Africa
Machine Learning for a Low-cost Air Pollution Network
We consider the example of a deployment of an air pollution monitoring network in Kampala, an East African city. Air pollution contributes to over three million deaths globally each year(Lelieveld and others, 2015). Kampala has one of the highest concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) of any African city Mead (2017) Hence we know little about its distribution or extent. Lower cost devices do exist, but these do not, on their own, provide the accuracy required for decision makers. In our case study, the Kampala network of sensors consists largely of low cost optical particle counters (OPCs) that give estimates of the PM2.5 particulate concentration.
Rademacher complexity and spin glasses: A link between the replica and statistical theories of learning
Abbara, Alia, Aubin, Benjamin, Krzakala, Florent, Zdeborová, Lenka
Statistical learning theory provides bounds of the generalization gap, using in particular the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension and the Rademacher complexity. An alternative approach, mainly studied in the statistical physics literature, is the study of generalization in simple synthetic-data models. Here we discuss the connections between these approaches and focus on the link between the Rademacher complexity in statistical learning and the theories of generalization for typical-case synthetic models from statistical physics, involving quantities known as Gardner capacity and ground state energy. We show that in these models the Rademacher complexity is closely related to the ground state energy computed by replica theories. Using this connection, one may reinterpret many results of the literature as rigorous Rademacher bounds in a variety of models in the high-dimensional statistics limit. Somewhat surprisingly, we also show that statistical learning theory provides predictions for the behavior of the ground-state energies in some full replica symmetry breaking models.
Tensor Recovery from Noisy and Multi-Level Quantized Measurements
Wang, Ren, Wang, Meng, Xiong, Jinjun
Tensor Recovery from Noisy and Multi-Level Quantized Measurements Ren Wang, Meng Wang, Jinjun Xiong Abstract --Higher-order tensors can represent scores in a rating system, frames in a video, and images of the same subject. In practice, the measurements are often highly quantized due to the sampling strategies or the quality of devices. Existing works on tensor recovery have focused on data losses and random noises. Only a few works consider tensor recovery from quantized measurements but are restricted to binary measurements. This paper, for the first time, addresses the problem of tensor recovery from multilevel quantized measurements. Leveraging the low-rank property of the tensor, this paper proposes a nonconvex optimization problem for tensor recovery. We provide a theoretical upper bound of the recovery error, which diminishes to zero when the sizes of dimensions increase to infinity. Our error bound significantly improves over the existing results in one-bit tensor recovery and quantized matrix recovery. A tensor-based alternating proximal gradient descent algorithm with a convergence guarantee is proposed to solve the nonconvex problem. Our recovery method can handle data losses and do not need the information of the quantization rule. The method is validated on synthetic data, image datasets, and music recommender datasets. I NTRODUCTION Many practical datasets are highly noisy and quantized, and recovering the actual values from quantized measurements finds applications in different domains.
From algae to AI, the 12 themes experts predict will shape the world in 50 years
If you had to imagine what we will be obsessing over in 50 years, what would top your list? We put versions of that question to dozens of entrepreneurs, scientists, academics, and artists, including Richard Branson, Temple Grandin, Ian Bremmer, Ann Kim, and Bright Simons. From their 550 answers, some clear themes emerged: AI will be transformative, climate change will dominate, the genetic revolution will be in full swing. When taken together, these themes paint a fascinating picture of our future world, from the perspective of people who have laid the groundwork to shape it. The themes show that, while experts anticipate that technology will play a big role in our lives in the future, it won't take away our humanity.
AWS Announces Five New Machine Learning Services That Reinvent and Improve Everyday Enterprise Tasks – With No Machine Learning Experience Required
AWS introduced new services that use AI to allow more developers to apply machine learning to create better end user experiences, including new machine learning-powered enterprise search, code reviews and profiling, fraud detection, medical transcription, and human review of AI predictions. Machine learning continues to grow at a rapid clip, and today there are tens of thousands of customers doing machine learning on AWS (twice as many as the next largest cloud provider), including many customers that opt to use AWS's fully managed AI Services like Alfresco, Bayer Crop Science, Cerner, CJ Cox Automotive, C-SPAN, Deloitte, Domino's, Emirates NBD, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, FICO, FINRA, Gallup, Kelley Blue Book, Kia, Mainichi Newspapers Co, NASA, PricewaterhouseCoopers, White House Historical Association, and Zola. In the past year, AWS has introduced several new fully managed AI Services like Amazon Personalize and Amazon Forecast that allow customers to benefit from the same personalization and forecasting machine learning technology used by Amazon's consumer business to power its award-winning customer experiences. AWS customers are interested in learning from Amazon's vast experience using machine learning at scale to improve operations and deliver better customer experiences, without needing to train, tune, and deploy their own custom machine learning models. Today, AWS is announcing five new AI services that build upon Amazon's rich experience with machine learning, and allow organizations of all sizes across all industries to adopt machine learning in their enterprises – with no machine learning experience required. Despite many attempts over many years, internal search remains a vexing problem for today's enterprises, and most employees still frequently struggle to find the information they need. Organizations have vast amounts of unstructured text data, much of it incredibly useful if it can be discovered, stored in many formats and spread across different data sources (e.g.
