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AI helped limit spread of Covid-19 in the Gulf, experts hear

#artificialintelligence

Artificial intelligence has been vital in controlling the spread of the coronavirus in the Arabian Gulf, a health conference has been told. Technology has forecast the pandemic's development and informed residents when they have been in contact with infected individuals, the Riyadh Global Digital Health Summit heard. The summit was also told that the rapid growth in telemedicine – such as video or telephone consultations – is not likely to be reversed when the pandemic is over. However, experts cautioned that organisations were not doing enough to share vital data that could save lives and certain ethical concerns about the use of data had not been resolved. Dr Esam Al Wagait, director of Saudi Arabia's National Information Centre, said the Kingdom's artificial intelligence (AI) based Covid-19 Index had been crucial in forecasting the virus's spread locally, including which areas would be most heavily affected and how many people would fall ill.


Assessing Gender Gaps in Artificial Intelligence

#artificialintelligence

As roles and tasks shift in tandem with the expansion of new technologies, and the division of work between human and machine is redrawn, it is of critical importance to monitor how those changes will impact the evolution of economic gender gaps. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a prominent driver of change within the transformations brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), and can serve as key marker of the trajectory of innovation across industries.19 In partnership with the LinkedIn Economic Graph Team, the World Economic Forum aims to provide fresh evidence of the emerging contours of gender parity in the new world of work through near-term labour market information. The increasing expansion of AI is creating the demand for a range of new skills, among them neural networks, deep learning, machine learning, and "tools" such as Weka and Scikit-Learn. AI skills are among the fastest-growing specializations among professionals represented on the LinkedIn platform.


Tensor Decompositions in Recursive Neural Networks for Tree-Structured Data

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The paper introduces two new aggregation functions to encode structural knowledge from tree-structured data. They leverage the Canonical and Tensor-Train decompositions to yield expressive context aggregation while limiting the number of model parameters. Finally, we define two novel neural recursive models for trees leveraging such aggregation functions, and we test them on two tree classification tasks, showing the advantage of proposed models when tree outdegree increases.


How a 30-Ton Robot Could Help Crops Withstand Climate Change

WSJ.com: WSJD - Technology

The 70-foot-tall colossus, called a "Field Scanalyzer," is the world's biggest agricultural robot, the project's researchers say. Resembling an oversize scaffold with a box perched in its middle, it lumbers daily over 2 acres of crops including sorghum, lettuce and wheat, its cluster of electronic eyes assessing their temperature, shape and hue, the angle of each leaf. The Scanalyzer beams this data--up to 10 terabytes a day, roughly equivalent to about 2.6 million copies of Tolstoy's "War and Peace"--to computers in Illinois and Missouri. Analyzing the range and depth of data generated is possible only with machine-learning algorithms, according to data scientists at George Washington University and St. Louis University, where researchers are teaching the computers to identify connections between specific genes and plant traits the Scanalyzer observes. Deep learning, a form of AI that uses conclusions from data to further refine a system, can also help pinpoint how some varieties of a plant may subtly differ from one another in ways that plant scientists may not anticipate, researchers say.


Industrial-grade VR company Varjo picks up $52M in Series C funding – TechCrunch

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Varjo, the Finnish startup that has developed a virtual and mixed reality headset capable of "human-eye resolution" for use in various enterprise applications, has closed a $51.7 million in Series C funding. Existing investors including Lifeline Ventures, Atomico, EQT Ventures and Volvo Cars Tech Fund have also followed on. It brings total raised by Varjo to around $100 million to date. The company is also announcing the appointment of Timo Toikkanen, who was previously president and COO of Varjo, as its new CEO. Co-founder and previous CEO, Niko Eiden, becomes CXO where he'll be tasked with continuing to drive the company's technology innovations and, notably, remains a board member.


Mathematical Reasoning via Self-supervised Skip-tree Training

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We examine whether self-supervised language modeling applied to mathematical formulas enables logical reasoning. We suggest several logical reasoning tasks that can be used to evaluate language models trained on formal mathematical statements, such as type inference, suggesting missing assumptions and completing equalities. To train language models for formal mathematics, we propose a novel skip-tree task. We find that models trained on the skip-tree task show surprisingly strong mathematical reasoning abilities, and outperform models trained on standard skip-sequence tasks. We also analyze the models' ability to formulate new conjectures by measuring how often the predictions are provable and useful in other proofs.


Adaptive Tensor Learning with Tensor Networks

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Tensor decomposition techniques have shown great successes in machine learning and data science by extending classical algorithms based on matrix factorization to multi-modal and multi-way data. However, there exist many tensor decomposition models (CP, Tucker, Tensor Train, etc.) and the rank of such a decomposition is typically a collection of integers rather than a unique number, making model and hyper-parameter selection a tedious and costly task. At the same time, tensor network methods are powerful tools developed in the physics community which have recently shown their potential for machine learning applications and offer a unifying view of the various tensor decomposition models. In this paper, we leverage the tensor network formalism to develop a generic and efficient adaptive algorithm for tensor learning. Our method is based on a simple greedy approach optimizing a differentiable loss function starting from a rank one tensor and successively identifying the most promising tensor network edges for small rank increments. Our algorithm can adaptively identify tensor network structures with small number of parameters that effectively optimize the objective function from data. The framework we introduce is very broad and encompasses many common tensor optimization problems. Experiments on tensor decomposition and tensor completion tasks with both synthetic and real world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.


Data science: the key to growing your business in Africa

#artificialintelligence

Do you want to understand why your competitors are winning the business of potential clients? How do you predict future trends within your marketplace? Are you looking to predict government policy decisions that will affect you and your business? These are the questions that can be answered by a team of data scientists that will improve your business and your understanding of your clients. Let's take the first question: "Why are your competitors winning the business of potential clients that you may be missing out on."


To Catch a Poacher: How Our Engineers Brought AI Tech to the Fight Against the Illegal Wildlife Trade

#artificialintelligence

In the wildlife reserves of East Africa, elephants, rhinos, gorillas, and other large mammals are hunted by poachers. All that stands between these animals and harm's way are small teams of park rangers and conservationists. The danger is very real for these species on the brink: A staggering 35,000 African elephants are killed each year, putting them just a decade away from extinction, according to the non-profit RESOLVE. Technology is an increasingly critical tool for protecting elephants and other large animals, given their necessarily expansive habitats: A group of just 50 rangers in Kenya, for example, covers a reserve of 3,000 square miles. Park rangers and conservationists have used motion-activated camera traps to catch poachers in action, but the animals are tragically already lost by the time rangers can respond.


Algorithms and Ordering Heuristics for Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems - Programmer Books

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DisCSP (Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problem) is a general framework for solving distributed problems arising in Distributed Artificial Intelligence. A wide variety of problems in artificial intelligence are solved using the constraint satisfaction problem paradigm. However, there are several applications in multi-agent coordination that are of a distributed nature. In this type of application, the knowledge about the problem, that is, variables and constraints, may be logically or geographically distributed among physical distributed agents. This distribution is mainly due to privacy and/or security requirements.