The first things you notice are the chill in the air, the vast grid on the floor which makes you feel like you're on the film set of the movie Tron, and the whooshing sound of wheels skimming across aluminium. The last thing on your mind is buying groceries. I'm standing upstairs in an Ocado warehouse in Hampshire, England, where grocery orders are assembled and dispatched, watching hundreds of cuboid robots whizz around on a vast metal grid that stretches out as far as I can see. The grocery giant doesn't often let journalists in to its 18 acre (784,080 sq ft) Andover site. With the exception of two or three maintenance engineers on standby, my guide and I are the only humans in the vast space.

Classical methods to control heating systems are often marred by suboptimal performance, inability to adapt to dynamic conditions and unreasonable assumptions e.g. existence of building models. This paper presents a novel deep reinforcement learning algorithm which can control space heating in buildings in a computationally efficient manner, and benchmarks it against other known techniques. The proposed algorithm outperforms rule based control by between 5-10% in a simulation environment for a number of price signals. We conclude that, while not optimal, the proposed algorithm offers additional practical advantages such as faster computation times and increased robustness to non-stationarities in building dynamics.

Decision making is a vital function in this age of machine learning and artificial intelligence, yet its physical realization and theoretical fundamentals are still not completely understood. In our former study, we demonstrated that single-photons can be used to make decisions in uncertain, dynamically changing environments. The two-armed bandit problem was successfully solved using the dual probabilistic and particle attributes of single photons. In this study, we present a category theoretic modeling and analysis of single-photon-based decision making, including a quantitative analysis that is in agreement with the experimental results. A category theoretic model reveals the complex interdependencies of subject matter entities in a simplified manner, even in dynamically changing environments. In particular, the octahedral and braid structures in triangulated categories provide a better understanding and quantitative metrics of the underlying mechanisms of a single-photon decision maker. This study provides both insight and a foundation for analyzing more complex and uncertain problems, to further machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Many state-of-the-art algorithms for solving hard combinatorial problems in artificial intelligence (AI) include elements of stochasticity that lead to high variations in runtime, even for a fixed problem instance. Knowledge about the resulting runtime distributions (RTDs) of algorithms on given problem instances can be exploited in various meta-algorithmic procedures, such as algorithm selection, portfolios, and randomized restarts. Previous work has shown that machine learning can be used to individually predict mean, median and variance of RTDs. To establish a new state-of-the-art in predicting RTDs, we demonstrate that the parameters of an RTD should be learned jointly and that neural networks can do this well by directly optimizing the likelihood of an RTD given runtime observations. In an empirical study involving five algorithms for SAT solving and AI planning, we show that neural networks predict the true RTDs of unseen instances better than previous methods, and can even do so when only few runtime observations are available per training instance.

Sound event detection systems typically consist of two stages: extracting hand-crafted features from the raw audio waveform, and learning a mapping between these features and the target sound events using a classifier. Recently, the focus of sound event detection research has been mostly shifted to the latter stage using standard features such as mel spectrogram as the input for classifiers such as deep neural networks. In this work, we utilize end-to-end approach and propose to combine these two stages in a single deep neural network classifier. The feature extraction over the raw waveform is conducted by a feedforward layer block, whose parameters are initialized to extract the time-frequency representations. The feature extraction parameters are updated during training, resulting with a representation that is optimized for the specific task. This feature extraction block is followed by (and jointly trained with) a convolutional recurrent network, which has recently given state-of-the-art results in many sound recognition tasks. The proposed system does not outperform a convolutional recurrent network with fixed hand-crafted features. The final magnitude spectrum characteristics of the feature extraction block parameters indicate that the most relevant information for the given task is contained in 0 - 3 kHz frequency range, and this is also supported by the empirical results on the SED performance.

Unsupervised machine translation---i.e., not assuming any cross-lingual supervision signal, whether a dictionary, translations, or comparable corpora---seems impossible, but nevertheless, Lample et al. (2018) recently proposed a fully unsupervised machine translation (MT) model. The model relies heavily on an adversarial, unsupervised alignment of word embedding spaces for bilingual dictionary induction (Conneau et al., 2018), which we examine here. Our results identify the limitations of current unsupervised MT: unsupervised bilingual dictionary induction performs much worse on morphologically rich languages that are not dependent marking, when monolingual corpora from different domains or different embedding algorithms are used. We show that a simple trick, exploiting a weak supervision signal from identical words, enables more robust induction, and establish a near-perfect correlation between unsupervised bilingual dictionary induction performance and a previously unexplored graph similarity metric.

Sudoku is a well-known logic-based puzzle game that was first published in 1979 under the name of "Number Place". It was popularised in Japan in 1984 by the puzzle company Nikoli, and later named "Sudoku", which roughly translates to "single digits". The puzzle gained attention in the West in 2004, after The Times published its first Sudoku grid (at the instigation of Hong Kong-based judge Wayne Gould, who first encountered the puzzle in 1997, and developed a computer program to automatically generate instances). Sudoku is now a global phenomenon, and many newspapers now carry it alongside their existing crosswords (see [4] for a general history of the puzzle). The simplest variant of Sudoku uses a 9 9 grid of cells divided into nine 3 3 subgrids (Figure 1 (left)). The aim of the puzzle is to fill the grid with digits such that each row, each column, and each 3 3 subgrid contains all of the digits 1-9 (Figure 1 (right)). An instance of Sudoku provides, at the outset, a partially-completed grid, but the difficulty of any grid derives more from the range of techniques required to solve it than the number of cell values that are provided for the player. Sudoku is an NPcomplete problem [12], as first shown in [35] (via a reduction from the Latin Square Completion problem [2]).

They call it "the hive," or "the grid." It's a huge structure that fills a warehouse on the outskirts of Andover, a small and quiet town in southeast England. It's impossible to take in at a single glance, but standing on a maintenance walkway near the building's rafters, you look over what seems to be a huge chessboard, populated entirely by robots. There are more than a thousand of them, each the size and shape of a washing machine, and they wheel about, night and day, moving groceries. Their job is to be cheaper and more efficient than humans, and they are very good at it.

A new machine learning tool that can detect whether emerging strains of the bacterium, Salmonella are more likely to cause dangerous bloodstream infections rather than food poisoning has been developed. The tool, created by a scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and her collaborators at the University of Otago, New Zealand and the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research, a site of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, Germany, greatly speeds up the process for identifying the genetic changes underlying new invasive types of Salmonella that are of public health concern. Reported today (8 May) in PLOS Genetics, the machine learning tool could be useful for flagging dangerous bacteria before they cause an outbreak, from hospital wards to a global scale. As the cost of genomic sequencing falls, scientists around the world are using genetics to better understand the bacteria causing infections, how diseases spread, how bacteria gain resistance to drugs, and which strains of bacteria may cause outbreaks. However, current methods to identify the genetic adaptations in emerging strains of bacteria behind an outbreak are time-consuming and often involve manually comparing the new strain to an older reference collection.

The past few years have seen an influx of apps that allow users to privately send money to their friends. On Tuesday, Google released an update that allowed one of its flagship mobile apps to join the fun, according to TechCrunch. As part of a software update that went live ahead of Tuesday's Google I/O event, the Gmail app for iOS now allows users to send or request money from other people when drafting an email. Gmail for iOS gets Google Pay and snooze features https://t.co/M743XF7yQT According to TechCrunch, the process is quite simple.