Improving Policies via Search in Cooperative Partially Observable Games
Lerer, Adam, Hu, Hengyuan, Foerster, Jakob, Brown, Noam
Recent superhuman results in games have largely been achieved in a variety of zero-sum settings, such as Go and Poker, in which agents need to compete against others. However, just like humans, real-world AI systems have to coordinate and communicate with other agents in cooperative partially observable environments as well. These settings commonly require participants to both interpret the actions of others and to act in a way that is informative when being interpreted. Those abilities are typically summarized as theory of mind and are seen as crucial for social interactions. In this paper we propose two different search techniques that can be applied to improve an arbitrary agreed-upon policy in a cooperative partially observable game. The first one, single-agent search, effectively converts the problem into a single agent setting by making all but one of the agents play according to the agreed-upon policy. In contrast, in multi-agent search all agents carry out the same common-knowledge search procedure whenever doing so is computationally feasible, and fall back to playing according to the agreed-upon policy otherwise. We prove that these search procedures are theoretically guaranteed to at least maintain the original performance of the agreed-upon policy (up to a bounded approximation error). In the benchmark challenge problem of Hanabi, our search technique greatly improves the performance of every agent we tested and when applied to a policy trained using RL achieves a new state-of-the-art score of 24.61 / 25 in the game, compared to a previous-best of 24.08 / 25. Introduction Real-world situations such as driving require humans to coordinate with others in a partially-observable environment with limited communication. In such environments, humans have a mental model of how other agents will behave in different situations (theory of mind). This model allows them to change their beliefs about the world based on why they think an agent acted as they did, as well as predict how their own actions will affect others' future behavior. Together, these capabilities allow humans to search for a good action to take while accounting for the behavior of others.
Landscape Complexity for the Empirical Risk of Generalized Linear Models
Maillard, Antoine, Arous, Gérard Ben, Biroli, Giulio
We present a method to obtain the average and the typical value of the number of critical points of the empirical risk landscape for generalized linear estimation problems and variants. This represents a substantial extension of previous applications of the Kac-Rice method since it allows to analyze the critical points of high dimensional non-Gaussian random functions. We obtain a rigorous explicit variational formula for the annealed complexity, which is the logarithm of the average number of critical points at fixed value of the empirical risk. This result is simplified, and extended, using the non-rigorous Kac-Rice replicated method from theoretical physics. In this way we find an explicit variational formula for the quenched complexity, which is generally different from its annealed counterpart, and allows to obtain the number of critical points for typical instances up to exponential accuracy.
An Automated Deep Learning Approach for Bacterial Image Classification
Automated recognition and classification of bacteria species from microscopic images have significant importance in clinical microbiology. Bacteria classification is usually carried out manually by biologists using different shapes and morphologic characteristics of bacteria species. The manual taxonomy of bacteria types from microscopy images is time-consuming and a challenging task for even experienced biologists. In this study, an automated deep learning based classification approach has been proposed to classify bacterial images into different categories. The ResNet-50 pre-trained CNN architecture has been used to classify digital bacteria images into 33 categories. The transfer learning technique was employed to accelerate the training process of the network and improve the classification performance of the network. The proposed method achieved an average classification accuracy of 99.2%. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique surpasses state-of-the-art methods in the literature and can be used for any type of bacteria classification tasks.
Binarized Canonical Polyadic Decomposition for Knowledge Graph Completion
Kishimoto, Koki, Hayashi, Katsuhiko, Akai, Genki, Shimbo, Masashi
Methods based on vector embeddings of knowledge graphs have been actively pursued as a promising approach to knowledge graph completion.However, embedding models generate storage-inefficient representations, particularly when the number of entities and relations, and the dimensionality of the real-valued embedding vectors are large. We present a binarized CANDECOMP/PARAFAC(CP) decomposition algorithm, which we refer to as B-CP, where real-valued parameters are replaced by binary values to reduce model size. Moreover, we show that a fast score computation technique can be developed with bitwise operations. We prove that B-CP is fully expressive by deriving a bound on the size of its embeddings. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method successfully reduces model size by more than an order of magnitude while maintaining task performance at the same level as the real-valued CP model.
Information Retrieval and Its Sister Disciplines
This article presents a summary graph to show the relationships between Information Retrieval (IR) and other related disciplines. The figure tells the key differences between them and the conditions under which one would transition into another. When I studied Machine Learning (ML), my favorite figure among all was "The Table of Common Distributions" in Casella and Berger's 2002 book "Statistical Inference". It appeared in the book's appendix. Every time when I saw this figure, I was in awe.