On a balmy summer's day in San Francisco, Milena Marinova is sitting on the roof terrace of the offices of Pearson, a company in the midst of a radical transformation from publishing powerhouse to digital-education platform, wrapped in a gray shawl and explaining how she plans to build advanced, deep-learning algorithms that could educate the next generation of students. This is no easy task. With millions of students using its education-software, Pearson has amassed "terrabytes" of data from student homework and even textbooks that have been digitized, data that Marinova is now pulling together to build software that can automatically give students feedback on their work like a teacher would. Instead of just telling them that an answer is right or wrong, a future update to Pearson's math homework tool will give more detailed feedback on how they went wrong in the steps taken to get an answer, Marinova told Forbes in an interview. Pearson is starting with math because the topic is relatively easy to structure and digitize.

There is no shortage of debate when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace. Some believe the technology will cost them their jobs, while others worry about security. A growing body of research, however, points to the narrative that intelligence will only diversify human thinking, not replace it. A recent study by Tata Communications, which was based on the inputs of 120 business leaders from across the world, says nine in 10 respondents agree that cognitive diversity is important for management and 93% believe AI will enhance decision making. What's more, three in four business leaders expect AI to produce new positions for their workers.

There are fears that tend to come up when people talk about futuristic artificial intelligence -- say, one that could teach itself to learn and become more advanced than anything we humans might be able to comprehend. In the wrong hands, perhaps even on its own, such an advanced algorithm might dominate the world's governments and militaries, impart Orwellian levels of surveillance, manipulation, and social control over societies, and perhaps even control entire battlefields of autonomous lethal weapons such as military drones. But some artificial intelligence experts don't think those fears are well-founded. In fact, highly-advanced artificial intelligence could be better at managing the world than humans have been. These fears themselves are the real danger, because they may hold us back from making that potential a reality. "Maybe not achieving AI is the danger for humanity," Tomas Mikolov, a research scientist for Facebook AI, said at The Joint Multi-Conference on Human-Level Artificial Intelligence, organized by GoodAI, in Prague on Saturday.

Unity Technologies on Monday released version 0.5 of its ML-Agents toolkit to make its Unity 3D game development platform better suited for developing and training autonomous agent code via machine learning. Initially rolled out a year ago in beta, version 0.5 comes with a few improvements. There's a wrapper for Gym (a toolkit for developing and testing reinforcement learning algorithms), support for letting agents make multiple action selections at once and for preventing agents from taking certain actions, and a refurbished set of environments called Marathon Environments. In these virtual spaces, AI researchers can teach software agents to perform certain tasks by rewarding them for correct actions. This sort of reinforcement learning can be limited to digital environments like video games or mapped to software-driven machines in the real world. Through its latest code update, Unity is making the case for Unity 3D as a key tool for AI research, a goal that company code boffins describe in a preprint paper titled, "Unity: A General Platform for Intelligent Agents."

We explore a new research direction in Bayesian variational inference with discrete latent variable priors where we exploit Kronecker matrix algebra for efficient and exact computations of the evidence lower bound (ELBO). The proposed "DIRECT" approach has several advantages over its predecessors; (i) it can exactly compute ELBO gradients (i.e. unbiased, zero-variance gradient estimates), eliminating the need for high-variance stochastic gradient estimators and enabling the use of quasi-Newton optimization methods; (ii) its training complexity is independent of the number of training points, permitting inference on large datasets; and (iii) its posterior samples consist of sparse and low-precision quantized integers which permit fast inference on hardware limited devices. In addition, our DIRECT models can exactly compute statistical moments of the parameterized predictive posterior without relying on Monte Carlo sampling. Our numerical studies demonstrate accurate inference using latent variables discretized as extremely low-precision 4-bit quantized integers. While the ELBO computations considered require over $10^{2352}$ log-likelihood evaluations, we train on datasets with over two-million points in just seconds.

Algorithmic predictions are increasingly used to aid, or in some cases supplant, human decision-making, and this development has placed new demands on the outputs of machine learning procedures. To facilitate human interaction, we desire that they output prediction functions that are in some fashion simple or interpretable. And because they influence consequential decisions, we also desire equitable prediction functions, ones whose allocations benefit (or at the least do not harm) disadvantaged groups. We develop a formal model to explore the relationship between simplicity and equity. Although the two concepts appear to be motivated by qualitatively distinct goals, our main result shows a fundamental inconsistency between them. Specifically, we formalize a general framework for producing simple prediction functions, and in this framework we show that every simple prediction function is strictly improvable: there exists a more complex prediction function that is both strictly more efficient and also strictly more equitable. Put another way, using a simple prediction function both reduces utility for disadvantaged groups and reduces overall welfare. Our result is not only about algorithms but about any process that produces simple models, and as such connects to the psychology of stereotypes and to an earlier economics literature on statistical discrimination.

