Footage has emerged showing bizarre prototypes of military contraptions during a parade in Ghana. A robot'walking tank' shaped like a pair of human legs and a giant armoured vehicle with leather seats inside were among the items on display at the event, said to have taken place in the capital, Accra. There were also people walking in military fatigue-coloured exoskeletons, in what appeared to be a product launch by manufacturer Kantanka. It is unclear whether the new products have any connection to the official Ghanaian military. Footage from the event shows the men in exoskeletons taking cumbersome steps in their heavy gear.

Nonetheless, properly constructed comparisons designed to reconcile the two datasets yield up to 90% agreement (e.g., in South America). The Comment by Hansen et al. (1) provides the opportunity to distinguish our research, which quantifies dynamics in carbon density, from studies focused on the binary classification of changes in forest area (2). We use a multisensor (ICESat/MODIS), multistage approach combined with field measurements to map net change (i.e., losses and gains) in carbon density for the period 2003–2014 for each 463 m 463 m (21.4 ha) pixel in our dataset. Within each pixel, dynamic processes occurring at both the tree and stand level are necessarily considered in aggregate, meaning that losses and gains are happening always and concurrently wherever woody biomass is present. A loss is registered when losses are greater than gains, and vice versa.

Motion is a dominant cue in automated driving systems. Optical flow is typically computed to detect moving objects and to estimate depth using triangulation. In this paper, our motivation is to leverage the existing dense optical flow to improve the performance of semantic segmentation. To provide a systematic study, we construct four different architectures which use RGB only, flow only, RGBF concatenated and two-stream RGB + flow. We evaluate these networks on two automotive datasets namely Virtual KITTI and Cityscapes using the state-of-the-art flow estimator FlowNet v2. We also make use of the ground truth optical flow in Virtual KITTI to serve as an ideal estimator and a standard Farneback optical flow algorithm to study the effect of noise. Using the flow ground truth in Virtual KITTI, two-stream architecture achieves the best results with an improvement of 4% IoU. As expected, there is a large improvement for moving objects like trucks, vans and cars with 38%, 28% and 6% increase in IoU. FlowNet produces an improvement of 2.4% in average IoU with larger improvement in the moving objects corresponding to 26%, 11% and 5% in trucks, vans and cars. In Cityscapes, flow augmentation provided an improvement for moving objects like motorcycle and train with an increase of 17% and 7% in IoU.

Droughts, with their increasing frequency of occurrence, continue to negatively affect livelihoods and elements at risk. For example, the 2011 in drought in east Africa has caused massive losses document to have cost the Kenyan economy over $12bn. With the foregoing, the demand for ex-ante drought monitoring systems is ever-increasing. The study uses 10 precipitation and vegetation variables that are lagged over 1, 2 and 3-month time-steps to predict drought situations. In the model space search for the most predictive artificial neural network (ANN) model, as opposed to the traditional greedy search for the most predictive variables, we use the General Additive Model (GAM) approach. Together with a set of assumptions, we thereby reduce the cardinality of the space of models. Even though we build a total of 102 GAM models, only 21 have R2 greater than 0.7 and are thus subjected to the ANN process. The ANN process itself uses the brute-force approach that automatically partitions the training data into 10 sub-samples, builds the ANN models in these samples and evaluates their performance using multiple metrics. The results show the superiority of 1-month lag of the variables as compared to longer time lags of 2 and 3 months. The champion ANN model recorded an R2 of 0.78 in model testing using the out-of-sample data. This illustrates its ability to be a good predictor of drought situations 1-month ahead. Investigated as a classifier, the champion has a modest accuracy of 66% and a multi-class area under the ROC curve (AUROC) of 89.99%

Quantification of the stationary points and the associated basins of attraction of neural network loss surfaces is an important step towards a better understanding of neural network loss surfaces at large. This work proposes a novel method to visualise basins of attraction together with the associated stationary points via gradient-based random sampling. The proposed technique is used to perform an empirical study of the loss surfaces generated by two different error metrics: quadratic loss and entropic loss. The empirical observations confirm the theoretical hypothesis regarding the nature of neural network attraction basins. Entropic loss is shown to exhibit stronger gradients and fewer stationary points than quadratic loss, indicating that entropic loss has a more searchable landscape. Quadratic loss is shown to be more resilient to overfitting than entropic loss. Both losses are shown to exhibit local minima, but the number of local minima is shown to decrease with an increase in dimensionality. Thus, the proposed visualisation technique successfully captures the local minima properties exhibited by the neural network loss surfaces, and can be used for the purpose of fitness landscape analysis of neural networks.

