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The State of Artificial Intelligence and Need for Standards: A Conversation with Syed Husain

#artificialintelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a lot of promise, but it is still in the hype phase. Although strides have been made in machine learning and cognitive computing, most practical applications for AI are still nascent. As such, this is the right time to begin developing AI standards that can address some of the issues that have already been identified with AI, such as potential bias and the ethical concerns behind the technology, so that business value can be maximized. Syed Husain, Manager Enterprise Architecture for Accenture, examined these topics at The Open Group London event in April 2018. In this far-reaching conversation, we spoke with Husain about where AI stands today, what the ultimate promise of AI is and the value standards may be able to bring to this still-emerging technology. How do you define Artificial Intelligence?


How chatbots are coming for our call centre jobs

BBC News

The biggest threat to jobs might not be physical robots, but intelligent software agents that can understand our questions and speak to us, integrating seamlessly with all the other programs we use at home and at work. And call centres are particularly at risk. Last week we learned that British retail giant Marks & Spencer is moving 100 switchboard staff to other roles because chatbots are taking over their duties. "All calls to 640 M&S stores and contact centres now handled via Twilio-powered technology," boasted the California-based tech company operating the new system. M&S is now using Twilio's speech recognition software and Google's Dialogflow artificial intelligence (AI) tool to transcribe customers' verbal requests and understand their intent.


Anti-vaccine myths are being promoted by social media bots and Russian trolls, study finds

The Independent - Tech

Online arguments trying to trick people into believing vaccines are spreading across the internet, according to a new study. Social media bots and trolls are sewing division by promoting "anti-vaxx" conspiracy theories and other myths, the new research has found. Experts suggest that the arguments are being used to divide the country as well as to trick them into clicking on malicious links and other attacks. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.


Memory Time Span in LSTMs for Multi-Speaker Source Separation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

With deep learning approaches becoming state-of-the-art in many speech (as well as non-speech) related machine learning tasks, efforts are being taken to delve into the neural networks which are often considered as a black box. In this paper it is analyzed how recurrent neural network (RNNs) cope with temporal dependencies by determining the relevant memory time span in a long short-term memory (LSTM) cell. This is done by leaking the state variable with a controlled lifetime and evaluating the task performance. This technique can be used for any task to estimate the time span the LSTM exploits in that specific scenario. The focus in this paper is on the task of separating speakers from overlapping speech. We discern two effects: A long term effect, probably due to speaker characterization and a short term effect, probably exploiting phone-size formant tracks.


Using Apple Machine Learning Algorithms to Detect and Subclassify Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Lung cancer continues to be a major healthcare challenge with high morbidity and mortality rates among both men and women worldwide. The majority of lung cancer cases are of non-small cell lung cancer type. With the advent of targeted cancer therapy, it is imperative not only to properly diagnose but also sub-classify non-small cell lung cancer. In our study, we evaluated the utility of using Apple Create ML module to detect and sub-classify non-small cell carcinomas based on histopathological images. After module optimization, the program detected 100% of non-small cell lung cancer images and successfully subclassified the majority of the images. Trained modules, such as ours, can be utilized in diagnostic smartphone-based applications, augmenting diagnostic services in understaffed areas of the world.


GoT-WAVE: Temporal network alignment using graphlet-orbit transitions

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Global pairwise network alignment (GPNA) aims to find a one-to-one node mapping between two networks that identifies conserved network regions. GPNA algorithms optimize node conservation (NC) and edge conservation (EC). NC quantifies topological similarity between nodes. Graphlet-based degree vectors (GDVs) are a state-of-the-art topological NC measure. Dynamic GDVs (DGDVs) were used as a dynamic NC measure within the first-ever algorithms for GPNA of temporal networks: DynaMAGNA++ and DynaWAVE. The latter is superior for larger networks. We recently developed a different graphlet-based measure of temporal node similarity, graphlet-orbit transitions (GoTs). Here, we use GoTs instead of DGDVs as a new dynamic NC measure within DynaWAVE, resulting in a new approach, GoT-WAVE. On synthetic networks, GoT-WAVE improves DynaWAVE's accuracy by 25% and speed by 64%. On real networks, when optimizing only dynamic NC, each method is superior ~50% of the time. While DynaWAVE benefits more from also optimizing dynamic EC, only GoT-WAVE can support directed edges. Hence, GoT-WAVE is a promising new temporal GPNA algorithm, which efficiently optimizes dynamic NC. Future work on better incorporating dynamic EC may yield further improvements.


