Africa
Battling Pandemic-Driven Uptick In APP Fraud
Digital fraud is a widespread problem, with fraud losses totaling more than $1.45 trillion annually around the globe. A fraud attack against a bank or business occurred every two minutes on average in 2019, for a total of 59,627 attacks that year. What's more, these figures do not take into account the innumerable schemes launched against individuals. The pandemic has only exacerbated the fraud threat as bad actors exploit economic uncertainties to scam individuals from all walks of life. One especially popular method of digital attack is authorized push payment (APP) fraud, which sees bad actors impersonating trusted merchants or officials and demanding payment from victims for goods or services.
Two teams from Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia will compete at the Cybathlon Global Edition 2020, the Olympics dedicated to new prosthetic technologies
IIT's teams will compete in the "Powered Arm Prosthesis" category showing two different robotic arm prostheses made in Italy: SoftHandPro and Hannes. The race course is about 30 metres long and will see the pilots compete in three races on 6 stations reproducing daily tasks. The IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) will participate in the Cybathlon Global Edition 2020, an international event organised by the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, and dedicated to new prosthetic devices. People with physical disabilities from all over the world will compete, as pilots, in different disciplines that reproduce daily useful tasks, using the latest discoveries in technology such as robotic prostheses, exoskeletons and new generation wheelchairs. IIT will participate by presenting two robotic arm prostheses: the SoftHand Pro, stemming from a research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC), and the Hannes robotic hand developed together with the Italian Centro Protesi INAIL (the prosthetic unit of the National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work).
18 Must-Subscribe Data Science Podcasts
The podcast boom and the rise of data and analytics roughly coincided, so it follows that there'd be a plethora of data science podcasts out there. At the same time, the landscape has shifted a fair amount in recent years, with promising newcomers arriving and several old favorites hanging up the mic. In our attempt to round up the best data science podcasts out there, we cast a wide net. We looked at data science, plus its more glamorous siblings machine learning and artificial intelligence, while also making room for a few broad-appeal wildcards. There are plenty more data podcasts out there, to be sure, but this list should help give you a sense of what you like.
On the Transferability of VAE Embeddings using Relational Knowledge with Semi-Supervision
Strömfelt, Harald, Dickens, Luke, Garcez, Artur d'Avila, Russo, Alessandra
When dealing with complex data, the effectiveness of a classifier/predictor is limited by its ability to extract useful information. As such, representations that clearly expose the semantics of the data should then be most amenable to downstream learning [1, 2]. This is often referred to as a challenge of acquiring a disentangled representation over the factors of the data [3]. A popular recent trend that has had significant success in this regard uses semi-supervised Variational AutoEncoders (VAE) [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. Whilst fully unsupervised VAE methods have been shown to require strong inductive bias [10], semi-supervised methods achieve disentanglement by training additional auxiliary tasks that are defined on the factors, alongside the standard VAE objective (see Appendix Eqn. 3).
Qualitative Investigation in Explainable Artificial Intelligence: A Bit More Insight from Social Science
Johs, Adam J., Agosto, Denise E., Weber, Rosina O.
This paper presents a focused analysis of human studies in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) entailing qualitative investigation. We draw on the social science corpora of qualitative research to illustrate opportunities for making the human studies where XAI researchers used observations, interviews, focus groups, and/or questionnaires to capture qualitative data more rigorous. We contextualize the presentation of the XAI contributions included in our analysis according to the components of rigor described in the qualitative research literature: 1) underlying theories or frameworks, 2) methodological approaches, 3) data collection methods, and 4) data analysis processes. The results of our analysis support calls from others in the XAI community advocating for collaboration with experts from social disciplines to bolster rigor and effectiveness in human studies.
