Seattle-based smart home appliance maker Wyze, which is popular for selling its products cheaper than its competitors, has been accused of a data breach and trafficking the data to Alibaba Cloud servers in China. In response to the alleged data breach against its production database, Wyze logged outfits users out of their accounts and has strengthened security for its servers. "Customers endured a lengthy reauthentication process as the company responded to a series of reports claiming that the company stored sensitive information about people's security cameras, local networks, and email addresses in exposed databases.", Texas-based Twelve Security, a self-described "boutique" consulting firm, claimed of a data breach against Wyze's two Elasticsearch databases on Medium yesterday. The data has come from 2.4 million users from the United States, United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and parts of Malaysia.

Reservoir computing, a highly successful neuromorphic computing scheme used to filter, predict, classify temporal inputs, has entered an era of microchips for several other engineering and biological applications. A basis for reservoir computing is memory-loss or the echo state property. It is an open problem on how design parameters of the reservoir can be optimized to maximize reservoir freedom to map an input robustly and yet have its close-by-variants represented in the reservoir differently. We present a framework to analyze stability due to input and parameter perturbations and make a surprising fundamental conclusion, that the echo state property is \emph{equivalent} to robustness to input in any nonlinear recurrent neural network that may or may not be in the gambit of reservoir computing. Further, backed by theoretical conclusions, we define and find the difficult-to-describe \emph{input specific} edge-of-criticality or the echo state property threshold, which defines the boundary between parameter related stability and instability.

Tourism information is scattered around nowadays. To search for the information, it is usually time consuming to browse through the results from search engine, select and view the details of each accommodation. In this paper, we present a methodology to extract particular information from full text returned from the search engine to facilitate the users. Then, the users can specifically look to the desired relevant information. The approach can be used for the same task in other domains. The main steps are 1) building training data and 2) building recognition model. First, the tourism data is gathered and the vocabularies are built. The raw corpus is used to train for creating vocabulary embedding. Also, it is used for creating annotated data. The process of creating named entity annotation is presented. Then, the recognition model of a given entity type can be built. From the experiments, given hotel description, the model can extract the desired entity,i.e, name, location, facility. The extracted data can further be stored as a structured information, e.g., in the ontology format, for future querying and inference. The model for automatic named entity identification, based on machine learning, yields the error ranging 8%-25%.

The study and development of autonomous vehicles have seen an increasing interest in recent years, becoming hot topics in both academia and industry. One of the main reasearch areas in this field is related to control systems, in particular planning and decision-making problems. The basic approaches for scheduling high-level maneuver execution modules are based on the concepts of time-to-collision (van der Horst and Hogema, 1994) and headway control (Hatipoglu et al., 1996). In order to add interpretation capabilities to the system, several approaches model the driving decision-making problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP, (Spaan, 2012)), as in (Liu et al., 2015) for urban scenarios and in (Song et al., 2016) for intersection handling. A further extension is proposed in (Bandyopadhyay et al., 2012) where a Mixed Observability Markov Decision Process (MOMDP) (Ong et al., 2010) is used to model uncertainties in agents intentions. However, since vehicles are assumed to behave in a deterministic way, the aforementioned approaches handle many situations with excessive prudence and would not be able to enter in a busy roundabout.

Consider the massive size of real estate lending. The Fed's latest report shows mortgage debt topping $9 trillion. When including mortgages from businesses, it tops $15 trillion. Over 10 million homes and commercial properties sell each year. Equally staggering is how much data exists on the borrowers.

Last year, IBM announced a Data Science Elite team whose only job is to help big enterprise companies push their first AI models into production. Now, more than a year after the program's launch, Rob Thomas, the IBM executive overseeing the AI SWAT team, reports that it has been a "huge success." The team has increased from 30 data scientists to 100, and there are plans to grow significantly next year. "We hire them wherever we can, actually," Thomas said, noting that these data scientists operate all over the world. Companies as diverse as Harley Davidson, Lufthansa, Experian, Sprint, Carrefour, and Siemens used the team for a necessary kickstart on AI projects. And the best part: It's all for free -- or at least there are no contractual obligations to pay.

This was not so much a transformation in terms of connectivity – nearly half the people in the world are not yet internet users, and if you are from a low-income country you probably only have patchy access to 3G if you are lucky. This was a change in the scale and reach of the world's data infrastructures, to a point where no one is truly invisible any more. You may not be able to reach the connected world, but it can certainly reach you. One clear sign of this internationalisation of infrastructure was the expansion of AI-enabled surveillance. A Carnegie Foundation report shows that 47 out of the 65 countries using AI surveillance are doing so with Chinese technology, though US and European firms are also providing substantial amounts.

Technological change and innovation are vitally important, especially for high-tech companies. However, factors influencing their future research and development (R&D) trends are both complicated and various, leading it a quite difficult task to make technology tracing for high-tech companies. To this end, in this paper, we develop a novel data-driven solution, i.e., Deep Technology Forecasting (DTF) framework, to automatically find the most possible technology directions customized to each high-tech company. Specially, DTF consists of three components: Potential Competitor Recognition (PCR), Collaborative Technology Recognition (CTR), and Deep Technology Tracing (DTT) neural network. For one thing, PCR and CTR aim to capture competitive relations among enterprises and collaborative relations among technologies, respectively. For another, DTT is designed for modeling dynamic interactions between companies and technologies with the above relations involved. Finally, we evaluate our DTF framework on real-world patent data, and the experimental results clearly prove that DTF can precisely help to prospect future technology emphasis of companies by exploiting hybrid factors.

Delivering useful hydrological forecasts is critical for urban and agricultural water management, hydropower generation, flood protection and management, drought mitigation and alleviation, and river basin planning and management, among others. In this work, we present and appraise a new methodology for hydrological time series forecasting. This methodology is based on simple combinations. The appraisal is made by using a big dataset consisted of 90-year-long mean annual river flow time series from approximately 600 stations. Covering large parts of North America and Europe, these stations represent various climate and catchment characteristics, and thus can collectively support benchmarking. Five individual forecasting methods and 26 variants of the introduced methodology are applied to each time series. The application is made in one-step ahead forecasting mode. The individual methods are the last-observation benchmark, simple exponential smoothing, complex exponential smoothing, automatic autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average (ARFIMA) and Facebook's Prophet, while the 26 variants are defined by all the possible combinations (per two, three, four or five) of the five afore-mentioned methods. The findings have both practical and theoretical implications. The simple methodology of the study is identified as well-performing in the long run. Our large-scale results are additionally exploited for finding an interpretable relationship between predictive performance and temporal dependence in the river flow time series, and for examining one-year ahead river flow predictability.

There is currently an unprecedented demand for large-scale temporal data analysis due to the explosive growth of data. Dynamic topic modeling has been widely used in social and data sciences with the goal of learning latent topics that emerge, evolve, and fade over time. Previous work on dynamic topic modeling primarily employ the method of nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), where slices of the data tensor are each factorized into the product of lower-dimensional nonnegative matrices. With this approach, however, information contained in the temporal dimension of the data is often neglected or underutilized. To overcome this issue, we propose instead adopting the method of nonnegative CANDECOMP/PARAPAC (CP) tensor decomposition (NNCPD), where the data tensor is directly decomposed into a minimal sum of outer products of nonnegative vectors, thereby preserving the temporal information. The viability of NNCPD is demonstrated through application to both synthetic and real data, where significantly improved results are obtained compared to those of typical NMF-based methods. The advantages of NNCPD over such approaches are studied and discussed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that NNCPD has been utilized for the purpose of dynamic topic modeling, and our findings will be transformative for both applications and further developments.