Oceania
10 startups riding the wave of AI innovation
We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. Organizations are increasingly adopting AI-enabled technologies to address existing and emerging problems within the enterprise ecosystem, meet changing market demands and deliver business outcomes at scale. Shubhangi Vashisth, senior principal research analyst at Gartner, said that AI innovation is happening at a rapid pace. Vashisth further noted that innovations including edge AI, computer vision, decision intelligence and machine learning will have a transformational impact on the market in coming years. However, while AI-powered technologies are helping to build more agile and effective enterprise systems, they usher in new challenges. For example, Gartner notes that AI-based approaches if left unchecked can perpetuate bias, leading to issues, loss of productivity and revenue.
Pushing Buttons: How indie games stole the limelight at UK gaming's biggest awards
Welcome to Pushing Buttons, the Guardian's gaming newsletter. If you'd like to receive it in your inbox every week, just pop your email in below – and check your inbox (and spam) for the confirmation email. I spent the latter half of last week in London for the Bafta Games Awards – a ceremony whose existence still seems to surprise people, despite the fact that they've been running in some form for 18 years. I suppose it doesn't help that the institution is literally called the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, but video games are a big deal at the UK's prestigious arts organisation, more so now than ever. It's never been a paid thing, though I have eaten a shameful number of cocktail sausages during jury deliberations.)
Interview and Discussion on the Potential of AI to Transform Healthcare with Dr. Ingrid Vasiliu-Feltes
Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a crucial role in the healthcare industry by helping doctors, patients and hospital administrators. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is defined as computing systems which are capable of performing tasks that humans are very good at, for example recognising objects, recognising and making sense of speech, and decision making in a constrained environment. For the purposes of this article, Machine Learning and Deep Learning (Deep Neural Networks) are defined as sub-branches of AI. See the Appendix for a more detailed explanation of these areas. Healthcare systems were already under a substantial strain before the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic. This strain has only increased since the pandemic and may cause challenges that persist for many years. It takes many years and costly resources to train healthcare workers. Specialist medical practitioners tend to be in short supply and often work long hours.
Government Deep Tech 2022 Top Funding Focus Explainable AI, Photonics, Quantum
DARPA, In-Q-Tel, US National Laboratories (examples: Argonne, Oak Ridge) are famous government funding agencies for deep tech on the forward boundaries, the near impossible, that have globally transformative solutions. The Internet is a prime example where more than 70% of the 7.8 billion population are online in 2022, closing in on 7 hours daily mobile usage, and global wealth of $500 Trillion is powered by the Internet. There is convergence between the early bets led by government funding agencies and the largest corporations and their investments. An example is from 2015, where I was invited to help the top 100 CEOs, representing nearly $100 Trillion in assets under management, to look ten years into the future for their investments. The resulting working groups, and private summits resulted in the member companies investing in all the areas identified: quantum computing, block chain, cybersecurity, big data, privacy and data, AI/ML, future in fintech, financial inclusion, ...
Government Deep Tech 2022 Top Funding Focus Explainable AI, Photonics, Quantum
DARPA, In-Q-Tel, US National Laboratories (examples: Argonne, Oak Ridge) are famous government funding agencies for deep tech on the forward boundaries, the near impossible, that have globally transformative solutions. The Internet is a prime example where more than 70% of the 7.8 billion population are online in 2022, closing in on 7 hours daily mobile usage, and global wealth of $500 Trillion is powered by the Internet. There is convergence between the early bets led by government funding agencies and the largest corporations and their investments. An example is from 2015, where I was invited to help the top 100 CEOs, representing nearly $100 Trillion in assets under management, to look ten years into the future for their investments. The resulting working groups, and private summits resulted in the member companies investing in all the areas identified: quantum computing, block chain, cybersecurity, big data, privacy and data, AI/ML, future in fintech, financial inclusion, ...
Top 108 Computer Vision startups
Computer vision is an interdisciplinary field that deals with how computers can be made for gaining high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to automate tasks that the human visual system can do. Country: China Funding: $1.6B SenseTime develops face recognition technology that can be applied to payment and picture analysis, which could be used, for instance, on bank card verification and security systems. Country: China Funding: $607M Megvii develops Face Cognitive Services - a platform offering computer vision technologies that enable your applications to read and understand the world better. Face allows you to easily add leading, deep learning-based image analysis recognition technologies into your applications, with simple and powerful APIs and SDKs.
