Oceania
A Fast Algorithm for Computing the Deficiency Number of a Mahjong Hand
Yan, Xueqing, Li, Yongming, Li, Sanjiang
The tile-based multiplayer game Mahjong is widely played in Asia and has also become increasingly popular worldwide. Face-to-face or online, each player begins with a hand of 13 tiles and players draw and discard tiles in turn until they complete a winning hand. An important notion in Mahjong is the deficiency number (a.k.a. shanten number in Japanese Mahjong) of a hand, which estimates how many tile changes are necessary to complete the hand into a winning hand. The deficiency number plays an essential role in major decision-making tasks such as selecting a tile to discard. This paper proposes a fast algorithm for computing the deficiency number of a Mahjong hand. Compared with the baseline algorithm, the new algorithm is usually 100 times faster and, more importantly, respects the agent's knowledge about available tiles. The algorithm can be used as a basic procedure in all Mahjong variants by both rule-based and machine learning-based Mahjong AI.
Learning from Images: Proactive Caching with Parallel Convolutional Neural Networks
Wang, Yantong, Hu, Ye, Yang, Zhaohui, Saad, Walid, Wong, Kai-Kit, Friderikos, Vasilis
With the continuous trend of data explosion, delivering packets from data servers to end users causes increased stress on both the fronthaul and backhaul traffic of mobile networks. To mitigate this problem, caching popular content closer to the end-users has emerged as an effective method for reducing network congestion and improving user experience. To find the optimal locations for content caching, many conventional approaches construct various mixed integer linear programming (MILP) models. However, such methods may fail to support online decision making due to the inherent curse of dimensionality. In this paper, a novel framework for proactive caching is proposed. This framework merges model-based optimization with data-driven techniques by transforming an optimization problem into a grayscale image. For parallel training and simple design purposes, the proposed MILP model is first decomposed into a number of sub-problems and, then, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are trained to predict content caching locations of these sub-problems. Furthermore, since the MILP model decomposition neglects the internal effects among sub-problems, the CNNs' outputs have the risk to be infeasible solutions. Therefore, two algorithms are provided: the first uses predictions from CNNs as an extra constraint to reduce the number of decision variables; the second employs CNNs' outputs to accelerate local search. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme can reduce 71.6% computation time with only 0.8% additional performance cost compared to the MILP solution, which provides high quality decision making in real-time.
Deep Geospatial Interpolation Networks
Varshney, Sumit Kumar, Kumar, Jeetu, Tiwari, Aditya, Singh, Rishabh, Gunturi, Venkata M. V., Krishnan, Narayanan C.
To this end, we propose a novel deep neural network called as Research literature relevant to our work consists of the work done Deep Geospatial Interpolation Network(DGIN), which incorporates in the areas of traditional spatial statistics [1, 7, 9, 10], spatial data both spatial and temporal relationships and has significantly lower mining [4, 8], neural networks for spatio-temporal data [3, 11], and training time. DGIN consists of three major components: Spatial computer vision [5, 6]. Encoder to capture the spatial dependencies, Sequential module Spatial statistics techniques such as IDW [9], DDW [10], Kriging to incorporate the temporal dynamics, and an Attention block to [1, 7], and its variants are not suitable for the interpolation learn the importance of the temporal neighborhood around the problem because of the following reasons: (a) high execution time gap. We evaluate DGIN on the MODIS reflectance dataset from (in case of Kriging), (b) strong assumptions on the nature of spatial two different regions. Our experimental results indicate that DGIN relationships (such as inverse relationship in case of IDW), (c) has two advantages: (a) it outperforms alternative approaches (has prior assumption and/or knowledge on statistical properties of data lower MSE with p-value 0.01) and, (b) it has significantly low (e.g., precise knowledge of the mean in case of Simple Kriging and execution time than Kriging.
The Price of Selfishness: Conjunctive Query Entailment for ALCSelf is 2ExpTime-hard
Bednarczyk, Bartosz, Rudolph, Sebastian
In logic-based knowledge representation, query answering has essentially replaced mere satisfiability checking as the inferencing problem of primary interest. For knowledge bases in the basic description logic ALC, the computational complexity of conjunctive query (CQ) answering is well known to be ExpTime-complete and hence not harder than satisfiability. This does not change when the logic is extended by certain features (such as counting or role hierarchies), whereas adding others (inverses, nominals or transitivity together with role-hierarchies) turns CQ answering exponentially harder. We contribute to this line of results by showing the surprising fact that even extending ALC by just the Self operator - which proved innocuous in many other contexts - increases the complexity of CQ entailment to 2ExpTime. As common for this type of problem, our proof establishes a reduction from alternating Turing machines running in exponential space, but several novel ideas and encoding tricks are required to make the approach work in that specific, restricted setting.
