Machine learning algorithms are increasingly being used to make decisions about the individuals in various areas such as university admissions, employment, health, etc. As the individuals gain information about the algorithms being used, they have an incentive to adapt their data so as to be classified desirably. For example, if a student is aware that a university heavily weighs SAT score in their admission process, she will be motivated to achieve a higher SAT score either through extensive test preparation or multiple tries. Such efforts by the students might not change their probability of being successful at the university, but are enough to fool the admissions' process. Therefore, under such "strategic manipulation" of one's data, the predictive power of the decisions are bound to decrease. One way to prevent such manipulation is by keeping the classification algorithms a secret, but this is not a practical solution to the problem, as some information is bound to leak over time and the transparency of these algorithms is a growing social concern. Thus, this motivates the study of algorithms that are optimal under "strategic manipulation". The problem of gaming in the context of classification algorithms is a well known problem and is increasingly gaining researchers' attention, for example, [HMPW16, ALB16, HIV19, MMDH19, DRS

If you're hoping to emerge from your house in a few months with a thorough knowledge of Ancient Greek winemaking and Egyptian funeral rites, might I recommend Assassin's Creed's Discovery Tours? They're free on Ubisoft's website or Uplay (you'll need Uplay to run them) and are absolutely worth grabbing, for you or your kids. Strip out the stabbing, leave the rest. Origins and Odyssey are some of the most intricate digital dioramas ever created. Sure, there's a video game layered on top, but the real draw is the world Ubisoft's artists and animators and scripters created.

UK's estimated coronavirus infection rate is now between 0.7 and 1 The UK's coronavirus R value – the estimated number of people each person infects – is now between 0.7 and 1, according to the government's scientific advisory group for emergencies (SAGE). Five days ago, UK prime minister Boris Johnson said R was between 0.5 and 0.9. The government's science advisors say the increase is not a reflection of coronavirus restrictions being eased in England this week, but rather due to a lag in the data that is used to model the R value. We won't know how easing restrictions has impacted the current R value for another three weeks. Only 1500 of a total of 18,000 coronavirus contact tracers – just over 8 per cent – have been recruited by the UK government by its mid-May deadline, a cabinet minister said today. The government had previously refused to say exactly how many contact tracers it had employed. Up to 8 million people could be on waiting lists for National Health Service (NHS) ...

Is Artificial intelligence (A.I) a revolution or a war? Do we really need more metaphors to describe it? Nowadays, A.I dictates what information is presented to us on social media, which ads we see, and what prices we're offered both on and offline. An algorithm can technically write and analyse books, beat humans at about every game conceivable, make movies, compose classical songs and help magicians perform better tricks. Beyond the arts, it also has the potential to encourage better decision-making, make medical diagnoses, and even solve some of humanity's most pressing challenges. It's intertwining with criminal justice, retail, education, recruiting, healthcare, banking, farming, transportation, warfare, insurance, media… the list goes on. Yet, we're so often busy discussing the ins and outs of whether A.I CAN do something, that we seldom ask if we SHOULD design it at all.

Predictive modelling using machine learning has become very popular for spatial mapping of the environment. Models are often applied to make predictions far beyond sampling locations where new geographic locations might considerably differ from the training data in their environmental properties. However, areas in the predictor space without support of training data are problematic. Since the model has no knowledge about these environments, predictions have to be considered uncertain. Estimating the area to which a prediction model can be reliably applied is required. Here, we suggest a methodology that delineates the "area of applicability" (AOA) that we define as the area, for which the cross-validation error of the model applies. We first propose a "dissimilarity index" (DI) that is based on the minimum distance to the training data in the predictor space, with predictors being weighted by their respective importance in the model. The AOA is then derived by applying a threshold based on the DI of the training data where the DI is calculated with respect to the cross-validation strategy used for model training. We test for the ideal threshold by using simulated data and compare the prediction error within the AOA with the cross-validation error of the model. We illustrate the approach using a simulated case study. Our simulation study suggests a threshold on DI to define the AOA at the .95 quantile of the DI in the training data. Using this threshold, the prediction error within the AOA is comparable to the cross-validation RMSE of the model, while the cross-validation error does not apply outside the AOA. This applies to models being trained with randomly distributed training data, as well as when training data are clustered in space and where spatial cross-validation is applied. We suggest to report the AOA alongside predictions, complementary to validation measures.