Student performance modelling (SPM) is a critical step to assessing and improving students performances in their learning discourse. However, most existing SPM are based on statistical approaches, which on one hand are based on probability, depicting that results are based on estimation; and on the other hand, actual influences of hidden factors that are peculiar to students, lecturers, learning environment and the family, together with their overall effect on student performance have not been exhaustively investigated. In this paper, Student Performance Models (SPM) for improving students performance in programming courses were developed using M5P Decision Tree (MDT) and Linear Regression Classifier (LRC). The data used was gathered using a structured questionnaire from 295 students in 200 and 300 levels of study who offered Web programming, C or JAVA at Federal University, Oye-Ekiti, Nigeria between 2012 and 2016. Hidden factors that are significant to students performance in programming were identified. The relevant data gathered, normalized, coded and prepared as variable and factor datasets, and fed into the MDT algorithm and LRC to develop the predictive models. The evaluation results obtained indicate that the variable-based LRC produced the best model in terms of MAE, RMSE, RAE and the RRSE having yielded the least values in all the evaluations conducted. Further results obtained established the strong significance of attitude of students and lecturers, fearful perception of students, erratic power supply, university facilities, student health and students attendance to the performance of students in programming courses. The variable-based LRC model presented in this paper could provide baseline information about students performance thereby offering better decision making towards improving teaching/learning outcomes in programming courses.

The intelligence community's (IC) stock in trade has always been knowing what nobody else knows. Now it's looking to tap into new technology to expand its ability to forecast geopolitical events in several ways, including finding out what everybody knows. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the IC's lead research arm, is looking to bring artificial intelligence to bear in a number of intelligence-gathering areas. This includes two projects at opposite ends of the spy game: at one end, intercepting and interpreting classified communications, and at the other, finding a way to read the tea leaves in massive amounts of public information. IARPA recently launched a competition to support its Mercury program, which focuses on the more familiar (to the public anyway) element of spycraft known as signals intelligence.

Software development effort estimation is considered a fundamental task for software development life cycle as well as for managing project cost, time and quality. Therefore, accurate estimation is a substantial factor in projects success and reducing the risks. In recent years, software effort estimation has received a considerable amount of attention from researchers and became a challenge for software industry. In the last two decades, many researchers and practitioners proposed statistical and machine learning-based models for software effort estimation. In this work, Firefly Algorithm is proposed as a metaheuristic optimization method for optimizing the parameters of three COCOMO-based models. These models include the basic COCOMO model and other two models proposed in the literature as extensions of the basic COCOMO model. The developed estimation models are evaluated using different evaluation metrics. Experimental results show high accuracy and significant error minimization of Firefly Algorithm over other metaheuristic optimization algorithms including Genetic Algorithms and Particle Swarm Optimization.

In temporal planning, many different temporal network formalisms are used to model real world situations. Each of these formalisms has different features which affect how easy it is to determine whether the underlying network of temporal constraints is consistent. While many of the simpler models have been well-studied from a computational complexity perspective, the algorithms developed for advanced models which combine features have very loose complexity bounds. In this paper, we provide tight completeness bounds for strong, weak, and dynamic controllability checking of temporal networks that have conditions, disjunctions, and temporal uncertainty. Our work exposes some of the subtle differences between these different structures and, remarkably, establishes a guarantee that all of these problems are computable in PSPACE.

The hype around artificial intelligence is reaching a fevered pitch in the global economy. In international development, there are Nethope webinars, TechChange courses, and USAID guides to build our excitement around this new technology. Yet, the peak of the hype cycle is also when we should pause and take a hard look at what is real, and what is just aspiration. Technology Salons next month in Washington, DC and Johannesburg, SA will be taking a close look at artificial intelligence in international development. We want to dive into real examples, understand the risks and rewards, and publish a comprehensive guide to who is innovating, and what they are learning.