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Key trends from NeurIPS 2019
With 51 workshops, 1428 accepted papers, and 13k attendees, saying that NeurIPS is overwhelming is an understatement. I did my best to summarize the key trends I got from the conference. This post is generously edited by the wonderful Andrey Kurenkov. Disclaimer: This post doesn't reflect the view of any of the organizations I'm associated with. NeurIPS is huge with a lot to take in, so I might get something wrong.
How Machine Learning Solutions are Transforming Financial Services: An Interview with Data Scientist Dr. Iain Brown Lionbridge AI
Dr. Iain Brown is the Head of Data Science for SAS UK&I and Adjunct Professor of Marketing Analytics at the University of Southampton. For the last decade he has been working closely with the financial services sector, providing thought leadership on the topics of risk, AI and machine learning. During his time at SAS he has been involved in driving innovation in AI and the corresponding fields of machine learning, computer vision and natural language understanding through the delivery of numerous projects. He is also a contributor to SAS' blog and an active member of the AI community on Twitter. In a wide-ranging conversation about the applications of machine learning in the financial services sector, Iain offered some helpful advice around the integration of AI into business models.
Tensor entropy for uniform hypergraphs
Many real world complex systems can be analyzed through a graph/ network prospective. There are two classical and well-known classes of complex networks, scale-fr ee networks and small world networks, which play a significant role in many domains such as social networks, b iology, cognitive science and signal processing [1, 4, 27, 44]. The human genome is a beautiful example of complex dynamic graph. The genome-wide chromosomal conformation (Hi-C) map represents the spatia l proximity of different parts of genome capturing the genome structure over time [40, 42]. When studying s uch dynamic graphs, one is often required to identify the pattern/couple changes including degree distributio n, path lengths, clustering coefficients, etc, in the graph topology in order to capture the dynamics [25, 33, 41]. The von Neumann entropy of a graph, first introduced by Braunst ein et al. [8], is a spectral measure used in structural pattern recognition. The intuition behind this me asure is linking the graph Laplacian to density matrices from quantum mechanics, and measuring the comp lexity of the graphs in terms of the von Neumman entropy of the corresponding density matrices [32]. In ad dition, the measure can be viewed as the information theoretic Shannon entropy, i.e., S null
Interactive Open-Ended Learning for 3D Object Recognition
The thesis contributes in several important ways to the research area of 3D object category learning and recognition. To cope with the mentioned limitations, we look at human cognition, in particular at the fact that human beings learn to recognize object categories ceaselessly over time. This ability to refine knowledge from the set of accumulated experiences facilitates the adaptation to new environments. Inspired by this capability, we seek to create a cognitive object perception and perceptual learning architecture that can learn 3D object categories in an open-ended fashion. In this context, ``open-ended'' implies that the set of categories to be learned is not known in advance, and the training instances are extracted from actual experiences of a robot, and thus become gradually available, rather than being available since the beginning of the learning process. In particular, this architecture provides perception capabilities that will allow robots to incrementally learn object categories from the set of accumulated experiences and reason about how to perform complex tasks. This framework integrates detection, tracking, teaching, learning, and recognition of objects. An extensive set of systematic experiments, in multiple experimental settings, was carried out to thoroughly evaluate the described learning approaches. Experimental results show that the proposed system is able to interact with human users, learn new object categories over time, as well as perform complex tasks. The contributions presented in this thesis have been fully implemented and evaluated on different standard object and scene datasets and empirically evaluated on different robotic platforms.
Global Deep Learning System Market Analysis by Market Key Player, Product Application & Geography
Deep Learning System Market report offers detailed analysis and a five-year forecast for the global Deep Learning System industry. Deep Learning System market report delivers the insights which will shape your strategic planning as you estimate geographic, product or service expansion within the Deep Learning System industry.. The Deep Learning System market accounted for $XX million in 2018, and is expected to reach $XX million by 2024, registering a CAGR of YY% from 2019 to 2024. The global Deep Learning System market is segmented based on product, end user, and region. Region wise, it is analyzed across North America (U.S., Canada, and Mexico), Europe (Germany, UK, Italy, Spain, France, and rest of Europe), Asia-Pacific (Japan, China, Australia, India, South Korea, Taiwan, and, rest of Asia-Pacific) and EMEA (Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, UAE, rest of EMEA). Ask more details or request custom reports to our experts at https://www.proaxivereports.com/pre-order/12206 Moreover, other factors that contribute toward the growth of the Deep Learning System market include favorable government initiatives related to the use of Deep Learning System.
