response for rescue highly relies on emergency call centres. The more recent Hurricane Harvey event reveals the limitations of the current systems. We use Hurricane Harvey and the associated Houston flooding as the motivating scenario to conduct research and develop a prototype as a proof-of-concept of using an intelligent agent as a complementary role to support emergency centres in hurricane emergency response. This intelligent agent is used to collect real-time streaming tweets during a natural disaster event, to identify tweets requesting rescue, to extract key information such as address and associated geocode, and to visualize the extracted information in an interactive map in decision supports. Our experiment shows promising outcomes and the potential application of the research in support of hurricane emergency response.
Experimental Analysis of Trajectory Control Using Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous Vehicles
Abbas, Ammar N., Irshad, Muhammad Asad, Ammar, Hossam Hassan
Perception of the lane boundaries is crucial for the tasks related to autonomous trajectory control. In this paper, several methodologies for lane detection are discussed with an experimental illustration: Hough transformation, Blob analysis, and Bird's eye view. Following the abstraction of lane marks from the boundary, the next approach is applying a control law based on the perception to control steering and speed control. In the following, a comparative analysis is made between an open-loop response, PID control, and a neural network control law through graphical statistics. To get the perception of the surrounding a wireless streaming camera connected to Raspberry Pi is used. After pre-processing the signal received by the camera the output is sent back to the Raspberry Pi that processes the input and communicates the control to the motors through Arduino via serial communication.
Not All Memories are Created Equal: Learning to Forget by Expiring
Sukhbaatar, Sainbayar, Ju, Da, Poff, Spencer, Roller, Stephen, Szlam, Arthur, Weston, Jason, Fan, Angela
Attention mechanisms have shown promising results in sequence modeling tasks that require long-term memory. Recent work investigated mechanisms to reduce the computational cost of preserving and storing memories. However, not all content in the past is equally important to remember. We propose Expire-Span, a method that learns to retain the most important information and expire the irrelevant information. This forgetting of memories enables Transformers to scale to attend over tens of thousands of previous timesteps efficiently, as not all states from previous timesteps are preserved. We demonstrate that Expire-Span can help models identify and retain critical information and show it can achieve strong performance on reinforcement learning tasks specifically designed to challenge this functionality. Next, we show that Expire-Span can scale to memories that are tens of thousands in size, setting a new state of the art on incredibly long context tasks such as character-level language modeling and a frame-by-frame moving objects task. Finally, we analyze the efficiency of Expire-Span compared to existing approaches and demonstrate that it trains faster and uses less memory.
Boosting Randomized Smoothing with Variance Reduced Classifiers
Horvรกth, Miklรณs Z., Mรผller, Mark Niklas, Fischer, Marc, Vechev, Martin
Randomized Smoothing (RS) is a promising method for obtaining robustness certificates by evaluating a base model under noise. In this work we: (i) theoretically motivate why ensembles are a particularly suitable choice as base models for RS, and (ii) empirically confirm this choice, obtaining state of the art results in multiple settings. The key insight of our work is that the reduced variance of ensembles over the perturbations introduced in RS leads to significantly more consistent classifications for a given input, in turn leading to substantially increased certifiable radii for difficult samples. We also introduce key optimizations which enable an up to 50-fold decrease in sample complexity of RS, thus drastically reducing its computational overhead. Experimentally, we show that ensembles of only 3 to 10 classifiers consistently improve on the strongest single model with respect to their average certified radius (ACR) by 5% to 21% on both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet. On the latter, we achieve a state-of-the-art ACR of 1.11. We release all code and models required to reproduce our results upon publication.
