Accurate vehicle localization is a crucial step towards building effective Vehicle-to-Vehicle networks and automotive applications. Yet standard grade GPS data, such as that provided by mobile phones, is often noisy and exhibits significant localization errors in many urban areas. Approaches for accurate localization from imagery often rely on structure-based techniques, and thus are limited in scale and are expensive to compute. In this paper, we present a scalable visual localization approach geared for real-time performance. We propose a hybrid coarse-to-fine approach that leverages visual and GPS location cues. Our solution uses a self-supervised approach to learn a compact road image representation. This representation enables efficient visual retrieval and provides coarse localization cues, which are fused with vehicle ego-motion to obtain high accuracy location estimates. As a benchmark to evaluate the performance of our visual localization approach, we introduce a new large-scale driving dataset based on video and GPS data obtained from a large-scale network of connected dash-cams. Our experiments confirm that our approach is highly effective in challenging urban environments, reducing localization error by an order of magnitude.

Large datasets of sub-meter aerial imagery represented as orthophoto mosaics are widely available today, and these data sets may hold a great deal of untapped information. This imagery has a potential to locate several types of features; for example, forests, parking lots, airports, residential areas, or freeways in the imagery. However, the appearances of these things vary based on many things including the time that the image is captured, the sensor settings, processing done to rectify the image, and the geographical and cultural context of the region captured by the image. This thesis explores the use of deep convolutional neural networks to classify land use from very high spatial resolution (VHR), orthorectified, visible band multispectral imagery. Recent technological and commercial applications have driven the collection a massive amount of VHR images in the visible red, green, blue (RGB) spectral bands, this work explores the potential for deep learning algorithms to exploit this imagery for automatic land use/ land cover (LULC) classification.

An autonomous system is an artificially intelligent entity that makes decisions in response to input, independent of human interaction. Robotic systems are physical entities that interact with the physical world. Thus, we consider an autonomous robotic system as a machine that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI), has a physical presence in and interacts with the real world. They are complex, inherently hybrid, systems, combining both hardware and software; they often require close safety, legal, and ethical consideration. Autonomous robotics are increasingly being used in commonplace-scenarios, such as driverless cars [68], pilotless aircraft [176], and domestic assistants [174, 60]. While for many engineered systems, testing, either through real deployment or via simulation, is deemed sufficient; the unique challenges of autonomous robotics, their dependence on sophisticated software control and decision-making, and their increasing deployment in safety-critical scenarios, require a stronger form of verification. This leads us towards using formal methods, which are mathematically-based techniques for the specification and verification of software systems, to ensure the correctness of, and provide sufficient evidence for the certification of, robotic systems. We contribute an overview and analysis of the state-of-the-art in formal specification and verification of autonomous robotics.

Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms such as Q-learning [Watkins, Dayan 92] have been widely used in practice and can achieve human level performance in applications such as video games [Mnih et al. 15]. Recently, equipped with the idea of optimism in the face of uncertainty, Q-learning algorithms [Jin, Allen-Zhu, Bubeck, Jordan 18] can be proven to be sample efficient for discrete tabular Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) which have finite number of states and actions. In this work, we present an efficient model-free Q-learning based algorithm in MDPs with a natural metric on the state-action space--hence extending efficient model-free Q-learning algorithms to continuous state-action space. Compared to previous model-based RL algorithms for metric spaces [Kakade, Kearns, Langford 03], our algorithm does not require access to a black-box planning oracle.

In the last year, new models and methods for pretraining and transfer learning have driven striking performance improvements across a range of language understanding tasks. The GLUE benchmark, introduced one year ago, offers a single-number metric that summarizes progress on a diverse set of such tasks, but performance on the benchmark has recently come close to the level of non-expert humans, suggesting limited headroom for further research. This paper recaps lessons learned from the GLUE benchmark and presents SuperGLUE, a new benchmark styled after GLUE with a new set of more difficult language understanding tasks, improved resources, and a new public leaderboard. SuperGLUE will be available soon at super.gluebenchmark.com.

United, Delta and American Airlines are taking steps to cover cameras on seat backs after the practice sparked a privacy backlash. Many consumers were outraged when they learned of the controversial cameras embedded within the entertainment systems of plane seats. It even sparked an inquiry from two US senators who demanded to know what the cameras were being used for and if they were recording unsuspecting passengers. Delta, United and American Airlines are covering the cameras on seat backs after recent criticisms around privacy. Now, the airlines say they intend to cover up the cameras in response to recent criticism.

The past decade has seen artificial intelligence develop from a mere fantasy to a fully integrated part of a marketing strategy, for brands that look to differentiate and improve their customer experiences and online strategies. Take Farfetch for example, which utilized RFID-enabled clothing racks and digital mirrors to allow its customers the choice of size and colour before directly checking out online. This particular use of AI shows the seamless integration of online and offline experiences, and proves that this technology has no end to the benefits and creativity it can bring for a brands engagement efforts. Found at the core of AI technology is data and analytics, allowing brands to streamline digital ads and offer a personalized customer service. This can result in a significant lift to brands engagement efforts and empowers them to fully engage with customer at every stage of the purchase lifecycle.

Akshaya Asokan works as a Technology Journalist at Analytics India Magazine. She has previously worked with IDG Media and The New Indian Express. When not writing, she can be seen either reading or staring at a flower.

Given that artificial intelligence (AI) is the new buzzword for high-growth industries in recent years, I thought it would be interesting to dig deeper to discover what's in store in the coming years in terms of innovations and trends. Interestingly, I discovered that there are actually three categories of AI, and the world is currently dealing with just the first one. For those who feel that AI is pretty advanced now, the good news is that there is still a significant runway for the technology to improve further. It is still early days in terms of recognising the potential for AI, and with further advancements in the years to come, all of us can look forward to more amazing inventions and contraptions. There is, of course, also the risk of AI becoming "too smart for its own good."

Missing values, irregularly collected samples, and multi-resolution signals commonly occur in multivariate time series data, making predictive tasks difficult. These challenges are especially prevalent in the healthcare domain, where patients' vital signs and electronic records are collected at different frequencies and have occasionally missing information due to the imperfections in equipment or patient circumstances. Researchers have handled each of these issues differently, often handling missing data through mean value imputation and then using sequence models over the multivariate signals while ignoring the different resolution of signals. We propose a unified model named Multi-resolution Flexible Irregular Time series Network (Multi-FIT). The building block for Multi-FIT is the FIT network. The FIT network creates an informative dense representation at each time step using signal information such as last observed value, time difference since the last observed time stamp and overall mean for the signal. Vertical FIT (FIT-V) is a variant of FIT which also models the relationship between different temporal signals while creating the informative dense representations for the signal. The multi-FIT model uses multiple FIT networks for sets of signals with different resolutions, further facilitating the construction of flexible representations. Our model has three main contributions: a.) it does not impute values but rather creates informative representations to provide flexibility to the model for creating task-specific representations b.) it models the relationship between different signals in the form of support signals c.) it models different resolutions in parallel before merging them for the final prediction task. The FIT, FIT-V and Multi-FIT networks improve upon the state-of-the-art models for three predictive tasks, including the forecasting of patient survival.