In traditional astronomies across the world, groups of stars in the night sky were linked into constellations -- symbolic representations rich in meaning and with practical roles. In some sky cultures, constellations are represented as line (or connect-the-dot) figures, which are spatial networks drawn over the fixed background of stars. We analyse 1802 line figures from 56 sky cultures spanning all continents, in terms of their network, spatial, and brightness features, and ask what associations exist between these visual features and culture type or sky region. First, an embedded map of constellations is learnt, to show clusters of line figures. We then form the network of constellations (as linked by their similarity), to study how similar cultures are by computing their assortativity (or homophily) over the network. Finally, we measure the diversity (or entropy) index for the set of constellations drawn per sky region. Our results show distinct types of line figures, and that many folk astronomies with oral traditions have widespread similarities in constellation design, which do not align with cultural ancestry. In a minority of sky regions, certain line designs appear universal, but this is not the norm: in the majority of sky regions, the line geometries are diverse.

This study develops a framework for unmanned aerial systems (UASs) to monitor fall hazard prevention systems near unprotected edges and openings in high-rise building projects. A three-step machine-learning-based framework was developed and tested to detect guardrail posts from the images captured by UAS. First, a guardrail detector was trained to localize the candidate locations of posts supporting the guardrail. Since images were used in this process collected from an actual job site, several false detections were identified. Therefore, additional constraints were introduced in the following steps to filter out false detections. Second, the research team applied a horizontal line detector to the image to properly detect floors and remove the detections that were not close to the floors. Finally, since the guardrail posts are installed with approximately normal distribution between each post, the space between them was estimated and used to find the most likely distance between the two posts. The research team used various combinations of the developed approaches to monitor guardrail systems in the captured images from a high-rise building project. Comparing the precision and recall metrics indicated that the cascade classifier achieves better performance with floor detection and guardrail spacing estimation. The research outcomes illustrate that the proposed guardrail recognition system can improve the assessment of guardrails and facilitate the safety engineer's task of identifying fall hazards in high-rise building projects.

Due to the rapid development of non-face-to-face services due to the corona virus, commerce through the Internet, such as sales and reservations, is increasing very rapidly. Consumers also post reviews, suggestions, or judgments about goods or services on the website. The review data directly used by consumers provides positive feedback and nice impact to consumers, such as creating business value. Therefore, analysing review data is very important from a marketing point of view. Our research suggests a new way to find factors for customer satisfaction through review data. We applied a method to find factors for customer satisfaction by mixing and using the data mining technique, which is a big data analysis method, and the natural language processing technique, which is a language processing method, in our research. Unlike many studies on customer satisfaction that have been conducted in the past, our research has a novelty of the thesis by using various techniques. And as a result of the analysis, the results of our experiments were very accurate.

Methods have recently been proposed that densely segment 3D volumes into classes using only color images and expert supervision in the form of sparse semantically annotated pixels. While impressive, these methods still require a relatively large amount of supervision and segmenting an object can take several minutes in practice. Such systems typically only optimize their representation on the particular scene they are fitting, without leveraging any prior information from previously seen images. In this paper, we propose to use features extracted with models trained on large existing datasets to improve segmentation performance. We bake this feature representation into a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) by volumetrically rendering feature maps and supervising on features extracted from each input image. We show that by baking this representation into the NeRF, we make the subsequent classification task much easier. Our experiments show that our method achieves higher segmentation accuracy with fewer semantic annotations than existing methods over a wide range of scenes.

There has been much hand-wringing about the crisis of the humanities, and recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have added to the angst. It is not only truck drivers whose jobs are threatened by automation. Deep-learning algorithms are also entering the domain of creative work. And now, they are demonstrating proficiency in the tasks that occupy humanities professors when they are not giving lectures: namely, writing papers and submitting them for publication in academic journals. Could academic publishing be automated?

The fourth industrial revolution is underway and it's threatening to wipe out nearly half the jobs in Australia. This latest round is characterised by intelligent robots and machine learning and PricewaterhouseCoopers economist Jeremy Thorpe said it's going to completely reshape the Australian jobs market. "Over the next 20 years approximately 44 per cent of Australia's jobs, that's more than 5 million jobs, are at risk of being disrupted by technology, whether that's digitisation or automation," he said. It seems only a matter of time before intelligence breaks free of its biological bonds - Joe Gelonesi talks to two philosophers with profoundly different visions of technology and the future. Stefan Hajkowicz, who is the principal scientist at the CSIRO, says it's white collar workers who are about to feel the pain.

Can a machine be an inventor? After the courts said no, a computer scientist is once more trying to have an artificial intelligence considered an inventor in the eyes of the law. In August, the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision that AI cannot be listed as the inventor on a patent registration. The case before the court--Thaler v. Vidal--was either a gimmick that could be dismissed with a simple reading of U.S. patent law or one that strikes at the heart of a metaphysical question with crucial implications for the future of innovation. In Thaler v. Vidal, Stephen Thaler challenged the refusal of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to issue a patent registration for an invention Thaler claims was created by an artificial intelligence device called Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience, or DABUS.

We introduce AARGH, an end-to-end task-oriented dialog system combining retrieval and generative approaches in a single model, aiming at improving dialog management and lexical diversity of outputs. The model features a new response selection method based on an action-aware training objective and a simplified single-encoder retrieval architecture which allow us to build an end-to-end retrieval-enhanced generation model where retrieval and generation share most of the parameters. On the MultiWOZ dataset, we show that our approach produces more diverse outputs while maintaining or improving state tracking and context-to-response generation performance, compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Deep learning based systems are susceptible to adversarial attacks, where a small, imperceptible change at the input alters the model prediction. However, to date the majority of the approaches to detect these attacks have been designed for image processing systems. Many popular image adversarial detection approaches are able to identify adversarial examples from embedding feature spaces, whilst in the NLP domain existing state of the art detection approaches solely focus on input text features, without consideration of model embedding spaces. This work examines what differences result when porting these image designed strategies to Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks - these detectors are found to not port over well. This is expected as NLP systems have a very different form of input: discrete and sequential in nature, rather than the continuous and fixed size inputs for images. As an equivalent model-focused NLP detection approach, this work proposes a simple sentence-embedding "residue" based detector to identify adversarial examples. On many tasks, it out-performs ported image domain detectors and recent state of the art NLP specific detectors.

Deep learning has been widely deployed for online ads systems to predict Click-Through Rate (CTR). Machine learning researchers and practitioners frequently retrain CTR models to test their new extracted features. However, the CTR model training often relies on a large number of raw input data logs. Hence, the feature extraction can take a significant proportion of the training time for an industrial-level CTR model. In this paper, we propose FeatureBox, a novel end-to-end training framework that pipelines the feature extraction and the training on GPU servers to save the intermediate I/O of the feature extraction. We rewrite computation-intensive feature extraction operators as GPU operators and leave the memory-intensive operator on CPUs. We introduce a layer-wise operator scheduling algorithm to schedule these heterogeneous operators. We present a light-weight GPU memory management algorithm that supports dynamic GPU memory allocation with minimal overhead. We experimentally evaluate FeatureBox and compare it with the previous in-production feature extraction framework on two real-world ads applications. The results confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method.