Africa
Linear Tensor Projection Revealing Nonlinearity
Maruhashi, Koji, Park, Heewon, Yamaguchi, Rui, Miyano, Satoru
Dimensionality reduction is an effective method for learning high-dimensional data, which can provide better understanding of decision boundaries in human-readable low-dimensional subspace. Linear methods, such as principal component analysis and linear discriminant analysis, make it possible to capture the correlation between many variables; however, there is no guarantee that the correlations that are important in predicting data can be captured. Moreover, if the decision boundary has strong nonlinearity, the guarantee becomes increasingly difficult. This problem is exacerbated when the data are matrices or tensors that represent relationships between variables. We propose a learning method that searches for a subspace that maximizes the prediction accuracy while retaining as much of the original data information as possible, even if the prediction model in the subspace has strong nonlinearity. This makes it easier to interpret the mechanism of the group of variables behind the prediction problem that the user wants to know. We show the effectiveness of our method by applying it to various types of data including matrices and tensors.
Scientists introduce new method for machine learning classifications in quantum computing
Quantum information scientists have introduced a new method for machine-learning classifications in quantum computing. The non-linear quantum kernels in a quantum binary classifier provide new insights for improving the accuracy of quantum machine learning, deemed able to outperform the current AI technology. The research team led by Professor June-Koo Kevin Rhee from the School of Electrical Engineering, proposed a quantum classifier based on quantum state fidelity by using a different initial state and replacing the Hadamard classification with a swap test. Unlike the conventional approach, this method is expected to significantly enhance the classification tasks when the training dataset is small, by exploiting the quantum advantage in finding non-linear features in a large feature space. Quantum machine learning holds promise as one of the imperative applications for quantum computing.
Building An AI Startup In Africa
Is talent really equally distributed? Karim helps companies getting a grip on the latest AI advancements and implementing them. A graduate of France's Ecole Polytechnique and former Program Fellow at NYU's Courant Institute, Karim has a passion for teaching and using applied mathematics. This led him to co-found InstaDeep, an AI startup that was nominated at the MWC17 for the Top 20 global startup list made by PCMAG. Karim uses TensorFlow to develop Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning products.
Loon's balloon-powered internet service is live in Kenya
A bit later than expected, Loon has finally launched its balloon-powered 4G internet service in Kenya. Through a partnership with Telkom Kenya, the balloons have served 35,000 customers and are covering about 50,000 square kilometres. Loon has been used to make voice and video calls, browse the web, email, text, access WhatsApp and stream YouTube. Loon plans to use a fleet of about 35 balloons in Kenya, and it describes the system as a "carefully choreographed and orchestrated balloon dance." At any given time, a balloon might be actively serving users, operating as a link in the mesh network to beam internet to other vehicles or repositioning itself via machine learning algorithms.
Digital Transformation and the 4IR - AI, Blockchain, IoT, Fintech
Digital Transformation and the 4IR – AI, Blockchain, IoT, Fintech is not a steady, fixed concept. It has evolved swiftly, over the course of various years, by gradual improvements of the technology, particularly the Internet, which fostered increasing digitization. Jeremy Rifkin, a US economist, futurist, and sociologist, who has analysed the shifts in society due to technology over the course of various decades, has written widely about the topic. He was the first one to tackle the impact of digital technologies and how these were triggering what he saw as a profound industrial shift. He described that shift, which he called "third industrial revolution", in his book "The Third Industrial Revolution; How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World" (2011).
Learning Combined Set Covering and Traveling Salesman Problem
The Traveling Salesman Problem is one of the most intensively studied combinatorial optimization problems due both to its range of real-world applications and its computational complexity. When combined with the Set Covering Problem, it raises even more issues related to tractability and scalability. We study a combined Set Covering and Traveling Salesman problem and provide a mixed integer programming formulation to solve the problem. Motivated by applications where the optimal policy needs to be updated on a regular basis and repetitively solving this via MIP can be computationally expensive, we propose a machine learning approach to effectively deal with this problem by providing an opportunity to learn from historical optimal solutions that are derived from the MIP formulation. We also present a case study using the vaccine distribution chain of the World Health Organization, and provide numerical results with data derived from four countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
Learning Branching Heuristics for Propositional Model Counting
Vaezipoor, Pashootan, Lederman, Gil, Wu, Yuhuai, Maddison, Chris J., Grosse, Roger, Lee, Edward, Seshia, Sanjit A., Bacchus, Fahiem
Propositional model counting or #SAT is the problem of computing the number of satisfying assignments of a Boolean formula and many discrete probabilistic inference problems can be translated into a model counting problem to be solved by #SAT solvers. Generic ``exact'' #SAT solvers, however, are often not scalable to industrial-level instances. In this paper, we present Neuro#, an approach for learning branching heuristics for exact #SAT solvers via evolution strategies (ES) to reduce the number of branching steps the solver takes to solve an instance. We experimentally show that our approach not only reduces the step count on similarly distributed held-out instances but it also generalizes to much larger instances from the same problem family. The gap between the learned and the vanilla solver on larger instances is sometimes so wide that the learned solver can even overcome the run time overhead of querying the model and beat the vanilla in wall-clock time by orders of magnitude.
Community detection and Social Network analysis based on the Italian wars of the 15th century
Fumanal-Idocin, J., Alonso-Betanzos, A., Cordón, O., Bustince, H., Minárová, M.
In this contribution we study social network modelling by using human interaction as a basis. To do so, we propose a new set of functions, affinities, designed to capture the nature of the local interactions among each pair of actors in a network. By using these functions, we develop a new community detection algorithm, the Borgia Clustering, where communities naturally arise from the multi-agent interaction in the network. We also discuss the effects of size and scale for communities regarding this case, as well as how we cope with the additional complexity present when big communities arise. Finally, we compare our community detection solution with other representative algorithms, finding favourable results.