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5 Tips for Helping Kids Learn About Coding and Robotics

#artificialintelligence

The current health scare has prompted many parents to rethink their children's learning habits and after-school activities. Although most schools continue to operate normally, many parents have put a temporary halt to some of their kids' usual activities in an effort to keep them safe and healthy. These include after-school sports clubs and learning programs. As a result, children are now spending all their free time in their homes. Making changes in your children's studying methods and after-school activities, though, does not mean that they experience a learning slide and spend their free time doing nothing productive.


Multilinear Common Component Analysis via Kronecker Product Representation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We consider the problem of extracting a common structure from multiple tensor datasets. To obtain the common structure from the multiple tensor datasets, we propose multilinear common component analysis (MCCA) based on Kronecker products of mode-wise covariance matrices. MCCA constructs the common basis represented by linear combinations of original variables without losing the information of multiple tensor datasets as possible. We also develop an estimation algorithm of MCCA that guarantees mode-wise global convergence. The numerical studies are conducted to show the effectiveness of MCCA.


No, Amazon Won't Deliver You a Burrito by Drone Anytime Soon

WIRED

In mid-July, a UPS subsidiary called Flight Forward and the drone company Matternet started a project with the Wake Forest Baptist Health system in North Carolina. The companies' aims are decidedly futuristic: to ferry specialty medicines and protective equipment between two of the system's facilities, less than a half-mile apart. Think of it: little flying machines, zipping about at speeds up to 43 mph, bearing the goods to heal. At this point, though, the drone operations are a little, well, human. The quadcopters must be operated by specialized drone pilots, who must pass a challenging aeronautical knowledge test to get their licenses.


The Big Freelance Skills Needed As Companies Rebuild After COVID 19

#artificialintelligence

Over twenty two million Americans lost their jobs in a little less than a month due to COVID 19. It took the Great Depression more than four years to achieve an equivalent level of unemployment. Millions of freelancers around the world have also lost critical project and consulting work; many clients have closed up shop. Gigsters have struggled to make a living as companies focus on conserving cash, reducing non-essential expense, and planning for an uncertain post COVID 19 world. What freelance skills / professional specialties are likely to be most in demand on your platform as the global economy begins to emerge out of COVID 19?


Blind Spots in AI Ethics and Biases in AI governance

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

There is an interesting link between critical theory and certain genres of literature that may be of interest to the current debate on AI ethics. While critical theory generally points out certain deficiencies in the present to criticize it, futurology and literary genres such as Cyberpunk, extrapolate our present deficits in possible dystopian futures to criticize the status quo. Given the great advance of the AI industry in recent years, an increasing number of ethical matters have been raised and debated, usually in the form of ethical guidelines and unpublished manuscripts by governments, the private sector, and academic sources. However, recent meta-analyses in the field of AI ethics have raised important questions such as: what is being omitted from published ethical guidelines? Does AI governance occur inclusively and diversely? Is this form of "ethics", based on soft rules and principles, efficient? In this study, I would like to present aspects omitted or barely mentioned in the current debate on AI ethics and defend the point that applied ethics should not be based on creating only soft versions of real legislation, but rather on criticizing the status quo for everything of value that is disregarded.


"And the Winner Is...": Dynamic Lotteries for Multi-group Fairness-Aware Recommendation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As recommender systems are being designed and deployed for an increasing number of socially-consequential applications, it has become important to consider what properties of fairness these systems exhibit. There has been considerable research on recommendation fairness. However, we argue that the previous literature has been based on simple, uniform and often uni-dimensional notions of fairness assumptions that do not recognize the real-world complexities of fairness-aware applications. In this paper, we explicitly represent the design decisions that enter into the trade-off between accuracy and fairness across multiply-defined and intersecting protected groups, supporting multiple fairness metrics. The framework also allows the recommender to adjust its performance based on the historical view of recommendations that have been delivered over a time horizon, dynamically rebalancing between fairness concerns. Within this framework, we formulate lottery-based mechanisms for choosing between fairness concerns, and demonstrate their performance in two recommendation domains.