The Impact of Covid-19 on Digital Acceleration & Adoption of AI
It was reported that Venture Capital investments into AI related startups made a significant increase in 2018, jumping by 72% compared to 2017, with 466 startups funded from 533 in 2017. PWC moneytree report stated that that seed-stage deal activity in the US among AI-related companies rose to 28% in the fourth-quarter of 2018, compared to 24% in the three months prior, while expansion-stage deal activity jumped to 32%, from 23%. There will be an increasing international rivalry over the global leadership of AI. President Putin of Russia was quoted as saying that "the nation that leads in AI will be the ruler of the world". Billionaire Mark Cuban was reported in CNBC as stating that "the world's first trillionaire would be an AI entrepreneur".
Brain-computer interfaces are making big progress this year
The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility. Eight months in, 2021 has already become a record year in brain-computer interface (BCI) funding, tripling the $97 million raised in 2019. BCIs translate human brainwaves into machine-understandable commands, allowing people to operate a computer, for example, with their mind. Just during the last couple of weeks, Elon Musk's BCI company, Neuralink, announced a $205 million in Series C funding, with Paradromics, another BCI firm, announcing a $20 million Seed round a few days earlier. Almost at the same time, Neuralink competitor Synchron announced it has received the groundbreaking go-ahead from the FDA to run clinical trials for its flagship product, the Stentrode, with human patients. Even before this approval, Synchron's Stentrode was already undergoing clinical trials in Australia, with four patients having received the implant.
Action on sexual abuse images is overdue, but Apple's proposals bring other dangers Ross Anderson
Last week, Apple announced two backdoors in the US into the encryption that protects its devices. One will monitor iMessages: if any photos sent by or to under-13s seem to contain nudity, the user may be challenged and their parents may be informed. The second will see Apple scan all the images on a phone's camera roll and if they're similar to known sex-abuse images flag them as suspect. If enough suspect images are backed up to an iCloud account, they'll be decrypted and inspected. If Apple thinks they're illegal, the user will be reported to the relevant authorities. Action on the circulation of child sexual abuse imagery is long overdue.
How to feel about emotion recognition software - Verdict
Alexa, Siri and Cortana may sound like the top three hipster baby names in 2021, but they are actually Amazon, Apple and Microsoft's virtual assistants. In recent years, we have experienced a boom in speech recognition tools that understand what we are saying. And soon they could also understand how we are feeling. The list of companies working on the development of emotion recognition technology is growing exponentially, and investors appear to be excited when it comes to emotionally intelligent tech. The industry is undoubtedly booming, with estimates predicting that the global emotional intelligence market will grow to $64m by 2027. The most common form of emotion detection software uses cameras to record and analyse facial expressions, body movements and gestures to detect how people are feeling.
A Microscopic Pandemic Simulator for Pandemic Prediction Using Scalable Million-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Tang, Zhenggang, Yan, Kai, Sun, Liting, Zhan, Wei, Liu, Changliu
Microscopic epidemic models are powerful tools for government policy makers to predict and simulate epidemic outbreaks, which can capture the impact of individual behaviors on the macroscopic phenomenon. However, existing models only consider simple rule-based individual behaviors, limiting their applicability. This paper proposes a deep-reinforcement-learning-powered microscopic model named Microscopic Pandemic Simulator (MPS). By replacing rule-based agents with rational agents whose behaviors are driven to maximize rewards, the MPS provides a better approximation of real world dynamics. To efficiently simulate with massive amounts of agents in MPS, we propose Scalable Million-Agent DQN (SMADQN). The MPS allows us to efficiently evaluate the impact of different government strategies. This paper first calibrates the MPS against real-world data in Allegheny, US, then demonstratively evaluates two government strategies: information disclosure and quarantine. The results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. As a broad impact, this paper provides novel insights for the application of DRL in large scale agent-based networks such as economic and social networks.
Neuron Campaign for Initialization Guided by Information Bottleneck Theory
Mao, Haitao, Chen, Xu, Fu, Qiang, Du, Lun, Han, Shi, Zhang, Dongmei
Initialization plays a critical role in the training of deep neural networks (DNN). Existing initialization strategies mainly focus on stabilizing the training process to mitigate gradient vanish/explosion problems. However, these initialization methods are lacking in consideration about how to enhance generalization ability. The Information Bottleneck (IB) theory is a well-known understanding framework to provide an explanation about the generalization of DNN. Guided by the insights provided by IB theory, we design two criteria for better initializing DNN. And we further design a neuron campaign initialization algorithm to efficiently select a good initialization for a neural network on a given dataset. The experiments on MNIST dataset show that our method can lead to a better generalization performance with faster convergence.