Social media popularity and importance is on the increase, due to people using it for various types of social interaction across multiple channels. This social interaction by online users includes submission of feedback, opinions and recommendations about various individuals, entities, topics, and events. This systematic review focuses on the evolving research area of Social Opinion Mining, tasked with the identification of multiple opinion dimensions, such as subjectivity, sentiment polarity, emotion, affect, sarcasm and irony, from user-generated content represented across multiple social media platforms and in various media formats, like text, image, video and audio. Therefore, through Social Opinion Mining, natural language can be understood in terms of the different opinion dimensions, as expressed by humans. This contributes towards the evolution of Artificial Intelligence, which in turn helps the advancement of several real-world use cases, such as customer service and decision making. A thorough systematic review was carried out on Social Opinion Mining research which totals 485 studies and spans a period of twelve years between 2007 and 2018. The in-depth analysis focuses on the social media platforms, techniques, social datasets, language, modality, tools and technologies, natural language processing tasks and other aspects derived from the published studies. Such multi-source information fusion plays a fundamental role in mining of people's social opinions from social media platforms. These can be utilised in many application areas, ranging from marketing, advertising and sales for product/service management, and in multiple domains and industries, such as politics, technology, finance, healthcare, sports and government. Future research directions are presented, whereas further research and development has the potential of leaving a wider academic and societal impact.

Sparse tensor best rank-1 approximation (BR1Approx), which is a sparsity generalization of the dense tensor BR1Approx, and is a higher-order extension of the sparse matrix BR1Approx, is one of the most important problems in sparse tensor decomposition and related problems arising from statistics and machine learning. By exploiting the multilinearity as well as the sparsity structure of the problem, four approximation algorithms are proposed, which are easily implemented, of low computational complexity, and can serve as initial procedures for iterative algorithms. In addition, theoretically guaranteed worst-case approximation lower bounds are proved for all the algorithms. We provide numerical experiments on synthetic and real data to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

Having a comprehensive, high-quality dataset of road sign annotation is critical to the success of AI-based Road Sign Recognition (RSR) systems. In practice, annotators often face difficulties in learning road sign systems of different countries; hence, the tasks are often time-consuming and produce poor results. We propose a novel approach using knowledge graphs and a machine learning algorithm - variational prototyping-encoder (VPE) - to assist human annotators in classifying road signs effectively. Annotators can query the Road Sign Knowledge Graph using visual attributes and receive closest matching candidates suggested by the VPE model. The VPE model uses the candidates from the knowledge graph and a real sign image patch as inputs. We show that our knowledge graph approach can reduce sign search space by 98.9%. Furthermore, with VPE, our system can propose the correct single candidate for 75% of signs in the tested datasets, eliminating the human search effort entirely in those cases.

Recent advances in deep learning have allowed Artificial Intelligence (AI) to reach near human-level performance in many sensory, perceptual, linguistic or cognitive tasks. There is a growing need, however, for novel, brain-inspired cognitive architectures. The Global Workspace theory refers to a large-scale system integrating and distributing information among networks of specialized modules to create higher-level forms of cognition and awareness. We argue that the time is ripe to consider explicit implementations of this theory using deep learning techniques. We propose a roadmap based on unsupervised neural translation between multiple latent spaces (neural networks trained for distinct tasks, on distinct sensory inputs and/or modalities) to create a unique, amodal global latent workspace (GLW). Potential functional advantages of GLW are reviewed.

While the success of pre-trained language models has largely eliminated the need for high-quality static word vectors in many NLP applications, static word vectors continue to play an important role in tasks where word meaning needs to be modelled in the absence of linguistic context. In this paper, we explore how the contextualised embeddings predicted by BERT can be used to produce high-quality word vectors for such domains, in particular related to knowledge base completion, where our focus is on capturing the semantic properties of nouns. We find that a simple strategy of averaging the contextualised embeddings of masked word mentions leads to vectors that outperform the static word vectors learned by BERT, as well as those from standard word embedding models, in property induction tasks. We notice in particular that masking target words is critical to achieve this strong performance, as the resulting vectors focus less on idiosyncratic properties and more on general semantic properties. Inspired by this view, we propose a filtering strategy which is aimed at removing the most idiosyncratic mention vectors, allowing us to obtain further performance gains in property induction.

