Alan Kalton, Vice President and General Manager of Aktana Europe, is a leader in data analytics and manages all new Contextual Intelligence implementations and developments across Europe. He comes to Aktana from Cape Town, South Africa where he led a data analytics venture called BroadReach and prior was the Analytics Leader of EY in South Africa. He also held prominent executive leadership positions in data analytics at IBM, Elsevier, Cognizant, Steris, Novartis, GSK, and ZS Associates. He graduated with a BS and MSc of industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan. Kalton can be reached at alan.kalton@aktana.com.

Convolutional neural networks are able to learn realistic image priors from numerous training samples in low-level image generation and restoration. We show that, for high-level image recognition tasks, we can further reconstruct "realistic" images of each category by leveraging intrinsic Batch Normalization (BN) statistics without any training data. Inspired by the popular VAE/GAN methods, we regard the zero-shot optimization process of synthetic images as generative modeling to match the distribution of BN statistics. The generated images serve as a calibration set for the following zero-shot network quantizations. Our method meets the needs for quantizing models based on sensitive information, \textit{e.g.,} due to privacy concerns, no data is available. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that, with the help of generated data, our approach consistently outperforms existing data-free quantization methods.

Logical theories in the form of ontologies and similar artefacts in computing and IT are used for structuring, annotating, and querying data, among others, and therewith influence data analytics regarding what is fed into the algorithms. Algorithmic bias is a well-known notion, but what does bias mean in the context of ontologies that provide a structuring mechanism for an algorithm's input? What are the sources of bias there and how would they manifest themselves in ontologies? We examine and enumerate types of bias relevant for ontologies, and whether they are explicit or implicit. These eight types are illustrated with examples from extant production-level ontologies and samples from the literature. We then assessed three concurrently developed COVID-19 ontologies on bias and detected different subsets of types of bias in each one, to a greater or lesser extent. This first characterisation aims contribute to a sensitisation of ethical aspects of ontologies primarily regarding representation of information and knowledge.

Falls are a common problem affecting the older adults and a major public health issue. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and World Health Organization report that one in three adults over the age of 65 and half of the adults over 80 fall each year. In recent years, an ever-increasing range of applications have been developed to help deliver more effective falls prevention interventions. All these applications rely on a huge elderly personal database collected from hospitals, mutual health, and other organizations in caring for elderly. The information describing an elderly is continually evolving and may become obsolete at a given moment and contradict what we already know on the same person. So, it needs to be continuously checked and updated in order to restore the database consistency and then provide better service. This paper provides an outline of an Obsolete personal Information Update System (OIUS) designed in the context of the elderly-fall prevention project. Our OIUS aims to control and update in real-time the information acquired about each older adult, provide on-demand consistent information and supply tailored interventions to caregivers and fall-risk patients. The approach outlined for this purpose is based on a polynomial-time algorithm build on top of a causal Bayesian network representing the elderly data. The result is given as a recommendation tree with some accuracy level. We conduct a thorough empirical study for such a model on an elderly personal information base. Experiments confirm the viability and effectiveness of our OIUS.

This document entails a progressive report on the design and implementation of a bus tracking and monitoring system . This report has its contents within the limits of five chapters with each concisely exploring their various objectives. Chapter one is the introductory chapter. It entails a brief description of a bus tracking and monitoring system ,the need and the aims and objectives of this project. Chapter two consists the literature review of this project. This entails the critical analysis of previous related research and projects undertaken by other people. The merits and demerits of the various implementations.Chapter three consists of theory and design considerations of the proposed system for Kwame Nkrumah University campus. Chapter four talks about the methods used to collect data and the approach and technology stack adopted to build the proposed system.Chapter five concludes the thesis and discusses the results of test and deployment of the proposed system on Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology campus

For some scientific questions, empirical data are essential to develop reliable simulation models. These data usually come from different sources with diverse and heterogeneous formats. The design of complex data-driven models is often shaped by the structure of the data available in research projects. Hence, applying such models to other case studies requires either to get similar data or to transform new data to fit the model inputs. It is the case of agent-based models (ABMs) that use advanced data structures such as Geographic Information Systems data. We faced this problem in the LittoSIM-GEN project when generalizing our participatory flooding model (LittoSIM) to new territories. From this experience, we provide a mapping approach to structure, describe, and automatize the integration of geospatial data into ABMs.

We study the impact of fiscal revenue shocks on local fiscal policy. We focus on the very volatile revenues from the immovable property gains tax in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland, and analyze fiscal behavior following large and rare positive and negative revenue shocks. We apply causal machine learning strategies and implement the post-double-selection LASSO estimator to identify the causal effect of revenue shocks on public finances. We show that local policymakers overall predominantly smooth fiscal shocks. However, we also find some patterns consistent with fiscal conservatism, where positive shocks are smoothed, while negative ones are mitigated by spending cuts.

Exploratory analysis of time series data can yield a better understanding of complex dynamical systems. Granger causality is a practical framework for analysing interactions in sequential data, applied in a wide range of domains. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for inferring multivariate Granger causality under nonlinear dynamics based on an extension of self-explaining neural networks. This framework is more interpretable than other neural-network-based techniques for inferring Granger causality, since in addition to relational inference, it also allows detecting signs of Granger-causal effects and inspecting their variability over time. In comprehensive experiments on simulated data, we show that our framework performs on par with several powerful baseline methods at inferring Granger causality and that it achieves better performance at inferring interaction signs. The results suggest that our framework is a viable and more interpretable alternative to sparse-input neural networks for inferring Granger causality.

Efficient Global Optimization (EGO) is the canonical form of Bayesian optimization that has been successfully applied to solve global optimization of expensive-to-evaluate black-box problems. However, EGO struggles to scale with dimension, and offers limited theoretical guarantees. In this work, we propose and analyze a trust-region-like EGO method (TREGO). TREGO alternates between regular EGO steps and local steps within a trust region. By following a classical scheme for the trust region (based on a sufficient decrease condition), we demonstrate that our algorithm enjoys strong global convergence properties, while departing from EGO only for a subset of optimization steps. Using extensive numerical experiments based on the well-known COCO benchmark, we first analyze the sensitivity of TREGO to its own parameters, then show that the resulting algorithm is consistently outperforming EGO and getting competitive with other state-of-the-art global optimization methods.

Globally, healthcare organisations have accelerated adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), with the ones still implementing frameworks planning to go live within 24 months. Hardly surprising given the improved consumer engagement that results from the technology. But more than that, the challenging economic climate is seeing healthcare organisations looking for better ways to make processes more efficient, enhance their existing products and services and lower costs. The key to this is AI that brings with it a more innovative environment to automate manual, error-prone processes and introduce a sophisticated layer of analytics that can deliver new insights to the wealth of data already available. These platforms use algorithms and machine learning to analyse and interpret data, while empowering the healthcare organisation with the means to provide more personalised customer experiences.