Africa
Embracing the power of technology
Just how worried should we be about killer robots? Amidst all the talk about how artificial intelligence (AI) is threatening society, some experts believe AI shouldn't be feared. Here's why we can embrace the power of technology. Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere. AI recommends movies and restaurant choices, prevents cars from crashing, books flights, tracks taxis, identifies financial fraud and creates playlists to work out to.
Thousands apply to Abu Dhabi AI University in first week
More than 3,000 potential students applied to join Abu Dhabi's artificial intelligence (AI) focused university in the first week that applications were open. Most of the applications to Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) came from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt, India, and China. MBZUAI, based in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, aims to enable students, businesses and governments to increase the use of AI technology. It is the first university focused only on AI. The current applications are for the academic year 2021-2022, with the first students expected to start in September 2020.
History as a giant data set: how analysing the past could help save the future
In its first issue of 2010, the scientific journal Nature looked forward to a dazzling decade of progress. By 2020, experimental devices connected to the internet would deduce our search queries by directly monitoring our brain signals. Crops would exist that doubled their biomass in three hours. Humanity would be well on the way to ending its dependency on fossil fuels. It warned that all these advances could be derailed by mounting political instability, which was due to peak in the US and western Europe around 2020. Human societies go through predictable periods of growth, the letter explained, during which the population increases and prosperity rises. Then come equally predictable periods of decline. In recent decades, the letter went on, a number of worrying social indicators โ such as wealth inequality and public debt โ had started to climb in western nations, indicating that these societies were approaching a period of upheaval. The letter-writer would go on to predict that the turmoil in the US in 2020 would be less severe than the American civil war, but worse than the violence of the late 1960s and early 70s, when the murder rate spiked, civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protests intensified and domestic terrorists carried out thousands of bombings across the country. The author of this stark warning was not a historian, but a biologist.
AI ethics is all about power
At the Common Good in the Digital Age tech conference recently held in Vatican City, Pope Francis urged Facebook executives, venture capitalists, and government regulators to be wary of the impact of AI and other technologies. "If mankind's so-called technological progress were to become an enemy of the common good, this would lead to an unfortunate regression to a form of barbarism dictated by the law of the strongest," he said. In a related but contextually different conversation, this summer Joy Buolamwini testified before Congress with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) that multiple audits found facial recognition technology generally works best on white men and worst on women of color. What these two events have in common is their relationship to power dynamics in the AI ethics debate. Arguments about AI ethics can wage without mention of the word "power," but it's often there just under the surface. In fact, it's rarely the direct focus, but it needs to be. Power in AI is like gravity, an invisible force that influences every consideration of ethics in artificial intelligence. Power provides the means to influence which use cases are relevant; which problems are priorities; and who the tools, products, and services are made to serve. It underlies debates about how corporations and countries create policy governing use of the technology.
Efficient Fair Principal Component Analysis
Kamani, Mohammad Mahdi, Haddadpour, Farzin, Forsati, Rana, Mahdavi, Mehrdad
The flourishing assessments of fairness measure in machine learning algorithms have shown that dimension reduction methods such as PCA treat data from different sensitive groups unfairly. In particular, by aggregating data of different groups, the reconstruction error of the learned subspace becomes biased towards some populations that might hurt or benefit those groups inherently, leading to an unfair representation. On the other hand, alleviating the bias to protect sensitive groups in learning the optimal projection, would lead to a higher reconstruction error overall. This introduces a trade-off between sensitive groups' sacrifices and benefits, and the overall reconstruction error. In this paper, in pursuit of achieving fairness criteria in PCA, we introduce a more efficient notion of Pareto fairness, cast the Pareto fair dimensionality reduction as a multi-objective optimization problem, and propose an adaptive gradient-based algorithm to solve it. Using the notion of Pareto optimality, we can guarantee that the solution of our proposed algorithm belongs to the Pareto frontier for all groups, which achieves the optimal trade-off between those aforementioned conflicting objectives. This framework can be efficiently generalized to multiple group sensitive features, as well. We provide convergence analysis of our algorithm for both convex and non-convex objectives and show its efficacy through empirical studies on different datasets, in comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithm.