Classification of hand drawn sketches with respect to content quality is extremely challenging task, comparing to usual image classification methods. In brief, we need to train computational device to able to classify the images of the same object into different classes with respect their content quality. In this paper we tested several methods of image classification, using machine learning and computer vision algorithms, to classify Draw-a-Person test images sketched by primary school students in Nigeria, aged 4 to 11 years. We collected 1000 original sketches and manually classified them (using guidelines from existing literature) according to the ages (8 classes) before testing this dataset on a computational device. The highest accuracy achieved in this experiment was 62%. We achieved this result with novel method, where we used Bag of Visual Words and K-means algorithm to count key-points on each sketch. We strongly believe that this challenging task needs further research to improve classification accuracy, we, therefore, release the complete dataset of sketches to the community.

British archaeologists who discovered hundreds of artefacts from a cluster of 17th century shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea have had their cargo seized and been accused of an'illicit excavation'. Enigma Recoveries, which led an expedition into the Levantine Basin off the coast of Cyprus, found 12 shipwrecks filled with Chinese porcelain, jugs, coffee pots, peppercorns and illicit tobacco pipes. The ships and their priceless cargo, hailed as the'archaeological equivalent of finding a new planet' were recovered in ancient'shipping lanes' that served spice and silk trades from 300 BC onwards. But in a strongly-worded statement, the Cypriot government accused the company of being well known to both Cyprus and UNESCO for its'illicit underwater excavations' and its'violent extraction of objects causing destruction to their context'. Cyprus's Department of Antiquities accused the company of intending to sell the objects, as allegedly evident in documents filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (NASDAQ).

Starting today through to May 21st, the standalone versions of Ubisoft's Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece and Discovery Tour: Ancient Egypt are free to download on PC as part of the company's Play Your Part, Play at Home campaign to help teachers and students during the coronavirus pandemic. They allow you to explore Assassin's Creed Origins and Odyssey's game worlds without worrying about combat or mission objectives. Along the way, they'll teach you about the historical periods they take place in. In the example of the Ancient Egypt experience, you'll learn more about what life was like in along the Nile delta during the waning years of the Ptolemaic dynasty. The company worked with professional historians to create the experiences and incorporated a variety of primary sources like archival photos into each tour.

Another 3 million US citizens filed for unemployment benefits last week, bringing the total to 36.5 million since mid-March, about 22 per cent of the US workforce. The total number of people who have lost their jobs is likely to be an underestimate because many states still have a backlog of claims to get through. Brazil has become a hotspot for coronavirus infections as the country confirmed a record 11,385 daily coronavirus cases and 749 more deaths yesterday. The total number of confirmed cases is now more than 190,000, the sixth highest in the world. Doctors in the country say a lack of adequate testing means the true number of cases could be ten times higher. A coronavirus antibody test developed by Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche has been approved for use by Public Health England. UK health minister Edward Argar said the test "appears to be extremely reliable". Unlike other forms of testing, antibody tests detect whether someone has been previously infected with the ...

Colocation giant Digital Realty deepened its ties to Nvidia with a service that allows enterprises to deploy Nvidia-powered artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning workloads on Digital Realty's data center platform. Nvidia launched its DGX-Ready Data Center program last year with 19 data center partners including Digital Realty. The AI partner program gives customers access to Nvidia's AI infrastructure inside the colocation providers' facilities. Meanwhile, Digital Realty in November announced PlatformDigital. At launch the data center platform offered customers four new services that they could deploy on top of PlatformDigital.