Facial recognition technology is being deployed in housing projects, homeless shelters, schools, even across entire cities--usually without much fanfare or discussion. To some, this represents a critical technology for helping vulnerable communities gain access to social services. In this episode, we speak to the advocates, technologists, and dissidents dealing with the messy consequences that come when a technology that can identify you almost anywhere (even if you're wearing a mask) is deployed without any clear playbook for regulating or managing it. This episode was reported and produced by Jennifer Strong, Tate Ryan-Mosley, Emma Cillekens, and Karen Hao. Strong: So, I'm in lower Manhattan next to some buildings known as Knickerbocker Village. You might hear the subway running up overhead there. So history buffs might know this spot as kind of a birthplace of housing rights. Some of New York City's first regulations on rental housing came to exist here because of the tenants association. These buildings were also among the very first federally funded affordable housing units.

SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative software and services, SAS empowers and inspires customers around the world to transform data into intelligence. SAS gives you THE POWER TO KNOW . The Canadian subsidiary of SAS has been in operation since 1988. Headquartered in Toronto, SAS employs more than 300 people across the country at its Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, Quebec City and Montréal offices.

We advance the modeling capability of electron particle precipitation from the magnetosphere to the ionosphere through a new database and use of machine learning tools to gain utility from those data. We have compiled, curated, analyzed, and made available a new and more capable database of particle precipitation data that includes 51 satellite years of Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) observations temporally aligned with solar wind and geomagnetic activity data. The new total electron energy flux particle precipitation nowcast model, a neural network called PrecipNet, takes advantage of increased expressive power afforded by machine learning approaches to appropriately utilize diverse information from the solar wind and geomagnetic activity and, importantly, their time histories. With a more capable representation of the organizing parameters and the target electron energy flux observations, PrecipNet achieves a >50% reduction in errors from a current state-of-the-art model (OVATION Prime), better captures the dynamic changes of the auroral flux, and provides evidence that it can capably reconstruct mesoscale phenomena. We create and apply a new framework for space weather model evaluation that culminates previous guidance from across the solar-terrestrial research community. The research approach and results are representative of the `new frontier' of space weather research at the intersection of traditional and data science-driven discovery and provides a foundation for future efforts.

The 2020 Multi-channel Magnetic Resonance Reconstruction (MC-MRRec) Challenge had two primary goals: 1) compare different MR image reconstruction models on a large dataset and 2) assess the generalizability of these models to datasets acquired with a different number of receiver coils (i.e., multiple channels). The challenge had two tracks: Track 01 focused on assessing models trained and tested with 12-channel data. Track 02 focused on assessing models trained with 12-channel data and tested on both 12-channel and 32-channel data. While the challenge is ongoing, here we describe the first edition of the challenge and summarise submissions received prior to 5 September 2020. Track 01 had five baseline models and received four independent submissions. Track 02 had two baseline models and received two independent submissions. This manuscript provides relevant comparative information on the current state-of-the-art of MR reconstruction and highlights the challenges of obtaining generalizable models that are required prior to clinical adoption. Both challenge tracks remain open and will provide an objective performance assessment for future submissions. Subsequent editions of the challenge are proposed to investigate new concepts and strategies, such as the integration of potentially available longitudinal information during the MR reconstruction process. An outline of the proposed second edition of the challenge is presented in this manuscript.

Over the last year, we saw a greater shift towards automation and AI applications to streamline insurance, including increased usage of augmented reality to support activities ranging from warning of risks, explaining insurance plans, estimating damages and increasing brand awareness. We also saw insurers starting to explore greater use of blockchain, the tech behind cryptocurrencies, to better support operations. With this came a greater emphasis on cybersecurity, with the expectation for more proactive and preventative measures. As we enter the next decade, we'll continue to see unprecedented growth in innovation in the Insurtech space, which has set up the industry for more market advancements in an increasingly complex environment. The Canadian insurance industry has been largely inert and less agile in the past, and it's this environment where Insurtech has made its mark.

High-dimensional data presents challenges for data management. Feature selection, as an important dimensionality reduction technique, reduces the dimensionality of data by identifying an essential subset of input features, and it can provide interpretable, effective, and efficient insights for analysis and decision-making processes. Algorithmic stability is a key characteristic of an algorithm in its sensitivity to perturbations of input samples. In this paper, first we propose an innovative unsupervised feature selection algorithm. The architecture of our algorithm consists of a feature scorer and a feature selector. The scorer trains a neural network (NN) to score all the features globally, and the selector is in a dependence sub-NN which locally evaluates the representation abilities to select features. Further, we present algorithmic stability analysis and show our algorithm has a performance guarantee by providing a generalization error bound. Empirically, extensive experimental results on ten real-world datasets corroborate the superior generalization performance of our algorithm over contemporary algorithms. Notably, the features selected by our algorithm have comparable performance to the original features; therefore, our algorithm significantly facilitates data management.

Coreference resolution (CR) is an essential part of discourse analysis. Most recently, neural approaches have been proposed to improve over SOTA models from earlier paradigms. So far none of the published neural models leverage external semantic knowledge such as type information. This paper offers the first such model and evaluation, demonstrating modest gains in accuracy by introducing either gold standard or predicted types. In the proposed approach, type information serves both to (1) improve mention representation and (2) create a soft type consistency check between coreference candidate mentions. Our evaluation covers two different grain sizes of types over four different benchmark corpora.

Application markets provide a communication channel between app developers and their end-users in form of app reviews, which allow users to provide feedback about the apps. Although security and privacy in mobile apps are one of the biggest issues, it is unclear how much people are aware of these or discuss them in reviews. In this study, we explore the privacy and security concerns of users using reviews in the Google Play Store. For this, we conducted a study by analyzing around 2.2M reviews from the top 539 apps of this Android market. We found that 0.5\% of these reviews are related to the security and privacy concerns of the users. We further investigated these apps by performing dynamic analysis which provided us valuable insights into their actual behaviors. Based on the different perspectives, we categorized the apps and evaluated how the different factors influence the users' perception of the apps. It was evident from the results that the number of permissions that the apps request plays a dominant role in this matter. We also found that sending out the location can affect the users' thoughts about the app. The other factors do not directly affect the privacy and security concerns for the users.

Subjectivity is the expression of internal opinions or beliefs which cannot be objectively observed or verified, and has been shown to be important for sentiment analysis and word-sense disambiguation. Furthermore, subjectivity is an important aspect of user-generated data. In spite of this, subjectivity has not been investigated in contexts where such data is widespread, such as in question answering (QA). We therefore investigate the relationship between subjectivity and QA, while developing a new dataset. We compare and contrast with analyses from previous work, and verify that findings regarding subjectivity still hold when using recently developed NLP architectures. We find that subjectivity is also an important feature in the case of QA, albeit with more intricate interactions between subjectivity and QA performance. For instance, a subjective question may or may not be associated with a subjective answer. We release an English QA dataset (SubjQA) based on customer reviews, containing subjectivity annotations for questions and answer spans across 6 distinct domains.

The AltaML Applied AI Lab launches today: https://lnkd.in/gbsggVF Each cohort of interns will work with industry partners Suncor, TransAlta, ATB Financial, Spartan Controls on applied #AI and #ML projects in #YYC. The AI Lab operates with support from Calgary Economic Development.