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Machine Learning and AI in Food Industry: Solutions and Potential

#artificialintelligence

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning solutions offer large possibilities to optimize and automate processes, save costs and make less human error possible for many industries. Food and Beverage is not an exception, where it can be beneficially applied in restaurants, bar and cafe businesses as well as in food manufacturing. These two segments have common use cases where AI in the food industry can be applied, as well as different ones, which is linked to different problems that must be solved. Knowing what goods to manufacture in large amounts or what dishes are the best choice to include in your restaurant menu is the key to increase earnings. Often customers' and market demands are changing very fast and so it is even more important to be one step ahead to take measures in time.


Transforming the agricultural industry with machine learning

#artificialintelligence

Adam Neilson, Chief Technology Officer at Wefarm discusses the ways in which machine learning can transform the African agricultural industry. Ever since Fritz Lang's Metropolis was first shown in the cinemas of 1927, the film industry has been forecasting how technology of the future would transform humanity. Fast forward to current day and we may not have flying cars or replica people mining in off planet worlds, but we do have something that I believe in the long run will be far more important to the future survival of our species. Over the last few years, machine learning (ML) has steadily rolled across the "hype cycle" from the "peak of inflated expectations" to officially entering the mainstream, and is now beginning to quietly revolutionise every aspect of our lives. For us consumers, it's now so deeply embedded within so many of the everyday products and services that we interact with it's almost invisible.


Canada refuses visas to African AI researchers

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For the second year in a row, Canada has refused visas to dozens of researchers - most of them from Africa - who were hoping to attend an artificial intelligence (AI) conference in Vancouver. The hassles have caused at least one other AI conference to choose a different country for their next event. The Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NeurIPS), which brings together thousands of experts and researchers from all over the world, will be held in Vancouver next month. Last week, NeurIPS began hearing that several attendees had had their visas denied. It was the second year in a row the conference has had visa troubles.


Stochastic Gradient Annealed Importance Sampling for Efficient Online Marginal Likelihood Estimation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We consider estimating the marginal likelihood in settings with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data. We propose estimating the predictive distributions in a sequential factorization of the marginal likelihood in such settings by using stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques. This approach is far more efficient than traditional marginal likelihood estimation techniques such as nested sampling and annealed importance sampling due to its use of mini-batches to approximate the likelihood. Stability of the estimates is provided by an adaptive annealing schedule. The resulting stochastic gradient annealed importance sampling (SGAIS) technique, which is the key contribution of our paper, enables us to estimate the marginal likelihood of a number of models considerably faster than traditional approaches, with no noticeable loss of accuracy. An important benefit of our approach is that the marginal likelihood is calculated in an online fashion as data becomes available, allowing the estimates to be used for applications such as online weighted model combination.


The Proper Care and Feeding of CAMELS: How Limited Training Data Affects Streamflow Prediction

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Accurate streamflow prediction largely relies on historical records of both meteorological data and streamflow measurements. For many regions around the world, however, such data are only scarcely or not at all available. To select an appropriate model for a region with a given amount of historical data, it is therefore indispensable to know a model's sensitivity to limited training data, both in terms of geographic diversity and different spans of time. In this study, we provide decision support for tree- and LSTM-based models. We feed the models meteorological measurements from the CAMELS dataset, and individually restrict the training period length and the number of basins used in training. Our findings show that tree-based models provide more accurate predictions on small datasets, while LSTMs are superior given sufficient training data. This is perhaps not surprising, as neural networks are known to be data-hungry; however, we are able to characterize each model's strengths under different conditions, including the "breakeven point" when LSTMs begin to overtake tree-based models.


West Africa boot camp seeks artificial intelligence fix for climate-hit farmers - Reuters

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DAKAR (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Data analyst Fabrice Sonzahi enrolled in a course on artificial intelligence (AI) in Dakar, hoping to help struggling farmers improve crop yields in his home country of Ivory Coast. He is part of an inaugural batch of students at a new AI programming school in Senegal, one of the first in West Africa. Its mission is to train local people in using data to solve pressing issues like the impact of climate change on crops. The Dakar Institute of Technology (DIT), which opened in September, is running its first 10-week boot camp with nine students in partnership with French AI school VIVADATA. "I am convinced that by analyzing data we can give (farmers) better solutions," said Sonzahi, 30.


Artificial intelligence and the worrying use of the deepfake TheArticle

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As is the case with many technological developments, 'deepfakes' -- videos in which someone who did not originally appear in the clip is rendered into it using artificial intelligence (AI) -- largely started in the world of pornography. Viewers, should they so desire, can now watch videos of their favourite musicians and film stars "in action," although that celebrity was never in that video. In these cases, increasingly sophisticated tools are used to put the musicians and film stars' faces onto pre-existing pornographic videos. There can obviously be a sinister, non-celebrity side to this too. The recent Sam Bourne novel, To Kill The Truth, features a protagonist Maggie Costello who appears in such a video as part of a cruel plot to undermine her.


Google awards $25 million in global AI impact grants

#artificialintelligence

Google today awarded $25 million in grants to a range of organizations to help them apply machine learning to fight some of the world's biggest challenges. Recipients range from New York City's fire department, which wants to find ways to reduce emergency call response time, to an experiment to track air quality with sensors attached to mopeds in Uganda, information that may shape public policy. The program is also an extension of Google's AI for Social Good program, which provides flood forecasting to communities in India and is researching how to provide speech recognition for more people with disabilities. More than 2,600 applications were received since the contest was announced in October from 119 countries around the world, Google.org The news was announced today onstage at the Google I/O developer conference by CEO Sundar Pichai and AI head Jeff Dean.


Cloud Machine Learning Market Size by Type, Product, Application & Market Opportunities 2019-2024

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Cloud Machine Learning Market report offers detailed analysis and a five-year forecast for the global Cloud Machine Learning industry. Cloud Machine Learning market report delivers the insights which will shape your strategic planning as you estimate geographic, product or service expansion within the Cloud Machine Learning industry.. The Cloud Machine Learning 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 Cloud Machine Learning 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/53269 Moreover, other factors that contribute toward the growth of the Cloud Machine Learning market include favorable government initiatives related to the use of Cloud Machine Learning.


Learning Behavioral Representations from Wearable Sensors

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The ubiquity of mobile devices and wearable sensors offers unprecedented opportunities for continuous collection of multimodal physiological data. Such data enables temporal characterization of an individual's behaviors, which can provide unique insights into her physical and psychological health. Understanding the relation between different behaviors/activities and personality traits such as stress or work performance can help build strategies to improve the work environment. Especially in workplaces like hospitals where many employees are overworked, having such policies improves the quality of patient care by prioritizing mental and physical health of their caregivers. One challenge in analyzing physiological data is extracting the underlying behavioral states from the temporal sensor signals and interpreting them. Here, we use a non-parametric Bayesian approach, to model multivariate sensor data from multiple people and discover dynamic behaviors they share. We apply this method to data collected from sensors worn by a population of workers in a large urban hospital, capturing their physiological signals, such as breathing and heart rate, and activity patterns. We show that the learned states capture behavioral differences within the population that can help cluster participants into meaningful groups and better predict their cognitive and affective states. This method offers a practical way to learn compact behavioral representations from dynamic multivariate sensor signals and provide insights into the data.