Asia
Microsoft invests in seven AI projects to help people with disabilities
Over the next year, the recipients will work on things like a nerve-sensing wearable wristband. Another project seeks to develop a wearable cap that reads a person's EEG data and communicates it to the cloud to provide seizure warnings and alerts. Other tools will rely on speech recognition, AI-powered chatbots and apps for people with vision impairment. This year's grantees include the University of California, Berkeley; Massachusetts Eye and Ear, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School; Voiceitt in Israel; Birmingham City University in the United Kingdom; University of Sydney in Australia; Pison Technology of Boston; and Our Ability, of Glenmont, New York. "What stands out the most about this round of grantees is how so many of them are taking standard AI capabilities, like a chatbot or data collection, and truly revolutionizing the value of technology," Microsoft's Senior Accessibility Architect Mary Bellard said in a blog post.
The road to artificial intelligence in mobility--smart moves required
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the word on everyone's lips. But in the automotive industry today, many products and services being labeled as such are in fact reliant on a form of advanced analytics (evolving from conventional algorithms) that enables those features--for example, predictive maintenance in manufacturing. Theories of AI have existed since 1950. However, AI itself gained wider functional applicability only in the past few decades, with the rise of machine learning and deep learning. This has also been facilitated by advances such as improved algorithms and training methods, greater computing power, and the availability of large amounts of data in the cloud.
IoT to Alter Agriculture and Food - Connected World
We are going to need the IoT (Internet of Things) to help solve the problems that are facing agriculture and the future of food. There is not a person on the planet that doesn't understand the importance of food, ag, and farming. Couple these facts with people living longer than ever, and we just keep having babies and you have a pot ready to boil over. All of these factors combined will lead to a more crowded planet than we've ever experienced before. With more mouths to feed, we as a global society will need to figure out how to produce more food.
Demand forecasting techniques for build-to-order lean manufacturing supply chains
Rivera-Castro, Rodrigo, Nazarov, Ivan, Xiang, Yuke, Pletneev, Alexander, Maksimov, Ivan, Burnaev, Evgeny
Build-to-order (BTO) supply chains have become common-place in industries such as electronics, automotive and fashion. They enable building products based on individual requirements with a short lead time and minimum inventory and production costs. Due to their nature, they differ significantly from traditional supply chains. However, there have not been studies dedicated to demand forecasting methods for this type of setting. This work makes two contributions. First, it presents a new and unique data set from a manufacturer in the BTO sector. Second, it proposes a novel data transformation technique for demand forecasting of BTO products. Results from thirteen forecasting methods show that the approach compares well to the state-of-the-art while being easy to implement and to explain to decision-makers.
Compressed Learning of Deep Neural Networks for OpenCL-Capable Embedded Systems
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been quite successful in solving many complex learning problems. However, DNNs tend to have a large number of learning parameters, leading to a large memory and computation requirement. In this paper, we propose a model compression framework for efficient training and inference of deep neural networks on embedded systems. Our framework provides data structures and kernels for OpenCL-based parallel forward and backward computation in a compressed form. In particular, our method learns sparse representations of parameters using $\ell_1$-based sparse coding while training, storing them in compressed sparse matrices. Unlike the previous works, our method does not require a pre-trained model as an input and therefore can be more versatile for different application environments. Even though the use of $\ell_1$-based sparse coding for model compression is not new, we show that it can be far more effective than previously reported when we use proximal point algorithms and the technique of debiasing. Our experiments show that our method can produce minimal learning models suitable for small embedded devices.
Learning Ensembles of Anomaly Detectors on Synthetic Data
Smolyakov, D., Sviridenko, N., Ishimtsev, V., Burikov, E., Burnaev, E.
The main aim of this work is to develop and implement an automatic anomaly detection algorithm for meteorological time-series. To achieve this goal we develop an approach to constructing an ensemble of anomaly detectors in combination with adaptive threshold selection based on artificially generated anomalies. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method by integrating the corresponding implementation into ``Minimax-94'' road weather information system.
Random Walks on Hypergraphs with Edge-Dependent Vertex Weights
Chitra, Uthsav, Raphael, Benjamin J
Hypergraphs are used in machine learning to model higher-order relationships in data. While spectral methods for graphs are well-established, spectral theory for hypergraphs remains an active area of research. In this paper, we use random walks to develop a spectral theory for hypergraphs with edge-dependent vertex weights: hypergraphs where every vertex $v$ has a weight $\gamma_e(v)$ for each incident hyperedge $e$ that describes the contribution of $v$ to the hyperedge $e$. We derive a random walk-based hypergraph Laplacian, and bound the mixing time of random walks on such hypergraphs. Moreover, we give conditions under which random walks on such hypergraphs are equivalent to random walks on graphs. As a corollary, we show that current machine learning methods that rely on Laplacians derived from random walks on hypergraphs with edge-independent vertex weights do not utilize higher-order relationships in the data. Finally, we demonstrate the advantages of hypergraphs with edge-dependent vertex weights on ranking applications using real-world datasets.
A Bayesian Approach to Robust Reinforcement Learning
Derman, Esther, Mankowitz, Daniel, Mann, Timothy, Mannor, Shie
Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) intend to ensure robustness with respect to changing or adversarial system behavior. In this framework, transitions are modeled as arbitrary elements of a known and properly structured uncertainty set and a robust optimal policy can be derived under the worst-case scenario. In this study, we address the issue of learning in RMDPs using a Bayesian approach. We introduce the Uncertainty Robust Bellman Equation (URBE) which encourages safe exploration for adapting the uncertainty set to new observations while preserving robustness. We propose a URBE-based algorithm, DQN-URBE, that scales this method to higher dimensional domains. Our experiments show that the derived URBE-based strategy leads to a better trade-off between less conservative solutions and robustness in the presence of model misspecification. In addition, we show that the DQN-URBE algorithm can adapt significantly faster to changing dynamics online compared to existing robust techniques with fixed uncertainty sets.
Modeling Combinatorial Evolution in Time Series Prediction
Hu, Wenjie, Yang, Yang, You, Zilong, Liu, Zongtao, Ren, Xiang
For instance, earthquake wave is the observation Time series modeling aims to capture the intrinsic factors underpinning of crustal movements, while different actions like running and observed data and its evolution. However, most existing studies walking will cause differences in observations of a fitness-tracking ignore the evolutionary relations among these factors, which are device. Moreover, in practice, we often observe the combinatorial what cause the combinatorial evolution of a given time series. For evolution of data; that is, the observed time series being covered example, personal interests are intrinsic factors hidden behind users' by the influence of multiple factors, and especially the relations observable online shopping behaviors; consequently, a precise item among these factors. For example, an earthquake is the result of recommendation depends not only on discovering the item-interest quick transitions from smooth movements in the Earth's crust to relationship, but also on an understanding of how user interests intense ones, which cause a sudden release of energy in the Earth's shift over time. In this paper, we propose to represent complex and crust. Meanwhile, observing one's online shopping logs, precise dynamic relations among intrinsic factors of time series data by item recommendations rely on tracing and understanding the shift means of an evolutionary state graph structure.