This is the sixth, and final episode in a series dedicated to all things A.I. In this episode, Tae Royle, Head of Digital Products APAC from Ashurst Advance Digital is joined by Tara Waters, Partner and Head of Ashurst Advance Digital. This is the sixth and final episode in a series dedicated to all things Artificial Intelligence. My name is Tae Royle head of digital products from Ashurst did that digital and today I'm joined by Tara Waters partner and head of Ashurst Advanced Digital based out of our London office. Naturally we come to the question of what's next? In Lewis Carroll's second novel, Alice enters Wonderland by climbing through a mirror.

The widespread adoption of machine learning models in different applications has given rise to a new range of privacy and security concerns. Among them are'inference attacks', whereby attackers cause a target machine learning model to leak information about its training data. However, these attacks are not very well understood and we need to readjust our definitions and expectations of how they can affect our privacy. This is according to researchers from several academic institutions in Australia and India who made the warning in a new paper (PDF) accepted at the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, which will be held in September. The paper was jointly authored by researchers at the University of New South Wales; Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani; Macquarie University; and the Cyber & Electronic Warfare Division, Defence Science and Technology Group, Australia.

It's no secret that building applications geared for artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics is a big challenge, even for the most experienced developers. Luckily, the amount of resources available to help both novice and expert programmers build sophisticated and intelligent software continues to grow. This includes major feature updates to popular application development platforms, a deluge of data-intensive algorithms created by open source developers, and an expanse of community-supported libraries. This is particularly true when it comes to the languages and frameworks that now directly target the requirements for developing machine learning applications. Not all of them are quite the same, however, and they vary in aspects that range from data handling capabilities to their associated tool sets.

A practical approach to robot reinforcement learning is to first collect a large batch of real or simulated robot interaction data, using some data collection policy, and then learn from this data to perform various tasks, using offline learning algorithms. Previous work focused on manually designing the data collection policy, and on tasks where suitable policies can easily be designed, such as random picking policies for collecting data about object grasping. For more complex tasks, however, it may be difficult to find a data collection policy that explores the environment effectively, and produces data that is diverse enough for the downstream task. In this work, we propose that data collection policies should actively explore the environment to collect diverse data. In particular, we develop a simple-yet-effective goal-conditioned reinforcement-learning method that actively focuses data collection on novel observations, thereby collecting a diverse data-set. We evaluate our method on simulated robot manipulation tasks with visual inputs and show that the improved diversity of active data collection leads to significant improvements in the downstream learning tasks.

The Foreign Exchange (Forex) is a large decentralized market, on which trading analysis and algorithmic trading are popular. Research efforts have been focusing on proof of efficiency of certain technical indicators. We demonstrate, however, that the values of indicator functions are not reproducible and often reduce the number of trade opportunities, compared to price-action trading. In this work, we develop two dataset-agnostic Forex trading heuristic templates with high rate of trading signals. In order to determine most optimal parameters for the given heuristic prototypes, we perform a machine learning simulation of 10 years of Forex price data over three low-margin instruments and 6 different OHLC granularities. As a result, we develop a specific and reproducible list of most optimal trade parameters found for each instrument-granularity pair, with 118 pips of average daily profit for the optimized configuration.

From global pandemics to geopolitical turmoil, leaders in logistics, product allocation, procurement and operations are facing increasing difficulty with safeguarding their organizations against supply chain vulnerabilities. It is recommended to opt for forecasting against trending based benchmark because auditing a future forecast puts more focus on seasonality. The forecasting models provide with end-to-end, real time oversight of the entire supply chain, while utilizing predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to identify potential disruptions before they occur. By combining internal and external data points, coming up with an AI-enabled modelling engine can greatly reduce risk by helping retail companies proactively respond to supply and demand variability. This research paper puts focus on creating an ingenious way to tackle the impact of COVID19 on Supply chain, product allocation, trending and seasonality. Key words: Supply chain, covid-19, forecasting, coronavirus, manufacturing, seasonality, trending, retail.

