Causal learning is an inductive process and causal knowledge about the world is of paramount importance for intelligent systems, natural or artificial. Given an observation of events happening in the world, how does an intelligent system establish the causalities between them? The issue is further complicated by intervening noisy events. Psychologists have proposed a contingency model of causal induction but it does not incorporate computational means of addressing the issues of intervening noise to recover the causalities between events. In this paper we propose an inductive causal learning method that is able to establish causalities between events in the presence of intervening noisy events, and we apply the method to real-world data to investigate its viability. We demonstrate that the learning method works well in uncovering valid causalities, and relatively non-noisy, opportunistic situations provide the best confirmation of the causalities involved. Causal knowledge is the foundation of problem solving and the ability to learn causal knowledge enables the intelligent system to be maximally adaptive.

Causal learning and reinforcement learning are both important AI learning mechanisms but are usually treated separately, despite the fact that both are directly relevant to problem solving processes. In this paper we propose a method for causal learning and problem solving, and compare and contrast that with AI reinforcement learning and show that the two methods are actually related, differing only in the values of the learning rate α and discount factor γ. However, the causal learning framework emphasizes quick but non-optimal concoction of problem solutions while AI reinforcement learning generates optimal solutions at the expense of speed. Cognitive science literature is reviewed and it is found that psychological reinforcement learning in lower form animals such as mammals is distinct from AI reinforcement learning in that psychological reinforcement learning strives neither for speed nor optimality, and that higher form animals such as humans and primates employ quick causal learning for survival instead of reinforcement learning. AI systems should likewise take advantage of a framework that employs rapid inductive causal learning to generate problem solutions for its general viability in terms of rapid adaptability, without the need to always strive for optimality.

Intelligent keyboards can support writing by suggesting content. Certain types of phrases, when offered as suggestions, may be systematically chosen more often than their frequency in a corpus of text would predict. In order to generate those types of suggestions, we collected a dataset of how human authors responded to suggestions offered to them during open-ended writing tasks. We present an offline strategy for evaluating suggestions that enables us to learn the parameters of an improved suggestion generation policy without the expense of collecting additional data under that policy. We validate the approach by simulation and on human data by demonstrating improvement in held-out suggestion acceptance rate. Our approach can be applied to other scenarios where what is typical is not necessarily what is desirable.

The detection of structural changes is an important task in analyzing network evolution, especially for interactions between people, that may be driven by external events.Existing work relies on snapshot data and misses out some key functions of networks. Here, we study contact network evolution where no snapshot data are available.In spite of the challenge, this study demonstrates how contact networks can be used to predict and control infectious disease epidemics.We first model structural changes in contact networks during the 2009 influenza pandemic in Hong Kong, and then present a probabilistic framework to address it, aiming to answer when and how the underlying structure changes, utilizing multiple data sources including demographic data, and epidemic surveillance data.The efficacy and public health utility of the method are demonstrated using both synthetic and real data.

Training deep neural network is a high dimensional and a highly non-convex optimization problem. In this paper, we revisit Hessian-free optimization method for deep networks with negative curvature direction detection. We also develop its distributed variant and demonstrate superior scaling potential to SGD, which allows more efficiently utilizing larger computing resources thus enabling large models and faster time to obtain desired solution. We show that these techniques accelerate the training process for both the standard MNIST dataset and also the TIMIT speech recognition problem, demonstrating robust performance with upto an order of magnitude larger batch sizes. This increased scaling potential is illustrated with near linear speed-up on upto 32 CPU nodes for a simple 4-layer network.

