An artificial intelligence-powered digital health worker has been unveiled by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as its latest tool for disseminating reliable health information to the public. Originally developed by New Zealand tech company Soul Machines, with support of the Qatar Ministry of Health, the first version of the virtual health worker was used to combat misinformation about the pandemic. The new version – dubbed Florence 2.0 – covers a broader range of topics. Along with advice on COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, it can also share advice on mental health, give tips to de-stress, provide guidance on how to eat healthily and be more active, and quit tobacco and e-cigarettes, according to the WHO. The chatbot can currently converse in English, with Arabic, French, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, and Russian to follow.

For two decades, the formalism of quantum mechanics has been successfully used to describe human decision processes, situations of heuristic reasoning, and the contextuality of concepts and their combinations. The phenomenon of 'categorical perception' has put us on track to find a possible deeper cause of the presence of this quantum structure in human cognition. Thus, we show that in an archetype of human perception consisting of the reconciliation of a bottom up stimulus with a top down cognitive expectation pattern, there arises the typical warping of categorical perception, where groups of stimuli clump together to form quanta, which move away from each other and lead to a discretization of a dimension. The individual concepts, which are these quanta, can be modeled by a quantum prototype theory with the square of the absolute value of a corresponding Schr\"odinger wave function as the fuzzy prototype structure, and the superposition of two such wave functions accounts for the interference pattern that occurs when these concepts are combined. Using a simple quantum measurement model, we analyze this archetype of human perception, provide an overview of the experimental evidence base for categorical perception with the phenomenon of warping leading to quantization, and illustrate our analyses with two examples worked out in detail.

In this paper, we investigate signal detection in multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems with hardware impairments, such as power amplifier nonlinearity and in-phase/quadrature imbalance. To deal with the complex combined effects of hardware imperfections, neural network (NN) techniques, in particular deep neural networks (DNNs), have been studied to directly compensate for the impact of hardware impairments. However, it is difficult to train a DNN with limited pilot signals, hindering its practical applications. In this work, we investigate how to achieve efficient Bayesian signal detection in MIMO systems with hardware imperfections. Characterizing combined hardware imperfections often leads to complicated signal models, making Bayesian signal detection challenging. To address this issue, we first train an NN to "model" the MIMO system with hardware imperfections and then perform Bayesian inference based on the trained NN. Modelling the MIMO system with NN enables the design of NN architectures based on the signal flow of the MIMO system, minimizing the number of NN layers and parameters, which is crucial to achieving efficient training with limited pilot signals. We then represent the trained NN with a factor graph, and design an efficient message passing based Bayesian signal detector, leveraging the unitary approximate message passing (UAMP) algorithm. The implementation of a turbo receiver with the proposed Bayesian detector is also investigated. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed technique delivers remarkably better performance than state-of-the-art methods.

We present a Chinese BERT model dubbed MarkBERT that uses word information in this work. Existing word-based BERT models regard words as basic units, however, due to the vocabulary limit of BERT, they only cover high-frequency words and fall back to character level when encountering out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. Different from existing works, MarkBERT keeps the vocabulary being Chinese characters and inserts boundary markers between contiguous words. Such design enables the model to handle any words in the same way, no matter they are OOV words or not. Besides, our model has two additional benefits: first, it is convenient to add word-level learning objectives over markers, which is complementary to traditional character and sentence-level pretraining tasks; second, it can easily incorporate richer semantics such as POS tags of words by replacing generic markers with POS tag-specific markers. With the simple markers insertion, MarkBERT can improve the performances of various downstream tasks including language understanding and sequence labeling. \footnote{All the codes and models will be made publicly available at \url{https://github.com/daiyongya/markbert}}

In the fight against wildlife trafficking, Australian scientists are using the power of artificial intelligence. The method detects animals being smuggled in luggage or the mail using 3-Dimensional X-rays at airports and post offices, and algorithms then warn customs agents. This device uses artificial intelligence to recognize the morphologies of animals that are being trafficked. Australia has a diverse flora and fauna, which has supported an illicit wildlife trade. The researchers created a 3D-scanned "reference library" for three types of wildlife: lizards, birds, and fish, which they used to teach artificial intelligence algorithms to recognize the species.