Baseline for Policy Gradients that All Deep Learning Enthusists Must Know
Deep reinforcement learning has a variety of different algorithms that solves many types of complex problems in various situations, one class of these algorithms is policy gradient (PG), which applies to a wide range of problems in both discrete and continuous action spaces, but applying it naively is inefficient, because of its poor sample complexity and high variance, which result in slower learning, to mitigate this we can use a baseline. The cause of the high variance problem is the reward scale, we think of policy gradient as it increases the probability of taking good actions and decreases it for bad actions, but mostly this is not the case, imagine a situation where the "good" episode return was 10 and the "bad" one was 5, then both probabilities of the actions in those episodes will be increased, which is not what we want, this problem is what baselines can solve. Mathematically, a baseline is a function when added to an expectation, does not change the expected value (or does not introduce bias), but at the same time, it can significantly affect the variance. Following this definition, we want a baseline for the policy gradient that can reduce its high variance and does not change its direction, a natural thing to do is to take the actions that are better than average, increase their probability, and decrease the probability of the actions that are worse than average, this is implemented by calculating the average reward over the trajectory and subtract it from the reward at the current timestep, this kind of baselines is called the average reward baseline. Now, we will show how baselines do not change the expected value, and we can choose any baselines we want.
Machine Learning and the Fourth Industrial Revolution
However, the most significant challenges to implementing machine learning are the perceived threat of redundancy or unemployment. In reality, machine learning should be developed to adapt to different purposes in the labour market rather than make it redundant. Machine learning might support the efficiency in the workforce, as labour intensive and monotonous tasks can be done by machines, while humans focus on higher-level qualitative tasks. The World Economic Forum (WEF) reports that despite machine learning and algorithms substituting 75 million jobs by 2022, they will create another 133 million new roles by the same period. Machine learning technologies and algorithms are influencing our everyday lives in numerous ways.
How YOOX NET-A-PORTER Is Using Artificial Intelligence To Revive Artisan Craft
HRH The Prince of Wales (Front L) Federico Marchetti Front (R) and Back row, members of The Modern ... [ ] Artisan Project team. My recent claim that fashion needs more imagination when it comes to using artificial intelligence has been unexpectedly answered by a project combining eCommerce data and artisanship. Not an obvious pairing, but the brainchild of passionate'dataphile' YOOX NET-A-PORTER GROUP Chairman and CEO, Federico Marchetti, and HRH The Prince of Wales, whose appreciation and support of artisanal craftsmanship (and dedication to safeguarding its future) is decades-long. Marchetti and the YOOX NET-A-PORTER team worked with The Prince's Foundation to create a unique year-long apprenticeship to cultivate the next generation of luxury fashion artisans, informed and guided by customer shopping data and AI analysis of millions of images of historically successful products. To breathe life into artisanship as a viable and attractive career option, underpinned by data that empowers it to deliver the right product, for the right customer on the right sales platform, crucially sustaining the artisans' craft methods and their livelihood.
Managing Marketing: The Psychology Of Brand Language Using Artificial Intelligence
Managing Marketing is a weekly podcast hosted by TrinityP3. Each one is a conversation with a marketing thought-leader, professional, practitioner and experts on the issues and topics of interest to marketers and business leaders everywhere. In this special series, TrinityP3's Anton Buchner discusses the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the impact it is having on marketing. Alastair Herbert is the founder of the research consultancy Linguabrand. He shares his wisdom having developed a deep-listening robot (Bob), that analyses visual and verbal language. Alastair introduces you to how Bob listens and analyses the psychology of language that humans potentially miss in data analysis and research groups. Bob can uncover insights to help brands shift the conversation away from sounding generic, to position themselves more persuasively. Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud, TuneIn, Stitcher, Spotify and Apple Podcast. Welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we sit down and talk with thought leaders and experts on the issues and opportunities in the marketing and business world. And it's quite warm here, so windows are open, so if you hear barking dogs, police cars, or squawking birds, you all know the reason why. It's nothing to do with COVID, it's actually just to do with enjoying summer. Now I'm really excited to have a chat with you today. As in most communications, I think most people realise that the vast majority of it is actually subconscious. And hopefully, by the end of this session, your listeners will have a much better understanding of how communications work. I'm sure they'll be excited. Before we jump in, I met you relatively recently through a colleague, Jeremy Taylor-Riley. He's now a business colleague of yours, I believe. Well, we actually go back to school days together. And what was great is that we – I think this was back when dinosaurs ruled the earth.