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Bayesian Networks. Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Probability

#artificialintelligence

The tragedy happened to the AirFrance 447 more than 10 years ago, in 2009. The flight took off in Rio de Janeiro and was planned to land in Paris. It suddenly disappeared in the middle of the Atlantic ocean without any warning. Immediately, rescuers reached the zone and what they found were just some wreckage and corpse. All 228 people onboard died in the crash.


Netflix teams with Ubisoft to develop series based on 'Assassin's Creed' video games

USATODAY - Tech Top Stories

Netflix is taking a swan dive into the Assassin's Creed video game franchise. The streaming TV giant will create a live-action TV series based on the Assassin's Creed series of video games, published by Ubisoft, the two companies announced Tuesday. Netflix may also eventually develop animated and anime series based on the hugely popular franchise, which chronicles a group of assassins' fight throughout history. "We're excited to partner with Ubisoft and bring to life the rich, multilayered storytelling that Assassin's Creed is beloved for," said Peter Friedlander, vice president of original series for Netflix, said in a statement. "From its breathtaking historical worlds and massive global appeal as one of the best selling video game franchises of all time, we are committed to carefully crafting epic and thrilling entertainment based on this distinct IP and provide a deeper dive for fans and our members around the world to enjoy."


AI in the workplace. Why machine learning is not coming after your job.

#artificialintelligence

When not building AI, enjoys mountain biking and a good book. Fiction through the effort of researchers and the stampede of scientific development has a tendency lately to become real. Artificial Intelligence is not one of those things. AI means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, so let's break it down. Think about dropping a Los Angeles alley cat into the Kruger National park in front of an elephant.


Deep-Learning AI Just Found Nearly 2 Billion Trees in the Sahara Desert

#artificialintelligence

There are many more trees in the West African Sahara Desert than we thought, according to a recent study based on AI and satellite imagery and published in the journal Nature -- which found more than 1.8 billion trees in the Sahara Desert. Researchers have counted more than 1.8 billion trees and shrubs in the 501,933 square-mile (1.3 million square-kilometer) area -- in an area encompassing the western-most region of the Sahara Desert -- called the Sahel -- along with sub-humid zones of West Africa, reports The World Economic Forum. "We were very surprised to see that quite a few trees actually grow in the Sahara Desert, because up until now, most people thought that virtually none existed," said Professor Martin Brandt from the geosciences and natural resource management department of the University of Copenhagen and lead author of the recent study. "We counted hundreds of millions of trees in the desert alone. Doing so wouldn't have been possible without this technology," explained Brandt, according to a blog post on the University of Copenhagen's website.


Emotion Artificial Intelligence to Witness Growth Acceleration During 2020-2025 – Eurowire

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The research report focuses on target groups of customers to help players to effectively market their products and achieve strong sales in the global Emotion Artificial Intelligence Market. Readers are provided with validated and revalidated market forecast figures such as CAGR, Emotion Artificial Intelligence market revenue, production, consumption, and market share. Our accurate market data equips players to plan powerful strategies ahead of time. The Emotion Artificial Intelligence report offers deep geographical analysis where key regional and country level markets are brought to light. The vendor landscape is also analysed in depth to reveal current and future market challenges and Emotion Artificial Intelligence business tactics adopted by leading companies to tackle them.


Sparse Symmetric Tensor Regression for Functional Connectivity Analysis

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Tensor regression models, such as CP regression and Tucker regression, have many successful applications in neuroimaging analysis where the covariates are of ultrahigh dimensionality and possess complex spatial structures. The high-dimensional covariate arrays, also known as tensors, can be approximated by low-rank structures and fit into the generalized linear models. The resulting tensor regression achieves a significant reduction in dimensionality while remaining efficient in estimation and prediction. Brain functional connectivity is an essential measure of brain activity and has shown significant association with neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. The symmetry nature of functional connectivity is a property that has not been explored in previous tensor regression models. In this work, we propose a sparse symmetric tensor regression that further reduces the number of free parameters and achieves superior performance over symmetrized and ordinary CP regression, under a variety of simulation settings. We apply the proposed method to a study of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and normal ageing from the Berkeley Aging Cohort Study (BACS) and detect two regions of interest that have been identified important to AD.


