Cost reduction by AI seems to be an important driver to counter the ever increasing cost of healthcare. However the opportunity to improve the effectiveness of healthcare by AI driven diagnostics and treatment plans is much bigger. Opportunities range from drug design to patient diagnosis and to create personalized treatment plans (almost on DNA level). Just as an example, Infervision uses Deep Learning techniques on patient data derived from X-Ray, CT, MRI, text descriptions of symptoms and diagnostic reports, to construct automatic diagnostic recommendations2. Another example is the use of Deep Learning to classify skin cancer.

AI research and video games are a match made in heaven. Researchers get a ready-made virtual environment with predefined goals they can control completely, and the AI agent gets to romp around without doing any damage. Sometimes, though, they do break things. Case in point is a paper published this week by a trio of machine learning researchers from the University of Freiburg in Germany. They were exploring a particular method of teaching AI agents to navigate video games (in this case, desktop ports of old Atari titles from the 1980s) when they discovered something odd.

The use of technology in recruiting is not intrinsically new. For years, hiring managers have been using application tracking systems and software, focused on managing volume and process, to filter applications based on given criteria like particular keywords or years of experience. Similarly for candidates, email once signed up to online job boards, email notification of broad matches for jobs are a familiar sight in inboxes, and organizations, agencies and headhunters reaching out to candidates via channels such as LinkedIn is also ubiquitous. Discussion about the extent to which Artificial Intelligence (AI) machine learning (ML) and data analytics should be used in recruitment itself, however, has often been intense; amid fear that it will take the human touch and "chemistry" element out of recruitment. Yet technology today has evolved to a level at which the debate is over.

An Atari-playing artificial intelligence created by researchers at the University of Freiburg in Germany has discovered a never-before-seen bug in the classic game Qbert. Using an inexplicable and seemingly random series of moves, the algorithm achieved an unprecedented high score in a matter of minutes. The researchers explained how they trained their A.I. to achieve an impossible result rivaling James T. Kirk's defeat of the Kobayashi Maru in a paper posted on the preprint side arXiv on February 24. Rather than employing a standard reinforcement learning approach, they used a lesser-known technique called evolutionary strategy. As the name suggests, the method is loosely based of the Darwinian concept of natural selection.

When we look at a stack of blocks or a stack of Oreos, we intuitively have a sense of how stable it is, whether it might fall over, and in what direction it may fall. That's a fairly sophisticated calculation involving the mass, texture, size, shape, and orientation of the objects in the stack. Researchers at MIT led by Josh Tenenbaum hypothesize that our brains have what you might call an intuitive physics engine: The information that we are able to gather through our senses is imprecise and noisy, but we nonetheless make an inference about what we think will probably happen, so we can get out of the way or rush to keep a bag of rice from falling over or cover our ears. Such a "noisy Newtonian" system involves probabilistic understandings and can fail. Consider this image of rocks stacked in precarious formations.

While the jury's still out on whether today's machine-learning techniques will ever create a program that could rival human intelligence, one thing about the future of artificial intelligence is clear: The machines are really good at playing games. And when the machines get good at the games, sometimes they come up with bizarre strategies and tactics that a human never would. For example: In a new unreviewed paper posted on Arxiv, which we saw through a tweet from researcher Miles Brundage, three researchers from the University of Freiburg in Germany trained an agent using evolutionary strategies to play eight different Atari games from over 30 years ago. For one of the games, "Qbert," the AI found a way to exploit a bug in between levels, make the entire stage flash, and then rack up unlimited points. Even if you have never played "Qbert," you can tell that the agent is crushing the game.

Social dilemmas, where mutual cooperation can lead to high payoffs but participants face incentives to cheat, are ubiquitous in multi-agent interaction. We wish to construct agents that cooperate with pure cooperators, avoid exploitation by pure defectors, and incentivize cooperation from the rest. However, often the actions taken by a partner are (partially) unobserved or the consequences of individual actions are hard to predict. We show that in a large class of games good strategies can be constructed by conditioning one's behavior solely on outcomes (ie. one's past rewards). We call this consequentialist conditional cooperation. We show how to construct such strategies using deep reinforcement learning techniques and demonstrate, both analytically and experimentally, that they are effective in social dilemmas beyond simple matrix games. We also show the limitations of relying purely on consequences and discuss the need for understanding both the consequences of and the intentions behind an action.

It has long been known that a single-layer fully-connected neural network with an i.i.d. prior over its parameters is equivalent to a Gaussian process (GP), in the limit of infinite network width. This correspondence enables exact Bayesian inference for infinite width neural networks on regression tasks by means of evaluating the corresponding GP. Recently, kernel functions which mimic multi-layer random neural networks have been developed, but only outside of a Bayesian framework. As such, previous work has not identified that these kernels can be used as covariance functions for GPs and allow fully Bayesian prediction with a deep neural network. In this work, we derive the exact equivalence between infinitely wide deep networks and GPs. We further develop a computationally efficient pipeline to compute the covariance function for these GPs. We then use the resulting GPs to perform Bayesian inference for wide deep neural networks on MNIST and CIFAR-10. We observe that trained neural network accuracy approaches that of the corresponding GP with increasing layer width, and that the GP uncertainty is strongly correlated with trained network prediction error. We further find that test performance increases as finite-width trained networks are made wider and more similar to a GP, and thus that GP predictions typically outperform those of finite-width networks. Finally we connect the performance of these GPs to the recent theory of signal propagation in random neural networks.

Businesses are naturally interested in detecting anomalies in their internal processes, because these can be indicators for fraud and inefficiencies. Within the domain of business intelligence, classic anomaly detection is not very frequently researched. In this paper, we propose a method, using autoencoders, for detecting and analyzing anomalies occurring in the execution of a business process. Our method does not rely on any prior knowledge about the process and can be trained on a noisy dataset already containing the anomalies. We demonstrate its effectiveness by evaluating it on 700 different datasets and testing its performance against three state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods. This paper is an extension of our previous work from 2016 [30]. Compared to the original publication we have further refined the approach in terms of performance and conducted an elaborate evaluation on more sophisticated datasets including real-life event logs from the Business Process Intelligence Challenges of 2012 and 2017. In our experiments our approach reached an F1 score of 0.87, whereas the best unaltered state-of-the-art approach reached an F1 score of 0.72. Furthermore, our approach can be used to analyze the detected anomalies in terms of which event within one execution of the process causes the anomaly.

Thanks to the growing availability of spoofing databases and rapid advances in using them, systems for detecting voice spoofing attacks are becoming more and more capable, and error rates close to zero are being reached for the ASVspoof2015 database. However, speech synthesis and voice conversion paradigms that are not considered in the ASVspoof2015 database are appearing. Such examples include direct waveform modelling and generative adversarial networks. We also need to investigate the feasibility of training spoofing systems using only low-quality found data. For that purpose, we developed a generative adversarial network-based speech enhancement system that improves the quality of speech data found in publicly available sources. Using the enhanced data, we trained state-of-the-art text-to-speech and voice conversion models and evaluated them in terms of perceptual speech quality and speaker similarity. The results show that the enhancement models significantly improved the SNR of low-quality degraded data found in publicly available sources and that they significantly improved the perceptual cleanliness of the source speech without significantly degrading the naturalness of the voice. However, the results also show limitations when generating speech with the low-quality found data.