Isotonic regression with unknown permutations: Statistics, computation, and adaptation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Motivated by models for multiway comparison data, we consider the problem of estimating a coordinate-wise isotonic function on the domain $[0, 1]^d$ from noisy observations collected on a uniform lattice, but where the design points have been permuted along each dimension. While the univariate and bivariate versions of this problem have received significant attention, our focus is on the multivariate case $d \geq 3$. We study both the minimax risk of estimation (in empirical $L_2$ loss) and the fundamental limits of adaptation (quantified by the adaptivity index) to a family of piecewise constant functions. We provide a computationally efficient Mirsky partition estimator that is minimax optimal while also achieving the smallest adaptivity index possible for polynomial time procedures. Thus, from a worst-case perspective and in sharp contrast to the bivariate case, the latent permutations in the model do not introduce significant computational difficulties over and above vanilla isotonic regression. On the other hand, the fundamental limits of adaptation are significantly different with and without unknown permutations: Assuming a hardness conjecture from average-case complexity theory, a statistical-computational gap manifests in the former case. In a complementary direction, we show that natural modifications of existing estimators fail to satisfy at least one of the desiderata of optimal worst-case statistical performance, computational efficiency, and fast adaptation. Along the way to showing our results, we improve adaptation results in the special case $d = 2$ and establish some properties of estimators for vanilla isotonic regression, both of which may be of independent interest.


Towards Probabilistic Tensor Canonical Polyadic Decomposition 2.0: Automatic Tensor Rank Learning Using Generalized Hyperbolic Prior

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Tensor rank learning for canonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) has long been deemed as an essential but challenging problem. In particular, since the tensor rank controls the complexity of the CPD model, its inaccurate learning would cause overfitting to noise or underfitting to the signal sources, and even destroy the interpretability of model parameters. However, the optimal determination of a tensor rank is known to be a non-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-hard) task. Rather than exhaustively searching for the best tensor rank via trial-and-error experiments, Bayesian inference under the Gaussian-gamma prior was introduced in the context of probabilistic CPD modeling and it was shown to be an effective strategy for automatic tensor rank determination. This triggered flourishing research on other structured tensor CPDs with automatic tensor rank learning. As the other side of the coin, these research works also reveal that the Gaussian-gamma model does not perform well for high-rank tensors or/and low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). To overcome these drawbacks, in this paper, we introduce a more advanced generalized hyperbolic (GH) prior to the probabilistic CPD model, which not only includes the Gaussian-gamma model as a special case, but also provides more flexibilities to adapt to different levels of sparsity. Based on this novel probabilistic model, an algorithm is developed under the framework of variational inference, where each update is obtained in a closed-form. Extensive numerical results, using synthetic data and real-world datasets, demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed method in learning both low as well as high tensor ranks even for low SNR cases.


Eight case studies on regulating biometric technology show us a path forward

MIT Technology Review

Amba Kak was in law school in India when the country rolled out the Aadhaar project in 2009. The national biometric ID system, conceived as a comprehensive identity program, sought to collect the fingerprints, iris scans, and photographs of all residents. It wasn't long, Kak remembers, before stories about its devastating consequences began to spread. "We were suddenly hearing reports of how manual laborers who work with their hands--how their fingerprints were failing the system, and they were then being denied access to basic necessities," she says. "We actually had starvation deaths in India that were being linked to the barriers that these biometric ID systems were creating. So it was a really crucial issue."


Phenotypical Ontology Driven Framework for Multi-Task Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Despite the large number of patients in Electronic Health Records (EHRs), the subset of usable data for modeling outcomes of specific phenotypes are often imbalanced and of modest size. This can be attributed to the uneven coverage of medical concepts in EHRs. In this paper, we propose OMTL, an Ontology-driven Multi-Task Learning framework, that is designed to overcome such data limitations. The key contribution of our work is the effective use of knowledge from a predefined well-established medical relationship graph (ontology) to construct a novel deep learning network architecture that mirrors this ontology. It can effectively leverage knowledge from a well-established medical relationship graph (ontology) by constructing a deep learning network architecture that mirrors this graph. This enables common representations to be shared across related phenotypes, and was found to improve the learning performance. The proposed OMTL naturally allows for multitask learning of different phenotypes on distinct predictive tasks. These phenotypes are tied together by their semantic distance according to the external medical ontology. Using the publicly available MIMIC-III database, we evaluate OMTL and demonstrate its efficacy on several real patient outcome predictions over state-of-the-art multi-task learning schemes.