Abstract--A novel procedure is presented in this paper, for training a deep convolutional and recurrent neural network, taking into account both the available training data set and some information extracted from similar networks trained with other relevant data sets. This information is included in an extended loss function used for the network training, so that the network can have an improved performance when applied to the other data sets, without forgetting the learned knowledge from the original data set. Facial expression and emotion recognition in-the-wild is the test bed application that is used to demonstrate the improved performance achieved using the proposed approach. In this framework, we provide an experimental study on categorical emotion recognition using datasets from a very recent related emotion recognition challenge. Index Terms --deep neural network training; classification; clustering internal representations; extended loss function; domain adaptation; transfer learning; emotion recognition in-the- wild; . Many real life problems are represented by a variety of data sets which may possess different characteristics. In such cases learning to classify correctly one data set does not generalize well in the other sets.

In this work, we propose two different sequential and adaptive hypothesis tests, motivated from classic Chernoff's test, for both decentralized and distributed setup of sensor networks. In the former setup, the sensors can communicate via central entity i.e. fusion center. On the other hand, in the latter setup, sensors are connected via communication link, and no central entity is present to facilitate the communication. We compare the performance of these tests with the optimal consistent sequential test in the sensor network. In decentralized setup, the proposed test achieves the same asymptotic optimality of the classic one, minimizing the expected cost required to reach a decision plus the expected cost of making a wrong decision, when the observation cost per unit time tends to zero. This test is also asymptotic optimal in the higher moments of decision time. The proposed test is parsimonious in terms of communications as the expected number of channel uses required by each sensor, in the regime of vanishing observation cost per unit time, to complete the test converges to four.In distributed setup, the proposed test is evaluated on the same performance measures as the test in decentralized setup. We also provide sufficient conditions for which the proposed test in distributed setup also achieves the same asymptotic optimality as the classic one. Like the proposed test in decentralized setup, under these sufficient conditions, the proposed test in distributed setup is also asymptotic optimal in the higher moments of time required to reach a decision in the sensor network. This test is parsimonious is terms of communications in comparison to the state of art schemes proposed in the literature for distributed hypothesis testing.

We present a principled Bayesian framework for signal reconstruction, in which the signal is modelled by basis functions whose number (and form, if required) is determined by the data themselves. This approach is based on a Bayesian interpretation of conventional sparse reconstruction and regularisation techniques, in which sparsity is imposed through priors via Bayesian model selection. We demonstrate our method for noisy 1- and 2-dimensional signals, including astronomical images. Furthermore, by using a product-space approach, the number and type of basis functions can be treated as integer parameters and their posterior distributions sampled directly. We show that order-of-magnitude increases in computational efficiency are possible from this technique compared to calculating the Bayesian evidences separately, and that further computational gains are possible using it in combination with dynamic nested sampling. Our approach can be readily applied to neural networks, where it allows the network architecture to be determined by the data in a principled Bayesian manner by treating the number of nodes and hidden layers as parameters.

Music relies heavily on self-reference to build structure and meaning. We explore the Transformer architecture (Vaswani et al., 2017) as a generative model for music, as self-attention has shown compelling results on tasks that require long-term structure such as Wikipedia summary generation (Liu et al, 2018). However, timing information is critical for polyphonic music, and Transformer does not explicitly model absolute or relative timing in its structure. To address this challenge, Shaw et al. (2018) introduced relative position representations to self-attention to improve machine translation. However, the formulation was not scalable to longer sequences. We propose an improved formulation which reduces the memory requirements of the relative position computation from $O(l^2d)$ to $O(ld)$, making it possible to train much longer sequences and achieve faster convergence. In experiments on symbolic music we find that relative self-attention substantially improves sample quality for unconditioned generation and is able to generate sequences of lengths longer than those from the training set. When primed with an initial sequence, the model generates continuations that develop the prime coherently and exhibit long-term structure. Relative self-attention can be instrumental in capturing richer relationships within a musical piece.