In distributed machine learning, data is dispatched to multiple machines for processing. Motivated by the fact that similar data points often belong to the same or similar classes, and more generally, classification rules of high accuracy tend to be "locally simple but globally complex" (Vapnik and Bottou 1993), we propose data dependent dispatching that takes advantage of such structure. We present an in-depth analysis of this model, providing new algorithms with provable worst-case guarantees, analysis proving existing scalable heuristics perform well in natural non worst-case conditions, and techniques for extending a dispatching rule from a small sample to the entire distribution. We overcome novel technical challenges to satisfy important conditions for accurate distributed learning, including fault tolerance and balancedness. We empirically compare our approach with baselines based on random partitioning, balanced partition trees, and locality sensitive hashing, showing that we achieve significantly higher accuracy on both synthetic and real world image and advertising datasets. We also demonstrate that our technique strongly scales with the available computing power.

The advent of multiple study on crowdsourcing for speech applications concluded crowdsourcing vendors and software infrastructure has that "although the crowd sometimes approached the level greatly helped this effort. Several providers also offer integrated of the experts, it never surpassed it" (Parent and Eskenazi filtering tools that allow users to customize different 2011)). This is exacerbated during multimodal dialog data aspects of their data collection, including target population, collections, where it becomes harder to quality-control for geographical location, demographics and sometimes usable audio-video data, due to a variety of factors including even education level and expertise. Managed crowdsourcing poor visual quality caused by variable lighting, position, providers extend these options by offering further customization or occlusions, participant or administrator error, or technical and end-to-end management of the entire data issues with the system or network (McDuff, Kaliouby, and collection operation.

We propose a framework for semi-automated annotation of video frames where the video is of an object that at any point in time can be labeled as being in one of a finite number of discrete states. A Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is used to model (1) the behavior of the underlying object and (2) the noisy observation of its state through an image processing algorithm. The key insight of this approach is that the annotation of frame-by-frame video can be reduced from a problem of labeling every single image to a problem of detecting a transition between states of the underlying objected being recording on video. The performance of the framework is evaluated on a driver gaze classification dataset composed of 16,000,000 images that were fully annotated over 6,000 hours of direct manual annotation labor. On this dataset, we achieve a 13x reduction in manual annotation for an average accuracy of 99.1% and a 84x reduction for an average accuracy of 91.2%.

We present an agent-based model of manipulating prices in financial markets through spoofing: submitting spurious orders to mislead other traders. Built around the standard limit-order mechanism, our model captures a complex market environment with combined private and common values, the latter represented by noisy observations of a fundamental time series. We start with zero intelligence traders, who ignore the order book, and introduce a version of heuristic belief learning (HBL) strategy that exploits the order book to predict price outcomes. By employing an empirical game-theoretic analysis to derive approximate strategic equilibria, we demonstrate the effectiveness of HBL and the usefulness of order book information in a range of non-spoofing environments. We further show that a market with HBL traders is spoofable, in that a spoofer can qualitatively manipulate prices towards its desired direction. After re-equilibrating games with spoofing, we find spoofing generally hurts market surplus and decreases the proportion of HBL. However, HBL's persistence in most environments with spoofing indicates a consistently spoofable market. Our model provides a way to quantify the effect of spoofing on trading behavior and efficiency, and thus measures the profitability and cost of an important form of market manipulation.

Unsolicited or unwanted messages is a byproduct of virtually every popular social media website. Spammers have become increasingly proficient at bypassing conventional spam filters, prompting a stronger effort to develop new methods that accurately detect spam while simultaneously acting as a more robust classifier against users that modify their behavior in order to avoid detection. This paper shows the usefulness of a relational model that works in conjunction with an independent model. First, an independent model is built using features that characterize individual comments and users, capturing the cases where spam is obvious. Second, a relational model is built, taking advantage of the interconnected nature of users and their comments. By feeding our initial predictions from the independent model into the relational model, we can start to propagate information about spammers and spam comments to jointly infer the labels of all spam comments at the same time. This allows us to capture the obfuscated spam comments missed by the independent model that are only found by looking at the relational structure of the social network. The results from our experiments demonstrates the viability of our method, and shows that models utilizing the underlying structure of the social network are more effective at detecting spam than ones that do not.