Satellite imaging is a critical technology for monitoring and responding to natural disasters such as flooding. Despite the capabilities of modern satellites, there is still much to be desired from the perspective of first response organisations like UNICEF. Two main challenges are rapid access to data, and the ability to automatically identify flooded regions in images. We describe a prototypical flood segmentation system, identifying cloud, water and land, that could be deployed on a constellation of small satellites, performing processing on board to reduce downlink bandwidth by 2 orders of magnitude. We target PhiSat-1, part of the FSSCAT mission, which is planned to be launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) near the start of 2020 as a proof of concept for this new technology.

My wife's father was a perfect mix of Walter Mattheu & Fred Flintstone. He didn't talk much so when he did you tended to listen. My wife's name is Kate but he called her Kay. When we first met, in the mid-1970s, I remember Ivan asking her about our relationship: "Now Kay, I always raised you to make the right decisions; now are you sure that you want to marry this guy?" There was something to his statement because, at that time, I didn't have two nickles to rub together and my prospects didn't look good.

Artificial intelligence took center stage as African female technology experts met at Women in Tech Week in Ghana to promote women's involvement in the field. When Lily Edinam Botsyoe was studying computer science at a university in Ghana, students wrote programming codes on a whiteboard because there were not enough computers. This made it difficult to apply the coding skills they were learning, she says, and the problem continues today. "We have students coming out of schools having the theoretical background -- which is very important because you can't actually appreciate something practical if you don't have the theory. But, the industry-ready skills is lacking because they didn't have the hands-on experience," Botsyoe said.

The Cognitive Computing Market report includes the leading advancements and technological up-gradation that engages the user to inhabit with fine business selections, define their future-based priority growth plans, and to implement the necessary actions. The global Cognitive Computing Market report also offers a detailed summary of key players and their manufacturing procedure with statistical data and profound analysis of the products, contribution, and revenue. Every information given in the report is sourced and verified by our expert team and is collated with precision. To give a broad overview of the current global market trends and strategies led by key businesses, we present the information in a graphical format such as graphs, pie-charts with the superior illustration.

Gaussian Processes (GPs) with an appropriate kernel are known to provide accurate predictions and uncertainty estimates even with very small amounts of labeled data. However, GPs are generally unable to learn a good representation that can encode intricate structures in high dimensional data. The representation power of GPs depends heavily on kernel functions used to quantify the similarity between data points. Traditional GP kernels are not very effective at capturing similarity between high dimensional data points, while methods that use deep neural networks to learn a kernel are not sample-efficient. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose deep probabilistic kernels which use a probabilistic neural network to map high-dimensional data to a probability distribution in a low dimensional subspace, and leverage the rich work on kernels between distributions to capture the similarity between these distributions. Experiments on a variety of datasets show that building a GP using this covariance kernel solves the conflicting problems of representation learning and sample efficiency. Our model can be extended beyond GPs to other small-data paradigms such as few-shot classification where we show competitive performance with state-of-the-art models on the mini-Imagenet dataset.

Recent work in signal propagation theory has shown that dropout limits the depth to which information can propagate through a neural network. In this paper, we investigate the effect of initialisation on training speed and generalisation for ReLU networks within this depth limit. We ask the following research question: given that critical initialisation is crucial for training at large depth, if dropout limits the depth at which networks are trainable, does initialising critically still matter? We conduct a large-scale controlled experiment, and perform a statistical analysis of over $12000$ trained networks. We find that (1) trainable networks show no statistically significant difference in performance over a wide range of non-critical initialisations; (2) for initialisations that show a statistically significant difference, the net effect on performance is small; (3) only extreme initialisations (very small or very large) perform worse than criticality. These findings also apply to standard ReLU networks of moderate depth as a special case of zero dropout. Our results therefore suggest that, in the shallow-to-moderate depth setting, critical initialisation provides zero performance gains when compared to off-critical initialisations and that searching for off-critical initialisations that might improve training speed or generalisation, is likely to be a fruitless endeavour.

Deep Learning has made several breakthroughs in recent years. Compared to traditional computation platforms, it has become more sophisticated and advanced than ever. Smart homes, intelligent personal assistant, etc. are some of the major breakthroughs in the present era. In this article, we list down 8 platforms which can be used to build mobile deep learning solutions. Facebook's open-source deep learning framework, Caffe2 is a lightweight, modular, and scalable framework which provides an easy way to experiment with deep learning models and algorithms. The framework comes with native Python and C APIs that work interchangeably and integrates with Android Studio, Microsoft Visual Studio, or XCode for mobile development.

If you're a lover of coffee, it will come as unpleasant news that the price of coffee could potentially spike in the near future. Climate change and deforestation are threatening some of the biggest coffee species in the world, but AI could potentially help keep coffee relatively affordable. The combined forces of deforestation and climate change are threatening the production of many species of coffee, including the common Arabica species, which can be found in many of the most prolific blends and brews. Coffee farmers around the globe are having to deal with rising temperatures and the problems that are associated with them, such as periods of drought. One recent study published in the journals Global Change Biology and Science Advances found that there were substantial risks to many wild coffee species, with around 60% of 124 different wild coffee species being vulnerable to extinction.

Predicting discomfort glare in open-plan offices is a challenging problem since most of available glare metrics are developed for cellular offices which are typically daylight dominated. The problem with open-plan offices is that they are mainly dependent on electric lighting rather than daylight even when they have a fully glazed facade. In addition, the contrast between bright windows and the buildings interior can be problematic and may cause discomfort glare to the building occupants. These problems can affect occupant productivity and wellbeing. Thus, it is important to develop a predictive model to avoid discomfort glare when designing open plan offices. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to adopt Machine Learning (ML) models to predict discomfort glare. In order to develop new glare predictive models for these types of offices, Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) and High Dynamic Range (HDR) images were collected from 80 occupants (n=80) in four different open-plan offices. Consequently, various multi-region luminance values, luminance and glare indices were calculated and used as input features to train ML models. The accuracy of the ML model was compared to the accuracy of 24 indices which were also evaluated using a Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis to identify the best cutoff values (thresholds) for each index for open-plan configurations. Results showed that the ML glare model could predict glare in open-plan offices with an accuracy of 83.8% (0.80 true positive rate and 0.86 true negative rate) which outperformed the accuracy of the previously developed glare metrics.

Non-negative tensor factorization models enable predictive analysis on count data. Among them, Bayesian Poisson-Gamma models are able to derive full posterior distributions of latent factors and are less sensitive to sparse count data. However, current inference methods for these Bayesian models adopt restricted update rules for the posterior parameters. They also fail to share the update information to better cope with the data sparsity. Moreover, these models are not endowed with a component that handles the imbalance in count data values. In this paper, we propose a novel variational auto-encoder framework called VAE-BPTF which addresses the above issues. It uses multi-layer perceptron networks to encode and share complex update information. The encoded information is then reweighted per data instance to penalize common data values before aggregated to compute the posterior parameters for the latent factors. Under synthetic data evaluation, VAE-BPTF tended to recover the right number of latent factors and posterior parameter values. It also outperformed current models in both reconstruction errors and latent factor (semantic) coherence across five real-world datasets. Furthermore, the latent factors inferred by VAE-BPTF are perceived to be meaningful and coherent under a qualitative analysis.