What does it take to make robots more welcome in the workplace? The answer may be programming them to make mistakes. Researchers in Austria conducted a study recently in which interactions between robots and human co-workers were examined in a simulated workplace. When some of the robots made mistakes--something they were programmed to do--the robot-human interactions observed were more positive than in sessions where the robots did their jobs perfectly. "People who interacted with the faulty robots liked them more," says Nicole Mirnig, a research fellow at the University of Salzburg's Center for Human-Computer Interaction, and one of six researchers on the study published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI.

Advanced digital technology could give UK manufacturing a huge boost and create hundreds of thousands of jobs, a new report claims. The independent review, chaired by the head of Siemens UK, highlights the benefits of robotics, 3D printing and artificial intelligence. But Juergen Maier said the UK needed "greater ambition" to take advantage of such technology. His report calls for a commission to help business adopt the advances. The report, Made Smarter, brought together executives from companies such as Rolls Royce, GKN and IBM, with representatives from small firms as well as academics from the universities of Newcastle and Cambridge.

A new endoscopic system powered by artificial intelligence (AI) has today been shown to automatically identify colorectal adenomas during colonoscopy. The system, developed in Japan, has recently been tested in one of the first prospective trials of AI-assisted endoscopy in a clinical setting, with the results presented today at the 25th UEG Week in Barcelona, Spain. The new computer-aided diagnostic system uses an endocytoscopic* image – a 500-fold magnified view of a colorectal polyp – to analyse approximately 300 features of the polyp after applying narrow-band imaging (NBI) mode or staining with methylene blue. The system compares the features of each polyp against more than 30,000 endocytoscopic images that were used for machine learning, allowing it to predict the lesion pathology in less than a second. Preliminary studies demonstrated the feasibility of using such a system to classify colorectal polyps, however, until today, no prospective studies have been reported.

Over-subscription, that is, being assigned too many things to do, is commonly encountered in temporal scheduling problems. As human beings, we often want to do more than we can actually do, and underestimate how long it takes to perform each task. Decision makers can benefit from aids that identify when these failure situations are likely, the root causes of these failures, and resolutions to these failures. In this paper, we present a decision assistant that helps users resolve over-subscribed temporal problems. The system works like an experienced advisor that can quickly identify the cause of failure underlying temporal problems and compute resolutions. The core of the decision assistant is the Best-first Conflict-Directed Relaxation (BCDR) algorithm, which can detect conflicting sets of constraints within temporal problems, and computes continuous relaxations for them that weaken constraints to the minimum extent, instead of removing them completely. BCDR is an extension to the Conflict-Directed A* algorithm, first developed in the model-based reasoning community to compute most likely system diagnoses or reconfigurations. It generalizes the discrete conflicts and relaxations, to hybrid conflicts and relaxations, which denote minimal inconsistencies and minimal relaxations to both discrete and continuous relaxable constraints. In addition, BCDR is capable of handling temporal uncertainty, expressed as either set-bounded or probabilistic durations, and can compute preferred trade-offs between the risk of violating a schedule requirement, versus the loss of utility by weakening those requirements. BCDR has been applied to several decision support applications in different domains, including deep-sea exploration, urban travel planning and transit system management. It has demonstrated its effectiveness in helping users resolve over-subscribed scheduling problems and evaluate the robustness of existing solutions. In our benchmark experiments, BCDR has also demonstrated its efficiency on solving large-scale scheduling problems in the aforementioned domains. Thanks to its conflict-driven approach for computing relaxations, BCDR achieves one to two orders of magnitude improvements on runtime performance when compared to state-of-the-art numerical solvers.

Multi-Context Systems (MCS) are a powerful framework for interlinking possibly heterogeneous, autonomous knowledge bases, where information can be exchanged among knowledge bases by designated bridge rules with negation as failure. An acknowledged issue with MCS is inconsistency that arises due to the information exchange. To remedy this problem, inconsistency removal has been proposed in terms of repairs, which modify bridge rules based on suitable notions for diagnosis of inconsistency. In general, multiple diagnoses and repairs do exist; this leaves the user, who arguably may oversee the inconsistency removal, with the task of selecting some repair among all possible ones. To aid in this regard, we extend the MCS framework with preference information for diagnoses, such that undesired diagnoses are filtered out and diagnoses that are most preferred according to a preference ordering are selected. We consider preference information at a generic level and develop meta-reasoning techniques on diagnoses in MCS that can be exploited to reduce preference-based selection of diagnoses to computing ordinary subset-minimal diagnoses in an extended MCS. We describe two meta-reasoning encodings for preference orders: the first is conceptually simple but may incur an exponential blowup. The second is increasing only linearly in size and based on duplicating the original MCS. The latter requires nondeterministic guessing if a subset-minimal among all most preferred diagnoses should be computed. However, a complexity analysis of diagnoses shows that this is worst-case optimal, and that in general, preferred diagnoses have the same complexity as subset-minimal ordinary diagnoses. Furthermore, (subset-minimal) filtered diagnoses and (subset-minimal) ordinary diagnoses also have the same complexity.