The loss of any life can be devastating, but the loss of a life from suicide is especially tragic. Around nine Australians take their own life each day, and it is the leading cause of death for Australians aged 15–44. Suicide attempts are more common, with some estimates stating that they occur up to 30 times as often as deaths. "Suicide has large effects when it happens. It impacts many people and has far-reaching consequences for family, friends and communities," says Karen Kusuma, a UNSW Sydney PhD candidate in psychiatry at the Black Dog Institute, who investigates suicide prevention in adolescents.

AI art tools like Craiyon (formerly DALL-E mini) and Midjourney have been making waves on the internet over recent months. But are these artificial intelligence tools exhibiting creativity, or just clever mimics? And how can machine learning be effectively used in artistic, creative and design endeavours most effectively? Cosmos science journalist Evrim Yazgin tackles these questions and speaks with AI expert Professor Jon McCormack, Director of Monash University's SensiLab, in the article "Creativity and AI" in Cosmos Magazine #96. At this year's Colorado State Fair's annual art competition awarded its prize to an AI-generated piece entitled "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" by Jason M. Allen.

Modelling individual objects in a scene as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) provides an alternative geometric scene representation that may benefit downstream robotics tasks such as scene understanding and object manipulation. However, we identify three challenges to using real-world training data collected by a robot to train a NeRF: (i) The camera trajectories are constrained, and full visual coverage is not guaranteed - especially when obstructions to the objects of interest are present; (ii) the poses associated with the images are noisy due to odometry or localization noise; (iii) the objects are not easily isolated from the background. This paper evaluates the extent to which above factors degrade the quality of the learnt implicit object representation. We introduce a pipeline that decomposes a scene into multiple individual object-NeRFs, using noisy object instance masks and bounding boxes, and evaluate the sensitivity of this pipeline with respect to noisy poses, instance masks, and the number of training images. We uncover that the sensitivity to noisy instance masks can be partially alleviated with depth supervision and quantify the importance of including the camera extrinsics in the NeRF optimisation process.

Multi-mobile robot systems show great advantages over one single robot in many applications. However, the robots are required to form desired task-specified formations, making feasible motions decrease significantly. Thus, it is challenging to determine whether the robots can pass through an obstructed environment under formation constraints, especially in an obstacle-rich environment. Furthermore, is there an optimal path for the robots? To deal with the two problems, a novel graphbased motion planner is proposed in this paper. A mapping between workspace and configuration space of multi-mobile robot systems is first built, where valid configurations can be acquired to satisfy both formation constraints and collision avoidance. Then, an undirected graph is generated by verifying connectivity between valid configurations. The breadth-first search method is employed to answer the question of whether there is a feasible path on the graph. Finally, an optimal path will be planned on the updated graph, considering the cost of path length and formation preference. Simulation results show that the planner can be applied to get optimal motions of robots under formation constraints in obstacle-rich environments. Additionally, different constraints are considered.

With the recent advance in large pre-trained language models, researchers have achieved record performances in NLP tasks that mostly focus on language pattern matching. The community is experiencing the shift of the challenge from how to model language to the imitation of complex reasoning abilities like human beings. In this work, we investigate the application domain of finance that involves real-world, complex numerical reasoning. We propose a new large-scale dataset, ConvFinQA, aiming to study the chain of numerical reasoning in conversational question answering. Our dataset poses great challenge in modeling long-range, complex numerical reasoning paths in real-world conversations. We conduct comprehensive experiments and analyses with both the neural symbolic methods and the prompting-based methods, to provide insights into the reasoning mechanisms of these two divisions. We believe our new dataset should serve as a valuable resource to push forward the exploration of real-world, complex reasoning tasks as the next research focus. Our dataset and code is publicly available at https://github.com/czyssrs/ConvFinQA.