Improving seasonal forecast using probabilistic deep learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The path toward realizing the potential of seasonal forecasting and its socioeconomic benefits depends heavily on improving general circulation model based dynamical forecasting systems. To improve dynamical seasonal forecast, it is crucial to set up forecast benchmarks, and clarify forecast limitations posed by model initialization errors, formulation deficiencies, and internal climate variability. With huge cost in generating large forecast ensembles, and limited observations for forecast verification, the seasonal forecast benchmarking and diagnosing task proves challenging. In this study, we develop a probabilistic deep neural network model, drawing on a wealth of existing climate simulations to enhance seasonal forecast capability and forecast diagnosis. By leveraging complex physical relationships encoded in climate simulations, our probabilistic forecast model demonstrates favorable deterministic and probabilistic skill compared to state-of-the-art dynamical forecast systems in quasi-global seasonal forecast of precipitation and near-surface temperature. We apply this probabilistic forecast methodology to quantify the impacts of initialization errors and model formulation deficiencies in a dynamical seasonal forecasting system. We introduce the saliency analysis approach to efficiently identify the key predictors that influence seasonal variability. Furthermore, by explicitly modeling uncertainty using variational Bayes, we give a more definitive answer to how the El Nino/Southern Oscillation, the dominant mode of seasonal variability, modulates global seasonal predictability.


Bayesian Algorithms for Decentralized Stochastic Bandits

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study a decentralized cooperative multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem with $K$ arms and $N$ agents connected over a network. In our model, each arm's reward distribution is same for all agents, and rewards are drawn independently across agents and over time steps. In each round, agents choose an arm to play and subsequently send a message to their neighbors. The goal is to minimize cumulative regret averaged over the entire network. We propose a decentralized Bayesian multi-armed bandit framework that extends single-agent Bayesian bandit algorithms to the decentralized setting. Specifically, we study an information assimilation algorithm that can be combined with existing Bayesian algorithms, and using this, we propose a decentralized Thompson Sampling algorithm and decentralized Bayes-UCB algorithm. We analyze the decentralized Thompson Sampling algorithm under Bernoulli rewards and establish a problem-dependent upper bound on the cumulative regret. We show that regret incurred scales logarithmically over the time horizon with constants that match those of an optimal centralized agent with access to all observations across the network. Our analysis also characterizes the cumulative regret in terms of the network structure. Through extensive numerical studies, we show that our extensions of Thompson Sampling and Bayes-UCB incur lesser cumulative regret than the state-of-art algorithms inspired by the Upper Confidence Bound algorithm. We implement our proposed decentralized Thompson Sampling under gossip protocol, and over time-varying networks, where each communication link has a fixed probability of failure.


Artificial Intelligence Systems applied to tourism: A Survey

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been improving the performance of systems for a diverse set of tasks and introduced a more interactive generation of personal agents. Despite the current trend of applying AI for a great amount of areas, we have not seen the same quantity of work being developed for the tourism sector. This paper reports on the main applications of AI systems developed for tourism and the current state of the art for this sector. The paper also provides an up-to-date survey of this field regarding several key works and systems that are applied to tourism, like Personal Agents, for providing a more interactive experience. We also carried out an in-depth research on systems for predicting traffic human flow, more accurate recommendation systems and even how geospatial is trying to display tourism data in a more informative way and prevent problems before they arise.


Learning Contextualised Cross-lingual Word Embeddings for Extremely Low-Resource Languages Using Parallel Corpora

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We propose a new approach for learning contextualised cross-lingual word embeddings based only on a small parallel corpus (e.g. a few hundred sentence pairs). Our method obtains word embeddings via an LSTM-based encoder-decoder model that performs bidirectional translation and reconstruction of the input sentence. Through sharing model parameters among different languages, our model jointly trains the word embeddings in a common multilingual space. We also propose a simple method to combine word and subword embeddings to make use of orthographic similarities across different languages. We base our experiments on real-world data from endangered languages, namely Yongning Na, Shipibo-Konibo and Griko. Our experiments on bilingual lexicon induction and word alignment tasks show that our model outperforms existing methods by a large margin for most language pairs. These results demonstrate that, contrary to common belief, an encoder-decoder translation model is beneficial for learning cross-lingual representations, even in extremely low-resource scenarios.