Probabilistic Graphical Modeling approach to dynamic PET direct parametric map estimation and image reconstruction

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In the context of dynamic emission tomography, the conventional processing pipeline consists of independent image reconstruction of single time frames, followed by the application of a suitable kinetic model to time activity curves (TACs) at the voxel or region-of-interest level. The relatively new field of 4D PET direct reconstruction, by contrast, seeks to move beyond this scheme and incorporate information from multiple time frames within the reconstruction task. Existing 4D direct models are based on a deterministic description of voxels' TACs, captured by the chosen kinetic model, considering the photon counting process the only source of uncertainty. In this work, we introduce a new probabilistic modeling strategy based on the key assumption that activity time course would be subject to uncertainty even if the parameters of the underlying dynamic process were known. This leads to a hierarchical Bayesian model, which we formulate using the formalism of Probabilistic Graphical Modeling (PGM). The inference of the joint probability density function arising from PGM is addressed using a new gradient-based iterative algorithm, which presents several advantages compared to existing direct methods: it is flexible to an arbitrary choice of linear and nonlinear kinetic model; it enables the inclusion of arbitrary (sub)differentiable priors for parametric maps; it is simpler to implement and suitable to integration in computing frameworks for machine learning. Computer simulations and an application to real patient scan showed how the proposed approach allows us to weight the importance of the kinetic model, providing a bridge between indirect and deterministic direct methods.


Reinforcement Learning for Relation Classification from Noisy Data

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Existing relation classification methods that rely on distant supervision assume that a bag of sentences mentioning an entity pair are all describing a relation for the entity pair. Such methods, performing classification at the bag level, cannot identify the mapping between a relation and a sentence, and largely suffers from the noisy labeling problem. In this paper, we propose a novel model for relation classification at the sentence level from noisy data. The model has two modules: an instance selector and a relation classifier. The instance selector chooses high-quality sentences with reinforcement learning and feeds the selected sentences into the relation classifier, and the relation classifier makes sentence level prediction and provides rewards to the instance selector. The two modules are trained jointly to optimize the instance selection and relation classification processes. Experiment results show that our model can deal with the noise of data effectively and obtains better performance for relation classification at the sentence level.


To Cluster, or Not to Cluster: An Analysis of Clusterability Methods

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Clustering is an essential data mining tool that aims to discover inherent cluster structure in data. For most applications, applying clustering is only appropriate when cluster structure is present. As such, the study of clusterability, which evaluates whether data possesses such structure, is an integral part of cluster analysis. However, methods for evaluating clusterability vary radically, making it challenging to select a suitable measure. In this paper, we perform an extensive comparison of measures of clusterability and provide guidelines that clustering users can reference to select suitable measures for their applications.


An Empirical Study of Rich Subgroup Fairness for Machine Learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Kearns et al. [2018] recently proposed a notion of rich subgroup fairness intended to bridge the gap between statistical and individual notions of fairness. Rich subgroup fairness picks a statistical fairness constraint (say, equalizing false positive rates across protected groups), but then asks that this constraint hold over an exponentially or infinitely large collection of subgroups defined by a class of functions with bounded VC dimension. They give an algorithm guaranteed to learn subject to this constraint, under the condition that it has access to oracles for perfectly learning absent a fairness constraint. In this paper, we undertake an extensive empirical evaluation of the algorithm of Kearns et al. On four real datasets for which fairness is a concern, we investigate the basic convergence of the algorithm when instantiated with fast heuristics in place of learning oracles, measure the tradeoffs between fairness and accuracy, and compare this approach with the recent algorithm of Agarwal et al. [2018], which implements weaker and more traditional marginal fairness constraints defined by individual protected attributes. We find that in general, the Kearns et al. algorithm converges quickly, large gains in fairness can be obtained with mild costs to accuracy, and that optimizing accuracy subject only to marginal fairness leads to classifiers with substantial subgroup unfairness. We also provide a number of analyses and visualizations of the dynamics and behavior of the Kearns et al. algorithm. Overall we find this algorithm to be effective on real data, and rich subgroup fairness to be a viable notion in practice.