Two nonparametric methods are presented for forecasting functional time series (FTS). The FTS we observe is a curve at a discrete-time point. We address both one-step-ahead forecasting and dynamic updating. Dynamic updating is a forward prediction of the unobserved segment of the most recent curve. Among the two proposed methods, the first one is a straightforward adaptation to FTS of the $k$-nearest neighbors methods for univariate time series forecasting. The second one is based on a selection of curves, termed \emph{the curve envelope}, that aims to be representative in shape and magnitude of the most recent functional observation, either a whole curve or the observed part of a partially observed curve. In a similar fashion to $k$-nearest neighbors and other projection methods successfully used for time series forecasting, we ``project'' the $k$-nearest neighbors and the curves in the envelope for forecasting. In doing so, we keep track of the next period evolution of the curves. The methods are applied to simulated data, daily electricity demand, and NOx emissions and provide competitive results with and often superior to several benchmark predictions. The approach offers a model-free alternative to statistical methods based on FTS modeling to study the cyclic or seasonal behavior of many FTS.

We introduce a framework for Bayesian experimental design (BED) with implicit models, where the data-generating distribution is intractable but sampling from it is still possible. In order to find optimal experimental designs for such models, our approach maximises mutual information lower bounds that are parametrised by neural networks. By training a neural network on sampled data, we simultaneously update network parameters and designs using stochastic gradient-ascent. The framework enables experimental design with a variety of prominent lower bounds and can be applied to a wide range of scientific tasks, such as parameter estimation, model discrimination and improving future predictions. Using a set of intractable toy models, we provide a comprehensive empirical comparison of prominent lower bounds applied to the aforementioned tasks.

Bayesian optimisation (BO) is a well-known efficient algorithm for finding the global optimum of expensive, black-box functions. The current practical BO algorithms have regret bounds ranging from $\mathcal{O}(\frac{logN}{\sqrt{N}})$ to $\mathcal O(e^{-\sqrt{N}})$, where $N$ is the number of evaluations. This paper explores the possibility of improving the regret bound in the noiseless setting by intertwining concepts from BO and tree-based optimistic optimisation which are based on partitioning the search space. We propose the BOO algorithm, a first practical approach which can achieve an exponential regret bound with order $\mathcal O(N^{-\sqrt{N}})$ under the assumption that the objective function is sampled from a Gaussian process with a Mat\'ern kernel with smoothness parameter $\nu > 4 +\frac{D}{2}$, where $D$ is the number of dimensions. We perform experiments on optimisation of various synthetic functions and machine learning hyperparameter tuning tasks and show that our algorithm outperforms baselines.

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) have revolutionized the conventional recommendation paradigm by embracing dialogue agents to dynamically capture the fine-grained user preference. In a typical conversational recommendation scenario, a CRS firstly generates questions to let the user clarify her/his demands and then makes suitable recommendations. Hence, the ability to generate suitable clarifying questions is the key to timely tracing users' dynamic preferences and achieving successful recommendations. However, existing CRSs fall short in asking high-quality questions because: (1) system-generated responses heavily depends on the performance of the dialogue policy agent, which has to be trained with huge conversation corpus to cover all circumstances; and (2) current CRSs cannot fully utilize the learned latent user profiles for generating appropriate and personalized responses. To mitigate these issues, we propose the Knowledge-Based Question Generation System (KBQG), a novel framework for conversational recommendation. Distinct from previous conversational recommender systems, KBQG models a user's preference in a finer granularity by identifying the most relevant relations from a structured knowledge graph (KG). Conditioned on the varied importance of different relations, the generated clarifying questions could perform better in impelling users to provide more details on their preferences. Finially, accurate recommendations can be generated in fewer conversational turns. Furthermore, the proposed KBQG outperforms all baselines in our experiments on two real-world datasets.