Nowcasting can play a key role in giving policymakers timelier insight to data published with a significant time lag, such as final GDP figures. Currently, there are a plethora of methodologies and approaches for practitioners to choose from. However, there lacks a comprehensive comparison of these disparate approaches in terms of predictive performance and characteristics. This paper addresses that deficiency by examining the performance of 12 different methodologies in nowcasting US quarterly GDP growth, including all the methods most commonly employed in nowcasting, as well as some of the most popular traditional machine learning approaches. Performance was assessed on three different tumultuous periods in US economic history: the early 1980s recession, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID crisis. The two best performing methodologies in the analysis were long short-term memory artificial neural networks (LSTM) and Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR).

Today, over 2/3 of the people on earth do not have access to radiologists. The are big disparities between counties and within countries. Some countries like the US have tens of thousands of radiologists whereas 14 African countries have no radiologists at all. In India there is approximately one radiologist for every 100,000 people whereas in the US there is one radiologist for every 10,000 people. There are also disparities within countries.

Elon Musk's Neuralink rival Synchron has begun human trials of its brain implant that lets the wearer control a computer using thought alone. The firm's Stentrode brain implant, about the size of a paperclip, will be implanted in six patients in New York and Pittsburgh who have severe paralysis. Stentrode will let patients control digital devices just by thinking and give them back the ability to perform daily tasks, including texting, emailing and shopping online. Although the implant has already been implanted and tested in Australian patients, the new clinical trial marks the first time it will be tested in the US. If successful, the Stentrode brain implant could be sold as a commercial product aimed at paralysis patients to regain their independence and quality of life.

Machine learning (ML) is the use of computer algorithms and statistical methods to help computers learn and make decisions from data, without human supervision. Machine learning is a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a major component of data science. Artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning or often used interchangeably, but they are not the same. Machine learning can be used in any field where data is involved.

Cryptocurrencies are no longer just the preferred option for cybercriminal activities on darknets, due to the increasing adoption in mainstream applications. This is partly due to the transparency associated with the underpinning ledgers, where any individual can access the record of a transaction record on the public ledger. In this paper, we build a dataset comprising Bitcoin transactions between 12 July 2019 and 26 May 2021. This dataset (hereafter referred to as BABD-13) contains 13 types of Bitcoin addresses, 5 categories of indicators with 148 features, and 544,462 labeled data, which is the largest labeled Bitcoin address behavior dataset publicly available to our knowledge. We then use our proposed dataset on common machine learning models, namely: k-nearest neighbors algorithm, decision tree, random forest, multilayer perceptron, and XGBoost. The results show that the accuracy rates of these machine learning models for the multi-classification task on our proposed dataset are between 93.24% and 97.13%. We also analyze the proposed features and their relationships from the experiments, and propose a k-hop subgraph generation algorithm to extract a k-hop subgraph from the entire Bitcoin transaction graph constructed by the directed heterogeneous multigraph starting from a specific Bitcoin address node (e.g., a known transaction associated with a criminal investigation). Besides, we initially analyze the behavior patterns of different types of Bitcoin addresses according to the extracted features.

Learning predictive models in new domains with scarce training data is a growing challenge in modern supervised learning scenarios. This incentivizes developing domain adaptation methods that leverage the knowledge in known domains (source) and adapt to new domains (target) with a different probability distribution. This becomes more challenging when the source and target domains are in heterogeneous feature spaces, known as heterogeneous domain adaptation (HDA). While most HDA methods utilize mathematical optimization to map source and target data to a common space, they suffer from low transferability. Neural representations have proven to be more transferable; however, they are mainly designed for homogeneous environments. Drawing on the theory of domain adaptation, we propose a novel framework, Heterogeneous Adversarial Neural Domain Adaptation (HANDA), to effectively maximize the transferability in heterogeneous environments. HANDA conducts feature and distribution alignment in a unified neural network architecture and achieves domain invariance through adversarial kernel learning. Three experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance against the state-of-the-art HDA methods on major image and text e-commerce benchmarks. HANDA shows statistically significant improvement in predictive performance. The practical utility of HANDA was shown in real-world dark web online markets. HANDA is an important step towards successful domain adaptation in e-commerce applications.

