This article describes REBA, a knowledge representation and reasoning architecture for robots that is based on tightly-coupled transition diagrams of the domain at two different levels of granularity. An action language is extended to support non-boolean fluents and non-deterministic causal laws, and used to describe the domain's transition diagrams, with the fine-resolution transition diagram being defined as a refinement of the coarse-resolution transition diagram. The coarse-resolution system description, and a history that includes prioritized defaults, are translated into an Answer Set Prolog (ASP) program. For any given goal, inference in the ASP program provides a plan of abstract actions. To implement each such abstract action, the robot automatically zooms to the part of the fine-resolution transition diagram relevant to this action. The zoomed fine-resolution system description, and a probabilistic representation of the uncertainty in sensing and actuation, are used to construct a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). The policy obtained by solving the POMDP is invoked repeatedly to implement the abstract action as a sequence of concrete actions. The fine-resolution outcomes of executing these concrete actions are used to infer coarse-resolution outcomes that are added to the coarse-resolution history and used for subsequent coarse-resolution reasoning. The architecture thus combines the complementary strengths of declarative programming and probabilistic graphical models to represent and reason with non-monotonic logic-based and probabilistic descriptions of uncertainty and incomplete domain knowledge. In addition, we describe a general methodology for the design of software components of a robot based on these knowledge representation and reasoning tools, and provide a path for proving the correctness of these components. The architecture is evaluated in simulation and on a mobile robot finding and moving target objects to desired locations in indoor domains, to show that the architecture supports reliable and efficient reasoning with violation of defaults, noisy observations and unreliable actions, in complex domains.

Unlike major Western languages, most African languages are very low-resourced. Furthermore, the resources that do exist are often scattered and difficult to obtain and discover. As a result, the data and code for existing research has rarely been shared. This has lead a struggle to reproduce reported results, and few publicly available benchmarks for African machine translation models exist. To start to address these problems, we trained neural machine translation models for 5 Southern African languages on publicly-available datasets. Code is provided for training the models and evaluate the models on a newly released evaluation set, with the aim of spur future research in the field for Southern African languages.

Researchers at the University of Washington plan to release their AI algorithm – GROVER -- that they say can generate extremely convincing, text-based fake news. The system is also able to write in the style of highly respected publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post and Wired. Researchers say their motivation for releasing the algorithm is to alert the public that such technology can be easily created and deployed. Data journalists formulate the appropriate story templates, and human editors review each story, according to Jason Hwang, head of partnerships, Hoodline. Essentially, they want AI-generated writing to be more human.

Opportunities made possible through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and analytics were brought to life at the annual AI Roadshow hosted by analytics company SAS at Hyatt Regency in Rosebank on 30 May. Business people, media and civil stakeholders attended the event which helped them gain insight into the current state of the analytics market in South Africa and how analytics, cloud and AI could be leveraged for business value. Speakers at the event included SAS South Africa country manager Akesh Lalla and IDC SA senior research manager for cloud and IT services Jon Tullett, among others. Keynote speaker and business philosopher Anders Indset began the event by encouraging delegates to think, ask questions and put people first in order to gain real value out of technology such as AI and use it to solve problems. Indset aims to show leaders how to cope with the 21st century by bridging the philosophy of the past with the technology and science of the future. Keynote speaker, business philosopher and futurist Anders Indset address business leaders at the AI Roadshow.

Machines use Google-type algorithms on biopsy images to help children get treatment faster. A study published in the open access journal JAMA Open Network today by scientists at the University of Virginia schools of Engineering and Medicine says machine learning algorithms applied to biopsy images can shorten the time for diagnosing and treating a gut disease that often causes permanent physical and cognitive damage in children from impoverished areas. In places where sanitation, potable water and food are scarce, there are high rates of children suffering from environmental enteric dysfunction, a disease that limits the gut's ability to absorb essential nutrients and can lead to stunted growth, impaired brain development and even death. The disease affects 20 percent of children under the age of 5 in low- and middle-income countries, such as Bangladesh, Zambia and Pakistan, but it also affects some children in rural Virginia. For Dr. Sana Syed, an assistant professor of pediatrics in the UVA School of Medicine, this project is an example of why she got into medicine.

With the unprecedented success of deep convolutional neural networks came the quest for training always deeper networks. However, while deeper neural networks give better performance when trained appropriately, that depth also translates in memory and computation heavy models, typically with tens of millions of parameters. Several methods have been proposed to leverage redundancies in the network to alleviate this complexity. Either a pretrained network is compressed, e.g. using a low-rank tensor decomposition, or the architecture of the network is directly modified to be more effective. In this paper, we study both approaches in a unified framework, under the lens of tensor decompositions. We show how tensor decomposition applied to the convolutional kernel relates to efficient architectures such as MobileNet. Moreover, we propose a tensor-based method for efficient higher order convolutions, which can be used as a plugin replacement for N-dimensional convolutions. We demonstrate their advantageous properties both theoretically and empirically for image classification, for both 2D and 3D convolutional networks.

In this paper we propose a method of obtaining points of extreme overfitting - parameters of modern neural networks, at which they demonstrate close to 100 % training accuracy, simultaneously with almost zero accuracy on the test sample. Despite the widespread opinion that the overwhelming majority of critical points of the loss function of a neural network have equally good generalizing ability, such points have a huge generalization error. The paper studies the properties of such points and their location on the surface of the loss function of modern neural networks.

Providing users with alternatives to choose from is an essential component in many online platforms, making the accurate prediction of choice vital to their success. A renewed interest in learning choice models has led to significant progress in modeling power, but most current methods are either limited in the types of choice behavior they capture, cannot be applied to large-scale data, or both. Here we propose a learning framework for predicting choice that is accurate, versatile, theoretically grounded, and scales well. Our key modeling point is that to account for how humans choose, predictive models must capture certain set-related invariances. Building on recent results in economics, we derive a class of models that can express any behavioral choice pattern, enjoy favorable sample complexity guarantees, and can be efficiently trained end-to-end. Experiments on three large choice datasets demonstrate the utility of our approach.

African languages are numerous, complex and low-resourced. The datasets required for machine translation are difficult to discover, and existing research is hard to reproduce. Minimal attention has been given to machine translation for African languages so there is scant research regarding the problems that arise when using machine translation techniques. To begin addressing these problems, we trained models to translate English to five of the official South African languages (Afrikaans, isiZulu, Northern Sotho, Setswana, Xitsonga), making use of modern neural machine translation techniques. The results obtained show the promise of using neural machine translation techniques for African languages. By providing reproducible publicly-available data, code and results, this research aims to provide a starting point for other researchers in African machine translation to compare to and build upon.

Credit risk modelling is an integral part of the global financial system. While there has been great attention paid to neural network models for credit default prediction, such models often lack the required interpretation mechanisms and measures of the uncertainty around their predictions. This work develops and compares Bayesian Neural Networks(BNNs) for credit card default modelling. This includes a BNNs trained by Gaussian approximation and the first implementation of BNNs trained by Hybrid Monte Carlo(HMC) in credit risk modelling. The results on the Taiwan Credit Dataset show that BNNs with Automatic Relevance Determination(ARD) outperform normal BNNs without ARD. The results also show that BNNs trained by Gaussian approximation display similar predictive performance to those trained by the HMC. The results further show that BNN with ARD can be used to draw inferences about the relative importance of different features thus critically aiding decision makers in explaining model output to consumers. The robustness of this result is reinforced by high levels of congruence between the features identified as important using the two different approaches for training BNNs.