A major new report led by the Novartis Foundation and Microsoft shows how investment in data and AI is critical to drive the health system improvements needed to respond to and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and the world's other greatest healthcare challenges. Reimagining Global Health through Artificial Intelligence: The Roadmap to AI Maturity was developed by the Broadband Commission Working Group on Digital and AI in Health, which the Novartis Foundation and Microsoft co-chair. Based on a landscape review of over 300 existing use cases of AI in health, the report shows how AI is already disrupting health and care. It then presents a roadmap to help countries use AI to transform their health systems from being reactive to proactive, predictive, and even preventive. Low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) that grapple with systemic health challenges such as a shortage of health workers, underserved populations, rapid urbanization and disinformation have the most to gain from AI – but they also have the most to lose.

The work in this repo was presented and demoed at the 2019 Experimental A.I. in Games (EXAG) workshop, an AIIDE workshop. Feel free to join the conversation surrounding this work via my Twitter, and on r/MachineLearning. The player builds places urban structures on a 2D map. In certain configurations, these structures invite population and vertical development. Reinforcement Learning agents are rewarded as a function of population or other city-wide metrics.

Rapid advances in technology, connectivity and telecommunications are conspiring to make Africa's large, rapidly growing population a valuable asset for the automation revolution. It is imperative that Africa quickly develop agency in data and artificial intelligence and it will be lucrative for investors who support them by financing Africa's telecom and data backbone. Africa must urgently develop cogent digital strategy. This at first seems fanciful, or even superfluous, given the continent's relative lack of more basic development. Indeed, there are myriad other challenges to which most would assign primacy.

The pace of digital transformation has notably picked up in the past decade, as enterprises invest in technology to retain their competitive edge and avoid having their market share eroded by disruptive newcomers. Organisations' ability to out-innovate their competitors in this way often requires a full-scale modernisation of the IT infrastructure stack underpinning their operations so they are better positioned to respond to the changing needs of their customers. For many enterprises, this process of modernisation has seen them look to invest in making their private, virtualised datacentres and server rooms more agile, responsive and easier to manage by investing in software-defined networking (SDN) technologies and automation tools. Such investments can help enterprises make better and more efficient use of their existing compute capacity, but that alone may not be enough to stave off competitive threats, prompting some IT leaders to weigh up a move to the public cloud. The benefits of such an approach are well-documented and proven, with the public cloud offering enterprises ready access to an almost infinite supply of cloud-based compute resources that can be set to auto-scale in line with peaks and troughs in demand, meaning enterprises only pay for what they use.

Graph neural network models have been extensively used to learn node representations for graph structured data in an end-to-end setting. These models often rely on localized first order approximations of spectral graph convolutions and hence are unable to capture higher-order relational information between nodes. Probabilistic Graphical Models form another class of models that provide rich flexibility in incorporating such relational information but are limited by inefficient approximate inference algorithms at higher order. In this paper, we propose to combine these approaches to learn better node and graph representations. First, we derive an efficient approximate sum-product loopy belief propagation inference algorithm for higher-order PGMs. We then embed the message passing updates into a neural network to provide the inductive bias of the inference algorithm in end-to-end learning. This gives us a model that is flexible enough to accommodate domain knowledge while maintaining the computational advantage. We further propose methods for constructing higher-order factors that are conditioned on node and edge features and share parameters wherever necessary. Our experimental evaluation shows that our model indeed captures higher-order information, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art $k$-order graph neural networks in molecular datasets.

