This paper proposes a simple yet effective method for human action recognition in video. The proposed method separately extracts local appearance and motion features using state-of-the-art three-dimensional convolutional neural networks from sampled snippets of a video. These local features are then concatenated to form global representations which are then used to train a linear SVM to perform the action classification using full context of the video, as partial context as used in previous works. The videos undergo two simple proposed preprocessing techniques, optical flow scaling and crop filling. We perform an extensive evaluation on three common benchmark dataset to empirically show the benefit of the SVM, and the two preprocessing steps.

In todays global economy, accuracy in predicting macro-economic parameters such as the foreign the exchange rate or at least estimating the trend correctly is of key importance for any future investment. In recent times, the use of computational intelligence-based techniques for forecasting macroeconomic variables has been proven highly successful. This paper tries to come up with a multivariate time series approach to forecast the exchange rate (USD/INR) while parallelly comparing the performance of three multivariate prediction modelling techniques: Vector Auto Regression (a Traditional Econometric Technique), Support Vector Machine (a Contemporary Machine Learning Technique), and Recurrent Neural Networks (a Contemporary Deep Learning Technique). We have used monthly historical data for several macroeconomic variables from April 1994 to December 2018 for USA and India to predict USD-INR Foreign Exchange Rate. The results clearly depict that contemporary techniques of SVM and RNN (Long Short-Term Memory) outperform the widely used traditional method of Auto Regression. The RNN model with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) provides the maximum accuracy (97.83%) followed by SVM Model (97.17%) and VAR Model (96.31%). At last, we present a brief analysis of the correlation and interdependencies of the variables used for forecasting.

Video summarisation can be posed as the task of extracting important parts of a video in order to create an informative summary of what occurred in the video. In this paper we introduce SummaryNet as a supervised learning framework for automated video summarisation. SummaryNet employs a two-stream convolutional network to learn spatial (appearance) and temporal (motion) representations. It utilizes an encoder-decoder model to extract the most salient features from the learned video representations. Lastly, it uses a sigmoid regression network with bidirectional long short-term memory cells to predict the probability of a frame being a summary frame. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that the proposed method achieves comparable or significantly better results than the state-of-the-art video summarisation methods.

Simplex-valued data appear throughout statistics and machine learning, for example in the context of transfer learning and compression of deep networks. Existing models for this class of data rely on the Dirichlet distribution or other related loss functions; here we show these standard choices suffer systematically from a number of limitations, including bias and numerical issues that frustrate the use of flexible network models upstream of these distributions. We resolve these limitations by introducing a novel exponential family of distributions for modeling simplex-valued data - the continuous categorical, which arises as a nontrivial multivariate generalization of the recently discovered continuous Bernoulli. Unlike the Dirichlet and other typical choices, the continuous categorical results in a well-behaved probabilistic loss function that produces unbiased estimators, while preserving the mathematical simplicity of the Dirichlet. As well as exploring its theoretical properties, we introduce sampling methods for this distribution that are amenable to the reparameterization trick, and evaluate their performance. Lastly, we demonstrate that the continuous categorical outperforms standard choices empirically, across a simulation study, an applied example on multi-party elections, and a neural network compression task.

Past work on evacuation planning assumes that evacuees will follow instructions -- however, there is ample evidence that this is not the case. While some people will follow instructions, others will follow their own desires. In this paper, we present a formal definition of a behavior-based evacuation problem (BBEP) in which a human behavior model is taken into account when planning an evacuation. We show that a specific form of constraints can be used to express such behaviors. We show that BBEPs can be solved exactly via an integer program called BB_IP, and inexactly by a much faster algorithm that we call BB_Evac. We conducted a detailed experimental evaluation of both algorithms applied to buildings (though in principle the algorithms can be applied to any graphs) and show that the latter is an order of magnitude faster than BB_IP while producing results that are almost as good on one real-world building graph and as well as on several synthetically generated graphs.

The graph represents a network of 2,185 Twitter users whose tweets in the requested range contained "#cloudcomputing", or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets. The network was obtained from the NodeXL Graph Server on Monday, 17 February 2020 at 14:42 UTC. The requested start date was Monday, 17 February 2020 at 01:01 UTC and the maximum number of days (going backward) was 14. The maximum number of tweets collected was 5,000. The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 2-day, 0-hour, 29-minute period from Thursday, 13 February 2020 at 12:00 UTC to Saturday, 15 February 2020 at 12:30 UTC.

Top 10 Tech Trends for 2020, and Beyond

The Dubai Silicon Oasis (DSO) in partnership with Intel has announced the launch of a new phase of the Intel Innovation Center in the integrated free zone technology park. The new phase will be hosted by Dubai Technology Entrepreneur Campus (Dtec), DSOA's wholly owned tech incubation center. Moreover, the Intel Innovation Center's new phase will directly be aligned with "Project Mustakbal", an Intel initiative that seeks to accelerate the Middle East's digital transformation. The Centre set to become a hub for future technological development in the region that will feature artificial intelligence (AI), Blockchain, Video analytics and Autonomous Driving. Muammar Al Katheeri, Executive Vice President of Engineering and Smart City at DSOA, said in a statement, "Four years ago, we launched with Intel the region's first Internet of Things (IoT) ignition lab that has already added significant value to tech start-ups and entrepreneurs in the UAE. Today we celebrate our partnership with Intel as we step forward together into a new milestone through the inauguration of the Intel Innovation Center that has found an ideal home at DSO. With its dynamic mix of business partners and boasting an environment that fosters the entrepreneurial spirit, DSO continues to push the boundaries of technological innovation."

The recent advances in Natural Language Processing have been a boon for well-represented languages in terms of available curated data and research resources. One of the challenges for low-resourced languages is clear guidelines on the collection, curation and preparation of datasets for different use-cases. In this work, we take on the task of creation of two datasets that are focused on news headlines (i.e short text) for Setswana and Sepedi and creation of a news topic classification task. We document our work and also present baselines for classification. We investigate an approach on data augmentation, better suited to low resource languages, to improve the performance of the classifiers

Land-use regression (LUR) models are important for the assessment of air pollution concentrations in areas without measurement stations. While many such models exist, they often use manually constructed features based on restricted, locally available data. Thus, they are typically hard to reproduce and challenging to adapt to areas beyond those they have been developed for. In this paper, we advocate a paradigm shift for LUR models: We propose the Data-driven, Open, Global (DOG) paradigm that entails models based on purely data-driven approaches using only openly and globally available data. Progress within this paradigm will alleviate the need for experts to adapt models to the local characteristics of the available data sources and thus facilitate the generalizability of air pollution models to new areas on a global scale. In order to illustrate the feasibility of the DOG paradigm for LUR, we introduce a deep learning model called MapLUR. It is based on a convolutional neural network architecture and is trained exclusively on globally and openly available map data without requiring manual feature engineering. We compare our model to state-of-the-art baselines like linear regression, random forests and multi-layer perceptrons using a large data set of modeled $\text{NO}_2$ concentrations in Central London. Our results show that MapLUR significantly outperforms these approaches even though they are provided with manually tailored features. Furthermore, we illustrate that the automatic feature extraction inherent to models based on the DOG paradigm can learn features that are readily interpretable and closely resemble those commonly used in traditional LUR approaches.