S-DABT: Schedule and Dependency-Aware Bug Triage in Open-Source Bug Tracking Systems
Jahanshahi, Hadi, Cevik, Mucahit
Fixing bugs in a timely manner lowers various potential costs in software maintenance. However, manual bug fixing scheduling can be time-consuming, cumbersome, and error-prone. In this paper, we propose the Schedule and Dependency-aware Bug Triage (S-DABT), a bug triaging method that utilizes integer programming and machine learning techniques to assign bugs to suitable developers. Unlike prior works that largely focus on a single component of the bug reports, our approach takes into account the textual data, bug fixing costs, and bug dependencies. We further incorporate the schedule of developers in our formulation to have a more comprehensive model for this multifaceted problem. As a result, this complete formulation considers developers' schedules and the blocking effects of the bugs while covering the most significant aspects of the previously proposed methods. Our numerical study on four open-source software systems, namely, EclipseJDT, LibreOffice, GCC, and Mozilla, shows that taking into account the schedules of the developers decreases the average bug fixing times. We find that S-DABT leads to a high level of developer utilization through a fair distribution of the tasks among the developers and efficient use of the free spots in their schedules. Via the simulation of the issue tracking system, we also show how incorporating the schedule in the model formulation reduces the bug fixing time, improves the assignment accuracy, and utilizes the capability of each developer without much comprising in the model run times. We find that S-DABT decreases the complexity of the bug dependency graph by prioritizing blocking bugs and effectively reduces the infeasible assignment ratio due to bug dependencies. Consequently, we recommend considering developers' schedules while automating bug triage.
Distributed learning optimisation of Cox models can leak patient data: Risks and solutions
Brink, Carsten, Hansen, Christian Rønn, Field, Matthew, Price, Gareth, Thwaites, David, Sarup, Nis, Bernchou, Uffe, Holloway, Lois
Medical data are often highly sensitive, and frequently there are missing data. Due to the data's sensitive nature, there is an interest in creating modelling methods where the data are kept in each local centre to preserve their privacy, but yet the model can be trained on and learn from data across multiple centres. Such an approach might be distributed machine learning (federated learning, collaborative learning) in which a model is iteratively calculated based on aggregated local model information from each centre. However, even though no specific data are leaving the centre, there is a potential risk that the exchanged information is sufficient to reconstruct all or part of the patient data, which would hamper the safety-protecting rationale idea of distributed learning. This paper demonstrates that the optimisation of a Cox survival model can lead to patient data leakage. Following this, we suggest a way to optimise and validate a Cox model that avoids these problems in a secure way. The feasibility of the suggested method is demonstrated in a provided Matlab code that also includes methods for handling missing data.
As a science journalist I'm reconsidering having kids. I'm not the only one
"I'm running out of time, but I'm also not gonna be like, 'I'm having a baby for the sake of having a baby,'" said the younger of the two. "One thing I would recommend," replied the older woman, "if it's an option: freeze your eggs." As a woman, you get to a certain age and babies – hypothetical, expected, realised – suddenly seem ubiquitous: in friendship circles, on social media, in targeted advertising for pregnancy tests and public health messages. But for women of my generation, the decision whether to have children feels more existentially fraught and morally complex than ever before. I have always wanted kids. I have always felt an uncomplicated joy at the chubbiness of babies' limbs and the infectiousness of a child's laughter.
Fairness in Influence Maximization through Randomization
Becker, Ruben, D’Angelo, Gianlorenzo, Ghobadi, Sajjad, Gilbert, Hugo
The influence maximization paradigm has been used by researchers in various fields in order to study how information spreads in social networks. While previously the attention was mostly on efficiency, more recently fairness issues have been taken into account in this scope. In the present paper, we propose to use randomization as a mean for achieving fairness. While this general idea is not new, it has not been applied in this area. Similar to previous works like Fish et al. (WWW ’19) and Tsang et al. (IJCAI ’19), we study the maximin criterion for (group) fairness. In contrast to their work however, we model the problem in such a way that, when choosing the seed sets, probabilistic strategies are possible rather than only deterministic ones. We introduce two different variants of this probabilistic problem, one that entails probabilistic strategies over nodes (node-based problem) and a second one that entails probabilistic strategies over sets of nodes (set-based problem). After analyzing the relation between the two probabilistic problems, we show that, while the original deterministic maximin problem was inapproximable, both probabilistic variants permit approximation algorithms that achieve a constant multiplicative factor of 1 − 1/e minus an additive arbitrarily small error that is due to the simulation of the information spread. For the node-based problem, the approximation is achieved by observing that a polynomial-sized linear program approximates the problem well. For the set-based problem, we show that a multiplicative-weight routine can yield the approximation result. For an experimental study, we provide implementations of multiplicative-weight routines for both the set-based and the node-based problems and compare the achieved fairness values to existing methods. Maybe non-surprisingly, we show that the ex-ante values, i.e., minimum expected value of an individual (or group) to obtain the information, of the computed probabilistic strategies are significantly larger than the (ex-post) fairness values of previous methods. This indicates that studying fairness via randomization is a worthwhile path to follow. Interestingly and maybe more surprisingly, we observe that even the ex-post fairness values, i.e., fairness values of sets sampled according to the probabilistic strategies computed by our routines, dominate over the fairness achieved by previous methods on many of the instances tested.