Datasets with a mixture of categorical and numerical attributes are pervasive in applications from business and socioeconomic settings. Clustering these datasets is an important activity in their analysis. Techniques to cluster these datasets have been developed by researchers, see for example [1], [2] and [3]. Techniques to cluster mixed datasets either prescribe a probabilistic generative model [4] or use a dissimilarity measure [5] to compute a dissimilarity matrix that is then clustered. Each of these approaches have issues that need to be addressed when they are applied to big datasets - datasets with a large number of instances compared to attributes.

We study rank-1 {L1-norm-based TUCKER2} (L1-TUCKER2) decomposition of 3-way tensors, treated as a collection of $N$ $D \times M$ matrices that are to be jointly decomposed. Our contributions are as follows. i) We prove that the problem is equivalent to combinatorial optimization over $N$ antipodal-binary variables. ii) We derive the first two algorithms in the literature for its exact solution. The first algorithm has cost exponential in $N$; the second one has cost polynomial in $N$ (under a mild assumption). Our algorithms are accompanied by formal complexity analysis. iii) We conduct numerical studies to compare the performance of exact L1-TUCKER2 (proposed) with standard HOSVD, HOOI, GLRAM, PCA, L1-PCA, and TPCA-L1. Our studies show that L1-TUCKER2 outperforms (in tensor approximation) all the above counterparts when the processed data are outlier corrupted.

We study the $\ell_0$-Low Rank Approximation Problem, where the goal is, given an $m \times n$ matrix $A$, to output a rank-$k$ matrix $A'$ for which $\|A'-A\|_0$ is minimized. Here, for a matrix $B$, $\|B\|_0$ denotes the number of its non-zero entries. This NP-hard variant of low rank approximation is natural for problems with no underlying metric, and its goal is to minimize the number of disagreeing data positions. We provide approximation algorithms which significantly improve the running time and approximation factor of previous work. For $k > 1$, we show how to find, in poly$(mn)$ time for every $k$, a rank $O(k \log(n/k))$ matrix $A'$ for which $\|A'-A\|_0 \leq O(k^2 \log(n/k)) \mathrm{OPT}$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm with provable guarantees for the $\ell_0$-Low Rank Approximation Problem for $k > 1$, even for bicriteria algorithms. For the well-studied case when $k = 1$, we give a $(2+\epsilon)$-approximation in {\it sublinear time}, which is impossible for other variants of low rank approximation such as for the Frobenius norm. We strengthen this for the well-studied case of binary matrices to obtain a $(1+O(\psi))$-approximation in sublinear time, where $\psi = \mathrm{OPT}/\lVert A\rVert_0$. For small $\psi$, our approximation factor is $1+o(1)$.

Inspired by the success of deep learning techniques in the physical and chemical sciences, we apply a modification of an autoencoder type deep neural network to the task of dimension reduction of molecular dynamics data. We can show that our time-lagged autoencoder reliably finds low-dimensional embeddings for highdimensional feature spaces which capture the slow dynamics of the underlying stochastic processes-beyond the capabilities of linear dimension reduction techniques. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation allows us to probe the full spatiotemporal detail of molecular processes, but its usefulness has long been limited by the sampling problem. If we do not want to choose the library of feature functions by hand, but instead want to optimize the nonlinear mapping E by employing a neural network, we have again two options: (1) employ the variational approach. In this paper we investigate option (2), which naturally leads to using a time-lagged autoencoder (TAE).

Matrix factorization is a flexible approach to uncover latent factors in low-rank or sparse models. With sparse factors, it is used in dictionary learning, and has proven very effective for denoising and visual feature encoding in signal and computer vision [see e.g., 1]. When the data admit a low-rank structure, matrix factorization has proven very powerful for various tasks such as matrix completion [2, 3], word embedding [4, 5], or network models [6]. It is flexible enough to accommodate a large set of constraints and regularizations, and has gained significant attention in scientific domains where interpretability is a key aspect, such as genetics [7] and neuroscience [8]. In this paper, our goal is to adapt matrix-factorization techniques to huge-dimensional datasets, i.e., with large number of columns n and large number of rows p. Specifically, our work is motivated by the rapid increase in sensor resolution, as in hyperspectral imaging or fMRI, and the challenge that the resulting high-dimensional signals pose to current algorithms.