We present an information-based uncertainty quantification method for general Markov Random Fields. Markov Random Fields (MRFs) are structured, probabilistic graphical models over undirected graphs, and provide a fundamental unifying modeling tool for statistical mechanics, probabilistic machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Typically MRFs are complex and high-dimensional with nodes and edges (connections) built in a modular fashion from simpler, low-dimensional probabilistic models and their local connections; in turn, this modularity allows to incorporate available data to MRFs and efficiently simulate them by leveraging their graph-theoretic structure. Learning graphical models from data and/or constructing them from physical modeling and constraints necessarily involves uncertainties inherited from data, modeling choices, or numerical approximations. These uncertainties in the MRF can be manifested either in the graph structure or the probability distribution functions, and necessarily will propagate in predictions for quantities of interest. Here we quantify such uncertainties using tight, information-based bounds on the predictions of quantities of interest; these bounds take advantage of the graphical structure of MRFs and are capable of handling the inherent high-dimensionality of such graphical models. We demonstrate our methods in MRFs for medical diagnostics and statistical mechanics models. In the latter, we develop uncertainty quantification bounds for finite-size effects and phase diagrams, which constitute two of the typical predictions goals of statistical mechanics modeling.

This paper presents and characterizes an Open Application Repository for Federated Learning (OARF), a benchmark suite for federated machine learning systems. Previously available benchmarks for federated learning have focused mainly on synthetic datasets and use a very limited number of applications. OARF includes different data partitioning methods (horizontal, vertical and hybrid) as well as emerging applications in image, text and structured data, which represent different scenarios in federated learning. Our characterization shows that the benchmark suite is diverse in data size, distribution, feature distribution and learning task complexity. We have developed reference implementations, and evaluated the important aspects of federated learning, including model accuracy, communication cost, differential privacy, secure multiparty computation and vertical federated learning.

Proof assistants offer tactics to apply proof by induction, but these tactics rely on inputs given by human engineers. We address this problem with SeLFiE, a domain-specific language to encode experienced users' expertise on how to apply the induct tactic in Isabelle/HOL: when we apply an induction heuristic written in SeLFiE to an inductive problem and arguments to the induct tactic, the SeLFiE interpreter examines both the syntactic structure of the problem and semantics of the relevant constants to judge whether the arguments to the induct tactic are plausible for that problem according to the heuristic.

Since modernity, ethic has been progressively fragmented into specific communities of practice. The digital revolution enabled by AI and Data is bringing ethical wicked problems in the crossroads of technology and behavior. However, the need of a comprehensive and constructive ethical framework is emerging as digital platforms connect us globally. The unequal structure of the global system makes that dynamic changes and systemic problems impact more on those that are most vulnerable. Ethical frameworks based only on the individual-level are not longer sufficient. A new ethical vision must comprise the understanding of the scales and complex interconnections of social systems. Many of these systems are internally fragile and very sensitive to external factors and threats, which turns into unethical situations that require systemic solutions. The high scale nature of digital technology that expands globally has also an impact at the individual level having the risk to make humans beings more homogeneous, predictable and ultimately controllable. To preserve the core of humanity ethic must take a stand to preserve and keep promoting individual rights and uniqueness and cultural heterogeneity tackling the negative trends and impact of digitalization. Only combining human-centered and collectiveness-oriented digital development it will be possible to construct new social models and human-machine interactions that are ethical. This vision requires science to enhance ethical frameworks and principles with the actionable insights of relationships and properties of the social systems that may not be evident and need to be quantified and understood to be solved. Artificial Intelligence is both a risk and and opportunity for an ethical development, thus we need a conceptual construct that drives towards a better digitalizated world.

Deliberate manipulation of digital images can be innocuous (e.g., to improve the quality and appearance of an image) or carried with malicious intent (e.g., to alter the semantic content of the image, or to establish an alibi). The diffusion of fake images has implications on judicial systems, global economy, financial health, and even homeland and national security. Not surprisingly, there have been interest from the digital forensics, and more specifically image forensics, community in recent years to detect deliberate manipulation of digital images. There have also been interest from the commercial market, as suggested in a recent study [1]. Image forensics, an emerging forensic discipline, seeks to determine the history of an image (e.g., its origin), the processing it underwent, etc, in order to determine the authenticity of the images [2].