Google develops AI to sort through public photos to track endangered species population
Wild animals are experts at staying out of sight, but a new partnership between Google and the conservation organization Wildlife Insights will try to help scientists capture and analyze pictures of them in their natural habitat. The program will use an artificial intelligence program to sort through photographs taken by small sensor driven camera installations placed in wilderness areas around the world. Google's AI and Cloud services will help researchers analyse and archive the enormous volume of images captured through the program as part of an effort to improve animal conservation strategies all around the world. The camera traps were originally developed in 1990 and in the intervening years have been placed everywhere from Mexico to Madagascar. To date, 4.553 million pictures have been taken from 8,209 camera deployments.
Trintech Expands Artificial Intelligence Strategy to Support the Office of Finance
DALLAS, TX / ACCESSWIRE / December 17, 2019 / Trintech, a leading global provider of integrated Record to Report software solutions for the office of finance, today announced its newest Artificial Intelligence (AI) investments, AI Risk Rating for Journal Entries and Risk Intelligent Inspect powered by MindBridge Ai. Each of these investments leverage Financial Controls AI, a type of Artificial Intelligence developed specifically for the complex needs of the office of finance to identify errors and anomalies in financial data. It uses a risk-based approach to help financial professionals optimize global controls and automate workflow. "Artificial Intelligence is playing a powerful role in helping organizations analyze financial data, identify insights and ultimately remove risk in their balance sheet as far down as each individual transaction," said Michael Ross, Chief Product Officer at Trintech. "As the risk of fraudulent activity and misstatement continues to rise, we are continuing to invest in our AI strategy to better provide our customers with solutions that efficiently and effectively reduce risk throughout their financial close process."
Google's AI can identify wildlife from trap-camera footage with up to 98.6% accuracy
With respect to climate change, poaching, and encroachment on natural habitats, some animal populations have fared far worse than others. It's estimated that the populations of more than 4,000 species shrunk by 60% between 1970 and 2014, and a recent United Nations global assessment found that as many as 1 million species are at risk of extinction within the next decade. That's why Google has partnered with Conservation International and other organizations -- the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Map of Life, World Wide Fund for Nature, Wildlife Conservation Society, and Zoological Society of London, with support from Google's Earth Outreach program and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Lyda Hill Philanthropies. The goal is to help process one of the world's largest and most diverse databases of photographs taken from motion-activated cameras. As of today, the fruits of their labor is available through Google Cloud as a part of Wildlife Insights, an AI-enabled platform that streamlines conservation monitoring by expediting trap-camera photo analysis.
Balancing the Tradeoff Between Clustering Value and Interpretability
Saisubramanian, Sandhya, Galhotra, Sainyam, Zilberstein, Shlomo
Graph clustering groups entities -- the vertices of a graph -- based on their similarity, typically using a complex distance function over a large number of features. Successful integration of clustering approaches in automated decision-support systems hinges on the interpretability of the resulting clusters. This paper addresses the problem of generating interpretable clusters, given features of interest that signify interpretability to an end-user, by optimizing interpretability in addition to common clustering objectives. We propose a $\beta$-interpretable clustering algorithm that ensures that at least $\beta$ fraction of nodes in each cluster share the same feature value. The tunable parameter $\beta$ is user-specified. We also present a more efficient algorithm for scenarios with $\beta\!=\!1$ and analyze the theoretical guarantees of the two algorithms. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the benefits of our approaches in generating interpretable clusters using four real-world datasets. The interpretability of the clusters is complemented by generating simple explanations denoting the feature values of the nodes in the clusters, using frequent pattern mining.
Variable-lag Granger Causality for Time Series Analysis
Amornbunchornvej, Chainarong, Zheleva, Elena, Berger-Wolf, Tanya Y.
Granger causality is a fundamental technique for causal inference in time series data, commonly used in the social and biological sciences. Typical operationalizations of Granger causality make a strong assumption that every time point of the effect time series is influenced by a combination of other time series with a fixed time delay. However, the assumption of the fixed time delay does not hold in many applications, such as collective behavior, financial markets, and many natural phenomena. To address this issue, we develop variable-lag Granger causality, a generalization of Granger causality that relaxes the assumption of the fixed time delay and allows causes to influence effects with arbitrary time delays. In addition, we propose a method for inferring variable-lag Granger causality relations. We demonstrate our approach on an application for studying coordinated collective behavior and show that it performs better than several existing methods in both simulated and real-world datasets. Our approach can be applied in any domain of time series analysis.