The smallest mention of a heatwave in the UK leads to ice creams selling out, barbecues heating up and shorts being dusted off as the nation celebrates. In June this year, air temperatures in parts of the country soared to over 90 F (33 C), while sharp increases were also felt across Europe, the US and Asia. Air temperatures were recorded in excess of 18 F (10 C) above the average for the time of year in many cities, according to the World Meteorological Organisation. But new heat maps released by the European Space Agency (ESA) show that this might not be such a cause for celebration. They reveal that heat dissipated more slowly in urban areas creating'heat islands' and make life more of a struggle. Experts are worried that this effect will only be exacerbated as climate change continues to take hold.

Home owners could soon save money on loans and insurance by making their homes more energy efficient, while banks and insurers gain new insights into the sustainability of their residential portfolios, thanks to Adelaide-based fintech startup ValAi. ValAi's core product, known as Greenhouse, is an app that allows residential homeowners to see their home's energy use and climate resilience in real time. It includes advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide practical tips that allow homeowners to save money and improve the value of their property by making it more sustainable and energy efficient. Meanwhile, for banks and insurers, the platform will fill a vital need by providing data on the sustainability of the properties in their residential portfolios at an individual asset level. The platform could potentially allow banks to make energy efficiency improvements a condition on the loans they issue.

As artificial intelligence travels through the solar system and gets to explore the heliosphere (enclosing the planets), it will adapt by making decisions that enable it to do its job. Many people in the field of astrobiology are in favour of the so-called post-biological cosmos vision. Is it because of the desire to conquer space that we humans are sowing the seeds of our own destruction in favour of artificial intelligence? Or are we unconsciously following some sort of master plan in which flesh and blood beings are destined to become extinct and be hybridised by silicon and synthetic materials? As for the mind, memory, consciousness, could there also be a place for humans in a robot's brain?

This paper introduces a novel approach to embed flow-based models with hierarchical structures. The proposed framework is named Variational Flow Graphical (VFG) Model. VFGs learn the representation of high dimensional data via a message-passing scheme by integrating flow-based functions through variational inference. By leveraging the expressive power of neural networks, VFGs produce a representation of the data using a lower dimension, thus overcoming the drawbacks of many flow-based models, usually requiring a high dimensional latent space involving many trivial variables. Aggregation nodes are introduced in the VFG models to integrate forward-backward hierarchical information via a message passing scheme. Maximizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO) of data likelihood aligns the forward and backward messages in each aggregation node achieving a consistency node state. Algorithms have been developed to learn model parameters through gradient updating regarding the ELBO objective. The consistency of aggregation nodes enable VFGs to be applicable in tractable inference on graphical structures. Besides representation learning and numerical inference, VFGs provide a new approach for distribution modeling on datasets with graphical latent structures. Additionally, theoretical study shows that VFGs are universal approximators by leveraging the implicitly invertible flow-based structures. With flexible graphical structures and superior excessive power, VFGs could potentially be used to improve probabilistic inference. In the experiments, VFGs achieves improved evidence lower bound (ELBO) and likelihood values on multiple datasets.

Networks and temporal point processes serve as fundamental building blocks for modeling complex dynamic relational data in various domains. We propose the latent space Hawkes (LSH) model, a novel generative model for continuous-time networks of relational events, using a latent space representation for nodes. We model relational events between nodes using mutually exciting Hawkes processes with baseline intensities dependent upon the distances between the nodes in the latent space and sender and receiver specific effects. We demonstrate that our proposed LSH model can replicate many features observed in real temporal networks including reciprocity and transitivity, while also achieving superior prediction accuracy and providing more interpretable fits than existing models.

Generative, ML-driven interactive systems have the potential to change how people interact with computers in creative processes - turning tools into co-creators. However, it is still unclear how we might achieve effective human-AI collaboration in open-ended task domains. There are several known challenges around communication in the interaction with ML-driven systems. An overlooked aspect in the design of co-creative systems is how users can be better supported in learning to collaborate with such systems. Here we reframe human-AI collaboration as a learning problem: Inspired by research on team learning, we hypothesize that similar learning strategies that apply to human-human teams might also increase the collaboration effectiveness and quality of humans working with co-creative generative systems. In this position paper, we aim to promote team learning as a lens for designing more effective co-creative human-AI collaboration and emphasize collaboration process quality as a goal for co-creative systems. Furthermore, we outline a preliminary schematic framework for embedding team learning support in co-creative AI systems. We conclude by proposing a research agenda and posing open questions for further study on supporting people in learning to collaborate with generative AI systems.

In this paper we share findings from our effort to build practical machine translation (MT) systems capable of translating across over one thousand languages. We describe results in three research domains: (i) Building clean, web-mined datasets for 1500+ languages by leveraging semi-supervised pre-training for language identification and developing data-driven filtering techniques; (ii) Developing practical MT models for under-served languages by leveraging massively multilingual models trained with supervised parallel data for over 100 high-resource languages and monolingual datasets for an additional 1000+ languages; and (iii) Studying the limitations of evaluation metrics for these languages and conducting qualitative analysis of the outputs from our MT models, highlighting several frequent error modes of these types of models. We hope that our work provides useful insights to practitioners working towards building MT systems for currently understudied languages, and highlights research directions that can complement the weaknesses of massively multilingual models in data-sparse settings.

The Euclidean shortest path problem (ESPP) is a well studied problem with many practical applications. Recently a new efficient online approach to this problem, RayScan, has been developed, based on ray shooting and polygon scanning. In this paper we show how we can improve RayScan by carefully reasoning about polygon scans. We also look into how RayScan could be applied in the single-source multi-target scenario, where logic during scanning is used to reduce the number of rays shots required. This improvement also helps in the single target case. We compare the improved RayScan+ against the state-of-the-art ESPP algorithm, illustrating the situations where it is better.

Rational verification refers to the problem of checking which temporal logic properties hold of a concurrent multiagent system, under the assumption that agents in the system choose strategies that form a game-theoretic equilibrium. Rational verification can be understood as a counterpart to model checking for multiagent systems, but while classical model checking can be done in polynomial time for some temporal logic specification languages such as CTL, and polynomial space with LTL specifications, rational verification is much harder: the key decision problems for rational verification are 2EXPTIME-complete with LTL specifications, even when using explicit-state system representations. Against this background, our contributions in this paper are threefold. First, we show that the complexity of rational verification can be greatly reduced by restricting specifications to GR(1), a fragment of LTL that can represent a broad and practically useful class of response properties of reactive systems. In particular, we show that for a number of relevant settings, rational verification can be done in polynomial space and even in polynomial time. Second, we provide improved complexity results for rational verification when considering players' goals given by mean-payoff utility functions; arguably the most widely used approach for quantitative objectives in concurrent and multiagent systems. Finally, we consider the problem of computing outcomes that satisfy social welfare constraints. To this end, we consider both utilitarian and egalitarian social welfare and show that computing such outcomes is either PSPACE-complete or NP-complete.

Zbigniew Michalewicz is Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide in Australia. He completed his Masters degree at Technical University of Warsaw in 1974 and he received Ph.D. degree from the Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences, in 1981. He also holds a Doctor of Science degree in Computer Science from the Polish Academy of Science. Zbigniew Michalewicz also holds Professor positions at the Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences, the Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology, and the State Key Laboratory of Software Engineering of Wuhan University, China. He is also associated with the Structural Complexity Laboratory at Seoul National University, South Korea.