A growing attention in the empirical literature has been paid to the incidence of climate shocks and change in migration decisions. Previous literature leads to different results and uses a multitude of traditional empirical approaches. This paper proposes a tree-based Machine Learning (ML) approach to analyze the role of the weather shocks towards an individual's intention to migrate in the six agriculture-dependent-economy countries such as Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal. We perform several tree-based algorithms (e.g., XGB, Random Forest) using the train-validation-test workflow to build robust and noise-resistant approaches. Then we determine the important features showing in which direction they are influencing the migration intention. This ML-based estimation accounts for features such as weather shocks captured by the Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) for different timescales and various socioeconomic features/covariates. We find that (i) weather features improve the prediction performance although socioeconomic characteristics have more influence on migration intentions, (ii) country-specific model is necessary, and (iii) international move is influenced more by the longer timescales of SPEIs while general move (which includes internal move) by that of shorter timescales.

Learning task-agnostic dynamics models in high-dimensional observation spaces can be challenging for model-based RL agents. We propose a novel way to learn latent world models by learning to predict sequences of future actions conditioned on task completion. These task-conditioned models adaptively focus modeling capacity on task-relevant dynamics, while simultaneously serving as an effective heuristic for planning with sparse rewards. We evaluate our method on challenging visual goal completion tasks and show a substantial increase in performance compared to prior model-free approaches. Deep reinforcement learning has proven to be a powerful and effective framework for solving a diversity of challenging decision-making problems (Silver et al., 2017a; Berner et al., 2019). However these algorithms are typically trained to maximize a single reward function, ignoring information that is not directly relevant to the associated task at hand. This way of learning is in stark contrast to how humans learn (Tenenbaum, 2018). Without being prompted by a specific task, humans can still explore their environment, practice achieving imaginary goals, and in so doing learn about the dynamics of the environment. When subsequently presented with a novel task, humans can utilize this learned knowledge to bootstrap learning -- a property we would like our artificial agents to have. In this work, we investigate one way to bridge this gap by learning world models (Ha & Schmidhuber, 2018) that enable the realization of previously unseen tasks. By modeling the task-agnostic dynamics of an environment, an agent can make predictions about how its own actions may affect the environment state without the need for additional samples from the environment. Prior work has shown that by using powerful function approximators to model environment dynamics, training an agent entirely within its own world models can result in large gains in sample efficiency (Ha & Schmidhuber, 2018).

Mitigating the substantial undesirable impact of transportation systems on the environment is paramount. Thus, predicting Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions is one of the profound topics, especially with the emergence of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). We develop a deep learning framework to predict link-level GHG emission rate (ER) (in CO2eq gram/second) based on the most representative predictors, such as speed, density, and the GHG ER of previous time steps. In particular, various specifications of the long-short term memory (LSTM) networks with exogenous variables are examined and compared with clustering and the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model with exogenous variables. The downtown Toronto road network is used as the case study and highly detailed data are synthesized using a calibrated traffic microsimulation and MOVES. It is found that LSTM specification with speed, density, GHG ER, and in-links speed from three previous minutes performs the best while adopting 2 hidden layers and when the hyper-parameters are systematically tuned. Adopting a 30 second updating interval improves slightly the correlation between true and predicted GHG ERs, but contributes negatively to the prediction accuracy as reflected on the increased root mean square error (RMSE) value. Efficiently predicting GHG emissions at a higher frequency with lower data requirements will pave the way to non-myopic eco-routing on large-scale road networks {to alleviate the adverse impact on the global warming

For Dr Mary-Anne Hartley, a medical doctor and researcher in EPFL's intelligent Global Health group (iGH), 2020 has been relentless. "It's not a relaxing time to study infectious diseases," she explained. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr Hartley's research team has been working non-stop with nearby Swiss university hospitals on two major projects. Using artificial intelligence (AI), they have developed new algorithms that, with data from ultrasound images and auscultation (chest/lung) sounds, can accurately diagnose the novel coronavirus in patients and predict how ill they are likely to become. "We've named the new deep learning algorithms DeepChest – using lung ultrasound images – and DeepBreath – using breath sounds from a digital stethoscope. This AI is helping us to better understand complex patterns in these fundamental clinical exams. So far, results are highly promising," said Professor Jaggi.

The evolution of human vision can be traced back to the very first primates that evolved 55 million years ago, a study of a tiny mammal from Madagascar found. The world's smallest primate, the endangered grey mouse lemur, is no bigger than an apple and weighs in at just two ounces. Researchers from Switzerland said that, despite their diminutive size, the endangered grey mouse lemur's visual system is just as big as that of other primates. In fact, more than a fifth of the big-eyed mammal's brain is dedicated to visual processing -- as compared to barely three percent of the human brain. The find highlights this brain region's incredible preservation and importance to our daily lives -- and those of our ancestors in the distant past.