Oceania
The AI edge chip market is on fire, kindled by 'staggering' VC funding
Chips to perform AI inference on edge devices such as smartphones is a red-hot market, even years into the field's emergence, attracting more and more startups and more and more venture funding, according to a prominent chip analyst firm covering the field. "There are more new startups continuing to come out, and continuing to try to differentiate," says Mike Demler, Senior Analyst with The Linley Group, which publishes the widely read Microprocessor Report, in an interview with ZDNet via phone. Linley Group produces two conferences each year in Silicon Valley hosting numerous startups, the Spring and Fall Processor Forum, with an emphasis in recent years on those AI startups. At the most recent event, held in October, both virtually and in-person, in Santa Clara, California, the conference was packed with startups such Flex Logix, Hailo Technologies, Roviero, BrainChip, Syntiant, Untether AI, Expedera, and Deep AI giving short talks about their chip designs. Demler and team regularly assemble a research report titled the Guide to Processors for Deep Learning, the latest version of which is expected out this month.
Artificial Intelligence Can Now Write Stories About Coffee
In the early hours of the morning, the news was breaking. Specialty coffee was being recognized as a vital part of the global coffee trade, and the industry was seeing huge growth. This was great news for coffee growers and roasters all over the world, and it was especially exciting for those in the know, who could look forward to even more opportunities to make a name for themselves. So, how did Sprudge uncover this scoop and break the news to the world? Thanks to the miracle of artificial intelligence, which some are calling AI.
Sr. Software Engineer, Machine Learning
Are you an Engineer who is passionate about using cutting-edge ML algorithms to create and deliver value using data? Poshmark is looking for a Senior ML Engineer who can independently drive innovation across our key AI products. As a market leader in Social Commerce, Poshmark faces a unique opportunity to utilize our massive multi-platform social and commerce data to shape social commerce and create value for our users. With 400 MM events per day and 30 terabytes of exponentially growing data, Poshmark presents a unique opportunity to build AI products using Big Data. This person will work on multiple ML initiatives and help solve some of the most challenging problems in social commerce like - Personalizing User Experience, Search Ranking, and many more.
Can an AI be properly considered an inventor? – TechCrunch
That is, at least in the U.S., essentially still the case. However, there's been a significant volume of water that's passed under the policy and lawmaking bridge since then, so I wanted to revisit the question. First, let's back up a little. I have to admit that my reasoning in 2018 was narrow rather than broad. The work – and let's note that it doesn't have to be considered aesthetically "good" or have required a lot of skill – must simply be original (meaning that it was independently created and has at least a "modicum" of creativity) and an expression of some sort.
StoryBuddy: A Human-AI Collaborative Chatbot for Parent-Child Interactive Storytelling with Flexible Parental Involvement
Zhang, Zheng, Xu, Ying, Wang, Yanhao, Yao, Bingsheng, Ritchie, Daniel, Wu, Tongshuang, Yu, Mo, Wang, Dakuo, Li, Toby Jia-Jun
Despite its benefits for children's skill development and parent-child bonding, many parents do not often engage in interactive storytelling by having story-related dialogues with their child due to limited availability or challenges in coming up with appropriate questions. While recent advances made AI generation of questions from stories possible, the fully-automated approach excludes parent involvement, disregards educational goals, and underoptimizes for child engagement. Informed by need-finding interviews and participatory design (PD) results, we developed StoryBuddy, an AI-enabled system for parents to create interactive storytelling experiences. StoryBuddy's design highlighted the need for accommodating dynamic user needs between the desire for parent involvement and parent-child bonding and the goal of minimizing parent intervention when busy. The PD revealed varied assessment and educational goals of parents, which StoryBuddy addressed by supporting configuring question types and tracking child progress. A user study validated StoryBuddy's usability and suggested design insights for future parent-AI collaboration systems.
Ultra-fine Entity Typing with Indirect Supervision from Natural Language Inference
Li, Bangzheng, Yin, Wenpeng, Chen, Muhao
The task of ultra-fine entity typing (UFET) seeks to predict diverse and free-form words or phrases that describe the appropriate types of entities mentioned in sentences. A key challenge for this task lies in the large amount of types and the scarcity of annotated data per type. Existing systems formulate the task as a multi-way classification problem and train directly or distantly supervised classifiers. This causes two issues: (i) the classifiers do not capture the type semantics since types are often converted into indices; (ii) systems developed in this way are limited to predicting within a pre-defined type set, and often fall short of generalizing to types that are rarely seen or unseen in training. This work presents LITE, a new approach that formulates entity typing as a natural language inference (NLI) problem, making use of (i) the indirect supervision from NLI to infer type information meaningfully represented as textual hypotheses and alleviate the data scarcity issue, as well as (ii) a learning-to-rank objective to avoid the pre-defining of a type set. Experiments show that, with limited training data, LITE obtains state-of-the-art performance on the UFET task. In addition, LITE demonstrates its strong generalizability, by not only yielding best results on other fine-grained entity typing benchmarks, more importantly, a pre-trained LITE system works well on new data containing unseen types.
