We present a framework for analyzing the exact dynamics of a class of online learning algorithms in the high-dimensional scaling limit. Our results are applied to two concrete examples: online regularized linear regression and principal component analysis. As the ambient dimension tends to infinity, and with proper time scaling, we show that the time-varying joint empirical measures of the target feature vector and its estimates provided by the algorithms will converge weakly to a deterministic measured-valued process that can be characterized as the unique solution of a nonlinear PDE. Numerical solutions of this PDE can be efficiently obtained. These solutions lead to precise predictions of the performance of the algorithms, as many practical performance metrics are linear functionals of the joint empirical measures. In addition to characterizing the dynamic performance of online learning algorithms, our asymptotic analysis also provides useful insights. In particular, in the high-dimensional limit, and due to exchangeability, the original coupled dynamics associated with the algorithms will be asymptotically "decoupled", with each coordinate independently solving a 1-D effective minimization problem via stochastic gradient descent. Exploiting this insight for nonconvex optimization problems may prove an interesting line of future research.

LAS VEGAS & LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Accenture (NYSE:ACN) has completed a pilot program that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and the ease of voice to help older people manage the daunting challenges of navigating their care delivery and well-being. The Accenture Liquid Studio in London developed an AI-powered platform (the Accenture Platform) that can learn user behaviors and preferences and suggest activities to support the overall physical and mental health of individuals ages 70 and older. The Accenture platform, which runs on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, includes a'Family and Carer' portal that lets family and caregivers check on the individual's daily activities, such as whether they have taken their medication or made new requests for caregivers. The Accenture platform can also spot abnormalities in behavior and alert family or friends, based on user defined permissions. Other services provided by the Accenture platform helped participants find local events as well as potential new friends, encouraging them to become more active and social.

Google says its AlphaGo Zero artificial intelligence program has triumphed at chess against world-leading specialist software within hours of teaching itself the game from scratch. The firm's DeepMind division says that it played 100 games against Stockfish 8, and won or drew all of them. The research has yet to be peer reviewed. But experts already suggest the achievement will strengthen the firm's position in a competitive sector. "From a scientific point of view, it's the latest in a series of dazzling results that DeepMind has produced," the University of Oxford's Prof Michael Wooldridge told the BBC.

Advent is upon us, and the season of overconsumption begins! My wife and I attended our first Christmas party of the year yesterday and the tree and decorations are going up this evening, in a solid attempt to be better organised this year! Whilst many of us might be starting to ease off for Christmas now, the LawTech sector has had another busy week. Legal Futures' Dan Bindman has written a great in depth piece on the Ailira chatbot that we mentioned in last weeks LawTech Review. Artificial Intelligence may help you win your next court case!

Margaret Thatcher's remarkable success at the ballot box may have been partially due to her distinctive voice, according to a new study. Experts looked at whether voters could be swayed by the way politicians speak. They found that politicians whose voices were hoarse, flat or slow received a better response from the public than those who had a different speech pattern. They believe this is because they are perceived as wiser and more competent than those who have a high-pitched voice. Margaret Thatcher's remarkable success at the ballot box may have been partially due to her distinctive voice, according to a new study.

According to an Oxford University analysis, close to half of all jobs will be taken over by robots in the next 25 years. No wonder the press is full of hand-wringing about how workers will adjust and the best way to prepare the next generation for this A.I.-filled future. But not everyone is alarmed about the prospect of radical change in the labor market. After all, this has happened before (for instance, when mechanization replaced the vast majority of farmers) and it turned out OK. Plus, a lot of today's jobs are soul-crushingly boring and repetitive. Losing them might just be a blessing.

LONDON – Christine Keeler, the central figure in the sex-and-espionage Profumo scandal that rocked Cold War Britain, has died at 75. Her son, Seymour Platt, posted on Facebook that Keeler died Monday at a hospital near Farnborough in southern England. Born in 1942, Keeler was a model and nightclub dancer in 1963 when she had an affair with British War Secretary John Profumo. When it emerged that Keeler had also slept with a Soviet naval attache, the collision of sex, wealth and national security issues caused a sensation and helped topple the Conservative government. A naked photo of Keeler straddling the back of a chair is among the most famous U.K. images of the 1960s.

Following written evidence from PHG Foundation submitted to a House of Lords inquiry on Artificial Intelligence, PHG Foundation was invited to give oral evidence on the implications of AI for healthcare to the Select Committee on 21 November. In evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence (AI), PHG Foundation's Head of Science, Dr Sobia Raza highlighted the potential value of an NHS wide strategy on using health data for algorithm development to realise the potential of AI for patients and to ensure data sets are sufficiently representative of the UK population. The committee is considering the economic, ethical and social implications of advances in artificial intelligence. Responding to a question on how to ensure the robust evaluation of machine learning tools before they are used on patients, Sobia used the analogy of driverless cars, which may have been trained and then successfully tested on broad open highways in California but are faced with a very different set of decisions on narrow British country lanes. She said'It's the same in healthcare – the AI algorithms have to be tested under the conditions and the population in which they will be used.'

Ubtech, a Shenzhen-based humanoid robots maker startup, raised $400 million in a Series C round led by Tencent Holdings (which invested $40 million in the round). Ubtech (Union Brothers Technology) builds and sells toy robots. Their most recent is a $300 Star Wars Stormtrooper robot which will ship just before the movie debuts mid-December. TuSimple, a Chinese startup providing autonomous driving technology for the trucking industry, raised $55 million in a Series C round led by Fuhe Capital with Zhiping Capital and SINA Corp. Note that TuSimple raised $20 million in August in a Series B round.

Environmental acoustic sensing involves the retrieval and processing of audio signals to better understand our surroundings. While large-scale acoustic data make manual analysis infeasible, they provide a suitable playground for machine learning approaches. Most existing machine learning techniques developed for environmental acoustic sensing do not provide flexible control of the trade-off between the false positive rate and the false negative rate. This paper presents a cost-sensitive classification paradigm, in which the hyper-parameters of classifiers and the structure of variational autoencoders are selected in a principled Neyman-Pearson framework. We examine the performance of the proposed approach using a dataset from the HumBug project which aims to detect the presence of mosquitoes using sound collected by simple embedded devices.