Quantum computing is all the rage lately, with companies large and small looking for ways to create the technology and then use it to solve a range of issues. Microsoft has a new coding language for quantum computers, Intel has created a test chip for the new tech and scientists are looking for ways to use corkscrew light beams for future practical quantum computing applications. Now Volkswagon and Google are teaming up for comprehensive research in the field, looking to use quantum computers and AI to create better EV batteries, something that Toyota is also pursuing. The two companies also want to work on traffic optimization (a key development for an autonomous-automobile future) and new machine learning processes. The announcement was made at a 2017 Web Summit in Lisbon, and said that Volkswagen specialists in San Francisco and Munich will work with Google's universal quantum computers.

In this paper we analyse the benefits of incorporating interval-valued fuzzy sets into the Bousi-Prolog system. A syntax, declarative semantics and im- plementation for this extension is presented and formalised. We show, by using potential applications, that fuzzy logic programming frameworks enhanced with them can correctly work together with lexical resources and ontologies in order to improve their capabilities for knowledge representation and reasoning.

Both in statistics and machine learning there has been substantial interest in the design and study of distributed statistical or learning methods in recent years. One driving reason is the fact that in certain applications datasets have become so large that it is often unfeasible, or computationally undesirable, to carry out the analysis on a single machine. In a distributed method the data are divided over a cluster consisting of several machines and/or cores. The machines in the cluster then process their data locally, after which the local results are somehow aggregated on a central machine to finally produce the overall outcome of the statistical analysis. Distributed methods are not only used for computational reasons, but are for instance also of interest in situations where privacy is important and it is undesirable that all data are handled at a single location. Moreover, there are applications in which data are by construction gathered at multiple locations and first processed locally, before being combined at a central location. Over the last years a variety of distributed methods have been proposed. Recent examples include Consensus Monte Carlo (Scott et al. (2016)), WASP The research leading to these results has received funding from the Netherlands Science foundation NWO and from the European Research Council under ERC Grant Agreement 320637.

The Calculation of Posterior Distributions by Data Augmentation: Comment: A Noniterative Sampling/Importance Resampling Alternative to the Data Augmentation Algorithm for Creating a Few Imputations When Fractions of Missing Information Are Modest: The SIR. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 82(398):543, jun 1987.

Information about intrinsic dimension is crucial to perform dimensionality reduction, compress information, design efficient algorithms, and do statistical adaptation. In this paper we propose an estimator for the intrinsic dimension of a data set. The estimator is based on binary neighbourhood information about the observations in the form of two adjacency matrices, and does not require any explicit distance information. The underlying graph is modelled according to a subset of a specific random connection model, sometimes referred to as the Poisson blob model. Computationally the estimator scales like n log n, and we specify its asymptotic distribution and rate of convergence. A simulation study on both real and simulated data shows that our approach compares favourably with some competing methods from the literature, including approaches that rely on distance information.

Recommender systems problems witness a growing interest for finding better learning algorithms for personalized information. Matrix factorization that estimates the user liking for an item by taking an inner product on the latent features of users and item have been widely studied owing to its better accuracy and scalability. However, it is possible that the mapping between the latent features learned from these and the original features contains rather complex nonlinear hierarchical information, that classical linear matrix factorization can not capture. In this paper, we aim to propose a novel multilayer non-linear approach to a variant of nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) to learn such factors from the incomplete ratings matrix. Firstly, we construct a user-item matrix with explicit ratings, secondly we learn latent factors for representations of users and items from the designed nonlinear multi-layer approach. Further, the architecture is built with different nonlinearities using adaptive gradient optimizer to better learn the latent factors in this space. We show that by doing so, our model is able to learn low-dimensional representations that are better suited for recommender systems on several benchmark datasets.

Recent work has demonstrated that neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, i.e., inputs that are almost indistinguishable from natural data and yet classified incorrectly by the network. In fact, some of the latest findings suggest that the existence of adversarial attacks may be an inherent weakness of deep learning models. To address this problem, we study the adversarial robustness of neural networks through the lens of robust optimization. This approach provides us with a broad and unifying view on much of the prior work on this topic. Its principled nature also enables us to identify methods for both training and attacking neural networks that are reliable and, in a certain sense, universal. In particular, they specify a concrete security guarantee that would protect against any adversary. These methods let us train networks with significantly improved resistance to a wide range of adversarial attacks. They also suggest the notion of security against a first-order adversary as a natural and broad security guarantee. We believe that robustness against such well-defined classes of adversaries is an important stepping stone towards fully resistant deep learning models.

Long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks are renowned for being uninterpretable "black boxes". In the medical domain where LSTMs have shown promise, this is specifically concerning because it is imperative to understand the decisions made by machine learning models in such acute situations. This study employs techniques used in the convolutional neural network domain to elucidate the inputs that are important when LSTMs classify electrocardiogram signals. Of the various techniques available to determine input feature saliency, it was found that learning an occlusion mask is the most effective.

This work brings together two powerful concepts in Gaussian processes: the variational approach to sparse approximation and the spectral representation of Gaussian processes. This gives rise to an approximation that inherits the benefits of the variational approach but with the representational power and computational scalability of spectral representations. The work hinges on a key result that there exist spectral features related to a finite domain of the Gaussian process which exhibit almost-independent covariances. We derive these expressions for Matern kernels in one dimension, and generalize to more dimensions using kernels with specific structures. Under the assumption of additive Gaussian noise, our method requires only a single pass through the dataset, making for very fast and accurate computation. We fit a model to 4 million training points in just a few minutes on a standard laptop. With non-conjugate likelihoods, our MCMC scheme reduces the cost of computation from O(NM2) (for a sparse Gaussian process) to O(NM) per iteration, where N is the number of data and M is the number of features.

This study presents an efficient incremental/decremental approach for big streams based on Kernel Ridge Regression (KRR), a frequently used data analysis in cloud centers. To avoid reanalyzing the whole dataset whenever sensors receive new training data, typical incremental KRR used a single-instance mechanism for updating an existing system. However, this inevitably increased redundant computational time, not to mention applicability to big streams. To this end, the proposed mechanism supports incremental/decremental processing for both single and multiple samples (i.e., batch processing). A large scale of data can be divided into batches, processed by a machine, without sacrificing the accuracy. Moreover, incremental/decremental analyses in empirical and intrinsic space are also proposed in this study to handle different types of data either with a large number of samples or high feature dimensions, whereas typical methods focused only on one type. At the end of this study, we further the proposed mechanism to statistical Kernelized Bayesian Regression, so that uncertainty modeling with incremental/decremental computation becomes applicable. Experimental results showed that computational time was significantly reduced, better than the original nonincremental design and the typical single incremental method. Furthermore, the accuracy of the proposed method remained the same as the baselines. This implied that the system enhanced efficiency without sacrificing the accuracy. These findings proved that the proposed method was appropriate for variable streaming data analysis, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.