DRiLLS: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Logic Synthesis
Hosny, Abdelrahman, Hashemi, Soheil, Shalan, Mohamed, Reda, Sherief
Abstract-- Logic synthesis requires extensive tuning of the synthesis optimization flow where the quality of results (QoR) depends on the sequence of optimizations used. Efficient design space exploration is challenging due to the exponential number of possible optimization permutations. Therefore, automating the optimization process is necessary. In this work, we propose a novel reinforcement learning-based methodology that navigates the optimization space without human intervention. We demonstrate the training of an Advantage Actor Critic (A2C) agent that seeks to minimize area subject to a timing constraint. Using the proposed methodology, designs can be optimized autonomously with no-humans in-loop. Evaluation on the comprehensive EPFL benchmark suite shows that the agent outperforms existing exploration methodologies and improves QoRs by an average of 13%. Logic synthesis transforms a high-level description of a design into an optimized gate-level representation. Modern logic synthesis tools represent a given design as an And-Inverter Graph (AIG), which encodes representative characteristics for optimizing Boolean functions.
How is AI Transforming the Work Culture and Workforce Management?
About 87% of marketing organizations have already started using some level of personalization. By 2024, AI identification of emotions is expected to influence more than 50% of online advertisements globally. Gartner has confirmed that AEI is among the key technology trends that are expected to witness tremendous growth in the next five years. Computer vision allows AI to interpret and manipulate physical environments, which is one of the key technologies used for emotion recognition. Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI) will sense customer emotions, based on which companies can influence buying decisions.
Significant Growth In Artificial Intelligence Platform Software Market 2019-2025 MICROSOFT Azure AI, GOOGLE Cloud Machine Learning Engine, IBM Watson, AMAZON ML platform services โ Market Expert24
The latest report titled global Artificial Intelligence Platform Software market includes the comprehensive study of the present market scope and based on the research that is being carried out the analysts at The Research Insights state that the newest developments that are presently affecting the changing scenario products and services that have high rankings and great feedback are described wisely. The Artificial Intelligence platform provides tools and technologies to build applications with AI-rich capabilities. The algorithms used for formulating the AI platform provide logical models for application developers to fabricate various innovative applications with capabilities, such as speech and voice recognition, text recognition, and predictive analytics. The factors likely to drive the Artificial Intelligence platform market are the substantial increase in data generation, high demand for AI-based solutions, the need to enhance customer experience, and the increasing operational efficiency & reduced cost that AI platforms offer. Among end users, the BFSI segment is projected to have the largest share, while healthcare is expected to have the highest growth rate during the forecast period.
Johannesburg // AI - Machine Learning - Chatbots (Johannesburg, South Africa)
The FinChatBot and IBM team are pleased to announce the official launch of our inaugural Hackathon Challenge @ IBM in Sandton. To participate, please register your details on the ChatBot link below: https://registration.finchatbot.com/ All details are on the event image above. Once you have completed the registration process, you will receive a confirmation email with all required information. One of the main reasons for this is due to lack of education about insurance and how to access it.
Make Your Own Algorithmic Art
This is the Part 6 of a short series of posts introducing and building generative adversarial networks, known as GANs. In this post we will develop a system for testing a GAN using controllable synthetic data. Too often GANs are tested against datasets which are very varied and this makes assessing the GAN very difficult. We'll also do some experiments with some of the many GAN design options to see if they help or hinder. Using controlled and simpler synthetic image data makes this assessment easier. Output from a conditioned GAN learning four classes of synthetic image. Previously: Part 1 introduced the idea of adversarial learning and we started to build the machinery of a GAN implementation. Part 2 we extended our code to learn a simple 1-dimensional pattern 1010. Part 3 we developed our code to learn to generate 2-dimensional grey-scale images that look like handwritten digits Part 4 extended our code to learn full colour faces, and also developed convolutional networks to encourage learning localised image features Part 5 developed a conditional GAN that can be trained to output images of a desired class.