With AI technology on the rise, Generation Alpha children may never experience a doctor's appointment without the presence of medical artificial intelligence (AI). As an IEEE report revealed, their millennial parents are growing more comfortable with the technology. IEEE's study found that millennial parents across the globe are becoming increasingly comfortable with AI health technology for their Generation Alpha children. Most respondents noted that they would have "at least some trust" in AI tech. SEE: IT leader's guide to the future of artificial intelligence (Tech Pro Research) Globally, 56% of respondents noted that they had a "great deal of trust" in AI technologies for diagnosing and treating their sick children.

HANGZHOU, China/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - In the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, an ambulance speeds through traffic on a wave of green lights, helped along by an artificial intelligence (AI) system and big data. The system, which involves sending information to a centralized computer linked to the city's transport networks, is part of a trial by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. The Chinese tech giant is hoping to use its cloud and data systems to tackle issues hobbling China's healthcare system like snarled city traffic, long patient queues and a lack of doctors. Alibaba's push into healthcare reflects a wider trend in China, where technology firms are racing to shake up a creaking state-run health sector and take a slice of spending that McKinsey & Co estimates will hit $1 trillion by 2020. Tencent-backed WeDoctor, which offers online consultations and doctor appointments, raised $500 million in May at a valuation of $5.5 billion.

For many of us, meetings are a boring waste of time but technology could soon help make them more interesting and productive. What do you do during a boring meeting? I canvassed some opinions on Twitter and the results were enlightening. Some people compose haikus, others play meeting bingo, seeing how many pre-agreed words they can chuck in to the conversation. Some secretly check out Grindr on their phones or watch catch-up TV, while others fiddle with their jewellery, doodle, or simply nod off.

Exploiting the appropriate inductive bias based on the knowledge of data is essential for achieving good performance in statistical machine learning. In practice, however, the domain knowledge of interest often provides information on the relationship of data attributes only distantly, which hinders direct utilization of such domain knowledge in popular regularization methods. In this paper, we propose the knowledge-based distant regularization framework, in which we utilize the distant information encoded in a knowledge graph for regularization of probabilistic model estimation. In particular, we propose to impose prior distributions on model parameters specified by knowledge graph embeddings. As an instance of the proposed framework, we present the factor analysis model with the knowledge-based distant regularization. We show the results of preliminary experiments on the improvement of the generalization capability of such model.

We consider the problem of decentralized consensus optimization, where the sum of $n$ convex functions are minimized over $n$ distributed agents that form a connected network. In particular, we consider the case that the communicated local decision variables among nodes are quantized in order to alleviate the communication bottleneck in distributed optimization. We propose the Quantized Decentralized Gradient Descent (QDGD) algorithm, in which nodes update their local decision variables by combining the quantized information received from their neighbors with their local information. We prove that under standard strong convexity and smoothness assumptions for the objective function, QDGD achieves a vanishing mean solution error. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that achieves vanishing consensus error in the presence of quantization noise. Moreover, we provide simulation results that show tight agreement between our derived theoretical convergence rate and the experimental results.

This paper presents a Bayesian nonparametric latent feature model specially suitable for exploratory analysis of high-dimensional count data. We perform a non-negative doubly sparse matrix factorization that has two main advantages: not only we are able to better approximate the row input distributions, but the inferred topics are also easier to interpret. By combining the three-parameter and restricted Indian buffet processes into a single prior, we increase the model flexibility, allowing for a full spectrum of sparse solutions in the latent space. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach in the analysis of countries' economic structure. Compared to other approaches, empirical results show our model's ability to give easy-to-interpret information and better capture the underlying sparsity structure of data.

Synthesizing images or texts automatically is a useful research area in the artificial intelligence nowadays. Generative adversarial networks (GANs), which are proposed by Goodfellow in 2014, make this task to be done more efficiently by using deep neural networks. We consider generating corresponding images from an input text description using a GAN. In this paper, we analyze the GAN-CLS algorithm, which is a kind of advanced method of GAN proposed by Scott Reed in 2016. First, we find the problem with this algorithm through inference. Then we correct the GAN-CLS algorithm according to the inference by modifying the objective function of the model. Finally, we do the experiments on the Oxford-102 dataset and the CUB dataset. As a result, our modified algorithm can generate images which are more plausible than the GAN-CLS algorithm in some cases. Also, some of the generated images match the input texts better.

Despite the success of neural networks (NNs), there is still a concern among many over their "black box" nature. Why do they work? Here we present a simple analytic argument that NNs are in fact essentially polynomial regression models. This view will have various implications for NNs, e.g. providing an explanation for why convergence problems arise in NNs, and it gives rough guidance on avoiding overfitting. In addition, we use this phenomenon to predict and confirm a multicollinearity property of NNs not previously reported in the literature. Most importantly, given this loose correspondence, one may choose to routinely use polynomial models instead of NNs, thus avoiding some major problems of the latter, such as having to set many tuning parameters and dealing with convergence issues. We present a number of empirical results; in each case, the accuracy of the polynomial approach matches or exceeds that of NN approaches. A many-featured, open-source software package, polyreg, is available.

Bayesian learning is built on an assumption that the model space contains a true reflection of the data generating mechanism. This assumption is problematic, particularly in complex data environments. Here we present a Bayesian nonparametric approach to learning that makes use of statistical models, but does not assume that the model is true. Our approach has provably better properties than using a parametric model and admits a trivially parallelizable Monte Carlo sampling scheme that affords massive scalability on modern computer architectures. The model-based aspect of learning is particularly attractive for regularizing nonparametric inference when the sample size is small, and also for correcting approximate approaches such as variational Bayes (VB). We demonstrate the approach on a number of examples including VB classifiers and Bayesian random forests.

The approximation power of general feedforward neural networks with piecewise linear activation functions is investigated. First, lower bounds on the size of a network are established in terms of the approximation error and network depth and width. These bounds improve upon state-of-the-art bounds for certain classes of functions, such as strongly convex functions. Second, an upper bound is established on the difference of two neural networks with identical weights but different activation functions.