In the last decade, there have been significant advances in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) but there are still numerous challenges, such as high sample complexity and slow convergence to stable policies, that need to be overcome before wide-spread deployment is possible. However, many real-world environments already, in practice, deploy sub-optimal or heuristic approaches for generating policies. An interesting question that arises is how to best use such approaches as advisors to help improve reinforcement learning in multi-agent domains. In this paper, we provide a principled framework for incorporating action recommendations from online suboptimal advisors in multi-agent settings. We describe the problem of ADvising Multiple Intelligent Reinforcement Agents (ADMIRAL) in nonrestrictive general-sum stochastic game environments and present two novel Q-learning based algorithms: ADMIRAL - Decision Making (ADMIRAL-DM) and ADMIRAL - Advisor Evaluation (ADMIRAL-AE), which allow us to improve learning by appropriately incorporating advice from an advisor (ADMIRAL-DM), and evaluate the effectiveness of an advisor (ADMIRAL-AE). We analyze the algorithms theoretically and provide fixed point guarantees regarding their learning in general-sum stochastic games. Furthermore, extensive experiments illustrate that these algorithms: can be used in a variety of environments, have performances that compare favourably to other related baselines, can scale to large state-action spaces, and are robust to poor advice from advisors.

In March, a largely overlooked, 90-page Government Accountability Office study revealed something interesting: This summer, the Pentagon is getting a new AI Strategy. Between shaping ethical norms for AI and establishing a new Chief Data and AI Officer, it's clear top brass have big plans for the technology, though the report is light on the details. Released in 2018, the last AI Strategy laid the scaffolding for the U.S. military's high-tech competition with China. But over the past four years one thing has become apparent: The United States needs a balanced approach to AI investment -- one that doesn't simply guard against threats, but also imposes costs on a Chinese force that sees AI as the key to victory. Undoubtedly, a military conflict between the United States and China would be catastrophic, and every effort must be taken to avoid such an outcome through diplomatic means.

In this contribution, we investigate the effectiveness of deep fusion of text and audio features for categorical and dimensional speech emotion recognition (SER). We propose a novel, multistage fusion method where the two information streams are integrated in several layers of a deep neural network (DNN), and contrast it with a single-stage one where the streams are merged in a single point. Both methods depend on extracting summary linguistic embeddings from a pre-trained BERT model, and conditioning one or more intermediate representations of a convolutional model operating on log-Mel spectrograms. Experiments on the MSP-Podcast and IEMOCAP datasets demonstrate that the two fusion methods clearly outperform a shallow (late) fusion baseline and their unimodal constituents, both in terms of quantitative performance and qualitative behaviour. Overall, our multistage fusion shows better quantitative performance, surpassing alternatives on most of our evaluations. This illustrates the potential of multistage fusion in better assimilating text and audio information.

When a patient is admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) after a traumatic brain injury (TBI), an early prognosis is essential for baseline risk adjustment and shared decision making. TBI outcomes are commonly categorised by the Glasgow Outcome Scale-Extended (GOSE) into 8, ordered levels of functional recovery at 6 months after injury. Existing ICU prognostic models predict binary outcomes at a certain threshold of GOSE (e.g., prediction of survival [GOSE>1] or functional independence [GOSE>4]). We aimed to develop ordinal prediction models that concurrently predict probabilities of each GOSE score. From a prospective cohort (n=1,550, 65 centres) in the ICU stratum of the Collaborative European NeuroTrauma Effectiveness Research in TBI (CENTER-TBI) patient dataset, we extracted all clinical information within 24 hours of ICU admission (1,151 predictors) and 6-month GOSE scores. We analysed the effect of 2 design elements on ordinal model performance: (1) the baseline predictor set, ranging from a concise set of 10 validated predictors to a token-embedded representation of all possible predictors, and (2) the modelling strategy, from ordinal logistic regression to multinomial deep learning. With repeated k-fold cross-validation, we found that expanding the baseline predictor set significantly improved ordinal prediction performance while increasing analytical complexity did not. Half of these gains could be achieved with the addition of 8 high-impact predictors (2 demographic variables, 4 protein biomarkers, and 2 severity assessments) to the concise set. At best, ordinal models achieved 0.76 (95% CI: 0.74-0.77) ordinal discrimination ability (ordinal c-index) and 57% (95% CI: 54%-60%) explanation of ordinal variation in 6-month GOSE (Somers' D). Our results motivate the search for informative predictors for higher GOSE and the development of ordinal dynamic prediction models.