RoPGen: Towards Robust Code Authorship Attribution via Automatic Coding Style Transformation
Li, Zhen, Guenevere, null, Chen, null, Chen, Chen, Zou, Yayi, Xu, Shouhuai
Source code authorship attribution is an important problem often encountered in applications such as software forensics, bug fixing, and software quality analysis. Recent studies show that current source code authorship attribution methods can be compromised by attackers exploiting adversarial examples and coding style manipulation. This calls for robust solutions to the problem of code authorship attribution. In this paper, we initiate the study on making Deep Learning (DL)-based code authorship attribution robust. We propose an innovative framework called Robust coding style Patterns Generation (RoPGen), which essentially learns authors' unique coding style patterns that are hard for attackers to manipulate or imitate. The key idea is to combine data augmentation and gradient augmentation at the adversarial training phase. This effectively increases the diversity of training examples, generates meaningful perturbations to gradients of deep neural networks, and learns diversified representations of coding styles. We evaluate the effectiveness of RoPGen using four datasets of programs written in C, C++, and Java. Experimental results show that RoPGen can significantly improve the robustness of DL-based code authorship attribution, by respectively reducing 22.8% and 41.0% of the success rate of targeted and untargeted attacks on average.
Relaxing the Feature Covariance Assumption: Time-Variant Bounds for Benign Overfitting in Linear Regression
Xu, Jing, Teng, Jiaye, Yao, Andrew Chi-Chih
Benign overfitting demonstrates that overparameterized models can perform well on test data while fitting noisy training data. However, it only considers the final min-norm solution in linear regression, which ignores the algorithm information and the corresponding training procedure. In this paper, we generalize the idea of benign overfitting to the whole training trajectory instead of the min-norm solution and derive a time-variant bound based on the trajectory analysis. Starting from the time-variant bound, we further derive a time interval that suffices to guarantee a consistent generalization error for a given feature covariance. Unlike existing approaches, the newly proposed generalization bound is characterized by a time-variant effective dimension of feature covariance. By introducing the time factor, we relax the strict assumption on the feature covariance matrix required in previous benign overfitting under the regimes of overparameterized linear regression with gradient descent. This paper extends the scope of benign overfitting, and experiment results indicate that the proposed bound accords better with empirical evidence.
Early Disease Stage Characterization in Parkinson's Disease from Resting-state fMRI Data Using a Long Short-term Memory Network
Guo, Xueqi, Tinaz, Sule, Dvornek, Nicha C.
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common and complex neurodegenerative disorder with 5 stages in the Hoehn and Yahr scaling. Given the heterogeneity of PD, it is challenging to classify early stages 1 and 2 and detect brain function alterations. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a promising tool in revealing functional connectivity (FC) differences and developing biomarkers in PD. Some machine learning approaches like support vector machine and logistic regression have been successfully applied in the early diagnosis of PD using fMRI data, which outperform classifiers based on manually selected morphological features. However, the early-stage characterization in FC changes has not been fully investigated. Given the complexity and non-linearity of fMRI data, we propose the use of a long short-term memory (LSTM) network to characterize the early stages of PD. The study included 84 subjects (56 in stage 2 and 28 in stage 1) from the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI), the largest available public PD dataset. Under a repeated 10-fold stratified cross-validation, the LSTM model reached an accuracy of 71.63%, 13.52% higher than the best traditional machine learning method, indicating significantly better robustness and accuracy compared with other machine learning classifiers. We used the learned LSTM model weights to select the top brain regions that contributed to model prediction and performed FC analyses to characterize functional changes with disease stage and motor impairment to gain better insight into the brain mechanisms of PD.
Pseudo Polynomial-Time Top-k Algorithms for d-DNNF Circuits
Bourhis, Pierre, Duchien, Laurence, Dusart, Jérémie, Lonca, Emmanuel, Marquis, Pierre, Quinton, Clément
We are interested in computing $k$ most preferred models of a given d-DNNF circuit $C$, where the preference relation is based on an algebraic structure called a monotone, totally ordered, semigroup $(K, \otimes, <)$. In our setting, every literal in $C$ has a value in $K$ and the value of an assignment is an element of $K$ obtained by aggregating using $\otimes$ the values of the corresponding literals. We present an algorithm that computes $k$ models of $C$ among those having the largest values w.r.t. $<$, and show that this algorithm runs in time polynomial in $k$ and in the size of $C$. We also present a pseudo polynomial-time algorithm for deriving the top-$k$ values that can be reached, provided that an additional (but not very demanding) requirement on the semigroup is satisfied. Under the same assumption, we present a pseudo polynomial-time algorithm that transforms $C$ into a d-DNNF circuit $C'$ satisfied exactly by the models of $C$ having a value among the top-$k$ ones. Finally, focusing on the semigroup $(\mathbb{N}, +, <)$, we compare on a large number of instances the performances of our compilation-based algorithm for computing $k$ top solutions with those of an algorithm tackling the same problem, but based on a partial weighted MaxSAT solver.