Common Sense Beyond English: Evaluating and Improving Multilingual Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning
Lin, Bill Yuchen, Lee, Seyeon, Qiao, Xiaoyang, Ren, Xiang
Commonsense reasoning research has so far been limited to English. We aim to evaluate and improve popular multilingual language models (ML-LMs) to help advance commonsense reasoning (CSR) beyond English. We collect the Mickey Corpus, consisting of 561k sentences in 11 different languages, which can be used for analyzing and improving ML-LMs. We propose Mickey Probe, a language-agnostic probing task for fairly evaluating the common sense of popular ML-LMs across different languages. In addition, we also create two new datasets, X-CSQA and X-CODAH, by translating their English versions to 15 other languages, so that we can evaluate popular ML-LMs for cross-lingual commonsense reasoning. To improve the performance beyond English, we propose a simple yet effective method -- multilingual contrastive pre-training (MCP). It significantly enhances sentence representations, yielding a large performance gain on both benchmarks.
AI 'dominated scientific output' in recent years, UNESCO report shows
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) today unveiled its latest Science Report. The massive undertaking -- this year's report totals 762 pages, compiled by 70 authors from 52 countries over 18 months -- is published every five years to examine current trends in science governance. This latest edition includes discussion of the rapid progress toward Industry 4.0 and, for the first time, a deep analysis of AI and robotics research around the globe. Going beyond just the global leaders, it offers an overview of almost two dozen countries and global regions, examining AI research, funding, strategies, and more. Overall, the report determines "it is the field of AI and robotics that dominated scientific output" in recent years.
FeSHI: Feature Map Based Stealthy Hardware Intrinsic Attack
Odetola, Tolulope, Khalid, Faiq, Sandefur, Travis, Mohammed, Hawzhin, Hasan, Syed Rafay
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have shown impressive performance in computer vision, natural language processing, and many other applications, but they exhibit high computations and substantial memory requirements. To address these limitations, especially in resource-constrained devices, the use of cloud computing for CNNs is becoming more popular. This comes with privacy and latency concerns that have motivated the designers to develop embedded hardware accelerators for CNNs. However, designing a specialized accelerator increases the time-to-market and cost of production. Therefore, to reduce the time-to-market and access to state-of-the-art techniques, CNN hardware mapping and deployment on embedded accelerators are often outsourced to untrusted third parties, which is going to be more prevalent in futuristic artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) systems. These AIoT systems anticipate horizontal collaboration among different resource-constrained AIoT node devices, where CNN layers are partitioned and these devices collaboratively compute complex CNN tasks Therefore, there is a dire need to explore this attack surface for designing secure embedded hardware accelerators for CNNs. Towards this goal, in this paper, we exploited this attack surface to propose an HT-based attack called FeSHI. This attack exploits the statistical distribution i.e., Gaussian distribution, of the layer-by-layer feature maps of the CNN to design two triggers for stealthy HT with a very low probability of triggering. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed attack, we deployed the LeNet and LeNet-3D on PYNQ to classify the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, respectively, and tested FeSHI. The experimental results show that FeSHI utilizes up to 2% extra LUTs, and the overall resource overhead is less than 1% compared to the original designs
A Game-Theoretic Approach to Multi-Agent Trust Region Optimization
Wen, Ying, Chen, Hui, Yang, Yaodong, Tian, Zheng, Li, Minne, Chen, Xu, Wang, Jun
Trust region methods are widely applied in single-agent reinforcement learning problems due to their monotonic performance-improvement guarantee at every iteration. Nonetheless, when applied in multi-agent settings, the guarantee of trust region methods no longer holds because an agent's payoff is also affected by other agents' adaptive behaviors. To tackle this problem, we conduct a game-theoretical analysis in the policy space, and propose a multi-agent trust region learning method (MATRL), which enables trust region optimization for multi-agent learning. Specifically, MATRL finds a stable improvement direction that is guided by the solution concept of Nash equilibrium at the meta-game level. We derive the monotonic improvement guarantee in multi-agent settings and empirically show the local convergence of MATRL to stable fixed points in the two-player rotational differential game. To test our method, we evaluate MATRL in both discrete and continuous multiplayer general-sum games including checker and switch grid worlds, multi-agent MuJoCo, and Atari games. Results suggest that MATRL significantly outperforms strong multi-agent reinforcement learning baselines.