A Shanghai court has become China's first court to officially adopt an artificial intelligence-supported software to facilitate judicial hearings, with judges and prosecutors using the new technology to improve efficiency and accuracy in delivering justice. This also means using less paper and manpower. The software was first put to test in January during a case involving robbery and murder. No paperwork was filed during the trial and nearly all evidence were presented in the court through electronic display. Huang Boqing, a deputy chief judge of the Shanghai No. 2 Intermediate People's Court, told CGTN that during previous trials, identifying and verifying evidence took a lot of time and attention.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. We're used to seeing bipedal robots keep their balance by continuously stepping in place, but not that many are competent enough to learn how to balance, walk, and go back to balancing again, like humans do, let alone climb stairs. A Chinese company called Innfos is introducing a "high-performance humanoid robot."

Accordingly, a prime step in text mining applications is to extract interesting patterns and features, from this supply of unstructured data. Feature extraction can be considered as the core of social media mining tasks such as sentiment analysis, event detection, and news recommendation [2]. In the literature, sentiment analysis tends to be used to refer to the task of classifying the polarity of a given piece of text at the document, sentence, feature, or aspect level [23]. There are various applications on a variety of domains which utilize sentiment analysis, in this regard one can mention applying the sentiment analysis for political reviews to estimate the general viewpoint of the parties [43], predicting stock market prices based on sentiment analysis by utilizing the different financial news data [5], and making use of the sentiment analysis to recognize the current medical and psychological status for a community [23]. Machine learning algorithms and statistical learning techniques have been rising in a variety of scientific fields [9, 10]. A number of machine learning techniques have been proposed to perform the task of sentiment analysis. As one of the powerful sub-domains of machine learning in recent years, deep learning models are emerging as a persuasive computational tool, they have affected many research areas and can be traced in many applications. With respect to the deep learning, textual deep representation models attempt to discover and present intricate syntactic and semantic representations of texts, automatically from data without any handmade feature engineering.

Defining action spaces for conversational agents and optimizing their decision-making process with reinforcement learning is an enduring challenge. Common practice has been to use handcrafted dialog acts, or the output vocabulary, e.g. in neural encoder decoders, as the action spaces. Both have their own limitations. This paper proposes a novel latent action framework that treats the action spaces of an end-to-end dialog agent as latent variables and develops unsupervised methods in order to induce its own action space from the data. Comprehensive experiments are conducted examining both continuous and discrete action types and two different optimization methods based on stochastic variational inference. Results show that the proposed latent actions achieve superior empirical performance improvement over previous word-level policy gradient methods on both DealOrNoDeal and MultiWoz dialogs. Our detailed analysis also provides insights about various latent variable approaches for policy learning and can serve as a foundation for developing better latent actions in future research.

The existing core methods, which are employed by the popular CTL model checking tools, are facing the famous state explode problem. In our previous study, a method based on the Machine Learning (ML) algorithms was proposed to address this problem. However, the accuracy is not satisfactory. First, we conduct a comprehensive experiment on Graph Lab to seek the optimal accuracy using the five machine learning algorithms. Second, given the optimal accuracy, the average time is seeked. The results show that the Logistic Regressive (LR)-based approach can simulate CTL model checking with the accuracy of 98.8%, and its average efficiency is 459 times higher than that of the existing method, as well as the Boosted Tree (BT)-based approach can simulate CTL model checking with the accuracy of 98.7%, and its average efficiency is 639 times higher than that of the existing method.

In this paper, we investigate the task of aggregating search results from heterogeneous sources in an E-commerce environment. First, unlike traditional aggregated web search that merely presents multi-sourced results in the first page, this new task may present aggregated results in all pages and has to dynamically decide which source should be presented in the current page. Second, as pointed out by many existing studies, it is not trivial to rank items from heterogeneous sources because the relevance scores from different source systems are not directly comparable. To address these two issues, we decompose the task into two subtasks in a hierarchical structure: a high-level task for source selection where we model the sequential patterns of user behaviors onto aggregated results in different pages so as to understand user intents and select the relevant sources properly; and a low-level task for item presentation where we formulate a slot filling process to sequentially present the items instead of giving each item a relevance score when deciding the presentation order of heterogeneous items. Since both subtasks can be naturally formulated as sequential decision problems and learn from the future user feedback on search results, we build our model with hierarchical reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model obtains remarkable improvements in search performance metrics, and achieves a higher user satisfaction.

Last week, the nonprofit research group OpenAI revealed that it had developed a new text-generation model that can write coherent, versatile prose given a certain subject matter prompt. However, the organization said, it would not be releasing the full algorithm due to "safety and security concerns." Instead, OpenAI decided to release a "much smaller" version of the model and withhold the data sets and training codes that were used to develop it. If your knowledge of the model, called GPT-2, came solely on headlines from the resulting news coverage, you might think that OpenAI had built a weapons-grade chatbot. A headline from Metro U.K. read, "Elon Musk-Founded OpenAI Builds Artificial Intelligence So Powerful That It Must Be Kept Locked Up for the Good of Humanity."

Raman Ghuman demonstrates a HoloLens device at Microsoft's annual conference for software developers on May 7, 2018, in Seattle. Microsoft workers are protesting the use of the augmented reality technology in a U.S. Amy contract. Raman Ghuman demonstrates a HoloLens device at Microsoft's annual conference for software developers on May 7, 2018, in Seattle. Microsoft workers are protesting the use of the augmented reality technology in a U.S. Amy contract. Microsoft workers are calling on the giant tech company to cancel its nearly $480 million U.S. Army contract, saying the deal "crosses the line" into weapons development by Microsoft for the first time.

Artificial intelligence capabilities are scheduled to be built into the Singapore region, said the firm. "These AI capabilities will serve startups and major …