Oceania
When Can Liquid Democracy Unveil the Truth?
Becker, Ruben, D'Angelo, Gianlorenzo, Delfaraz, Esmaeil, Gilbert, Hugo
In this paper, we investigate the so-called ODP-problem that has been formulated by Caragiannis and Micha [10]. Here, we are in a setting with two election alternatives out of which one is assumed to be correct. In ODP, the goal is to organise the delegations in the social network in order to maximize the probability that the correct alternative, referred to as ground truth, is elected. While the problem is known to be computationally hard, we strengthen existing hardness results by providing a novel strong approximation hardness result: For any positive constant $C$, we prove that, unless $P=NP$, there is no polynomial-time algorithm for ODP that achieves an approximation guarantee of $\alpha \ge (\ln n)^{-C}$, where $n$ is the number of voters. The reduction designed for this result uses poorly connected social networks in which some voters suffer from misinformation. Interestingly, under some hypothesis on either the accuracies of voters or the connectivity of the network, we obtain a polynomial-time $1/2$-approximation algorithm. This observation proves formally that the connectivity of the social network is a key feature for the efficiency of the liquid democracy paradigm. Lastly, we run extensive simulations and observe that simple algorithms (working either in a centralized or decentralized way) outperform direct democracy on a large class of instances. Overall, our contributions yield new insights on the question in which situations liquid democracy can be beneficial.
Songen is an app that uses AI to generate royalty-free song ideas
Songen is an iOS app that lets you generate new royalty-free music with just a few taps of the screen. It does this with the help of an AI-assisted engine that essentially sketches out a song idea for you. The app generates music based on the genre you select. Songen then generates 10 song ideas and you'll have the option to save the ones you like. In the next step, you can refine the song by adjusting the tempo, changing the key and swapping instrumentations.
Revisiting Indirect Ontology Alignment : New Challenging Issues in Cross-Lingual Context
Ontology alignment process is overwhelmingly cited in Knowledge Engineering as a key mechanism aimed at bypassing heterogeneity and reconciling various data sources, represented by ontologies, i.e., the the Semantic Web cornerstone. In such infrastructures and environments, it is inconceivable to assume that all ontologies covering a particular domain of knowledge are aligned in pairs. Moreover, the high performance of alignment approaches is closely related to two factors, i.e., time consumption and machine resource limitations. Thus, good quality alignments are valuable and it would be appropriate to exploit them. Based on this observation, this article introduces a new method of indirect alignment of ontologies in a cross-lingual context. Indeed, the proposed method deals with alignments of multilingual ontologies and implements an indirect ontology alignment strategy based on a composition and reuse of effective direct alignments. The trigger of the proposed method process is based on alignment algebra which governs the semantics composition of relationships and confidence values. The obtained results, after a thorough and detailed experiment are very encouraging and highlight many positive aspects about the new proposed method.
Understanding Continual Learning Settings with Data Distribution Drift Analysis
Lesort, Timothรฉe, Caccia, Massimo, Rish, Irina
Classical machine learning algorithms often assume that the data are drawn i.i.d. from a stationary probability distribution. Recently, continual learning emerged as a rapidly growing area of machine learning where this assumption is relaxed, namely, where the data distribution is non-stationary, i.e., changes over time. However, data distribution drifts may interfere with the learning process and erase previously learned knowledge; thus, continual learning algorithms must include specialized mechanisms to deal with such distribution drifts. A distribution drift may change the class labels distribution, the input distribution, or both. Moreover, distribution drifts might be abrupt or gradual. In this paper, we aim to identify and categorize different types of data distribution drifts and potential assumptions about them, to better characterize various continual-learning scenarios. Moreover, we propose to use the distribution drift framework to provide more precise definitions of several terms commonly used in the continual learning field.
ReCAM@IITK at SemEval-2021 Task 4: BERT and ALBERT based Ensemble for Abstract Word Prediction
Mittal, Abhishek, Modi, Ashutosh
This paper describes our system for Task 4 of SemEval-2021: Reading Comprehension of Abstract Meaning (ReCAM). We participated in all subtasks where the main goal was to predict an abstract word missing from a statement. We fine-tuned the pre-trained masked language models namely BERT and ALBERT and used an Ensemble of these as our submitted system on Subtask 1 (ReCAM-Imperceptibility) and Subtask 2 (ReCAM-Nonspecificity). For Subtask 3 (ReCAM-Intersection), we submitted the ALBERT model as it gives the best results. We tried multiple approaches and found that Masked Language Modeling(MLM) based approach works the best.
Machine Learning Crash Course
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Global silicon chip shortage hits supply of phones, TVs, cars and Australia's NBN
A global shortage of one crucial piece of technology is causing delays in everything from cars and televisions to video game consoles and Australia's National Broadband Network rollout. A temporary shutdown in the production of silicon computer chips at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as severe storms in Texas causing more recent delays, has caused worldwide chip shortages, with a knock-on effect for the production of phones, laptops and even automobiles. Samsung, which is the largest manufacturer of computer chips in the world, as well as one of the biggest users, has said the chip shortage comes amid rising demand for consumer electronics during the pandemic. "There's a serious imbalance in supply and demand of chips in the IT sector globally," the company's co-chief executive, Koh Dong-jin, said. Samsung has indicated it could delay the release of the next Galaxy Note smartphone until 2022 as a result of the shortage.
US Military Seeks to Speed AI Adoption for Support Systems - AI Trends
The US military needs to scale up its use of AI or be left behind by adversaries, Lt. Gen. Michael Groen, chief of the Pentagon's Joint AI Center (JAIC), told a recent conference of the National Defense Industrial Association, according to a report from UPI. While current military use of AI "is a step in the right direction, we need to start building on it," stated Groen, who was appointed head of the JAIC in October. He is the second director of JAIC, or "the jake" in Pentagon parlance, which was set up by Congress in 2018. The first director was Air Force Lt. Gen. John N.T. "Jack" Shanahan, who retired last year. Noting that China has said it intends "to be dominant in AI by 2030," the Pentagon has focused on a five-year program culminating in 2027.
Golden Tortoise Beetle Optimizer: A Novel Nature-Inspired Meta-heuristic Algorithm for Engineering Problems
Tarkhaneh, Omid, Alipour, Neda, Chapnevis, Amirahmad, Shen, Haifeng
This paper proposes a novel nature-inspired meta-heuristic algorithm called the Golden Tortoise Beetle Optimizer (GTBO) to solve optimization problems. It mimics golden tortoise beetle's behavior of changing colors to attract opposite sex for mating and its protective strategy that uses a kind of anal fork to deter predators. The algorithm is modeled based on the beetle's dual attractiveness and survival strategy to generate new solutions for optimization problems. To measure its performance, the proposed GTBO is compared with five other nature-inspired evolutionary algorithms on 24 well-known benchmark functions investigating the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, local optima avoidance, and convergence towards the global optima is statistically significant. We particularly applied GTBO to two well-known engineering problems including the welded beam design problem and the gear train design problem. The results demonstrate that the new algorithm is more efficient than the five baseline algorithms for both problems. A sensitivity analysis is also performed to reveal different impacts of the algorithm's key control parameters and operators on GTBO's performance.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Global and Local Graph Neural Networks in Limited Labeled Data Scenario: Application to Disaster Management
Ghosh, Samujjwal, Maji, Subhadeep, Desarkar, Maunendra Sankar
Identification and categorization of social media posts generated during disasters are crucial to reduce the sufferings of the affected people. However, lack of labeled data is a significant bottleneck in learning an effective categorization system for a disaster. This motivates us to study the problem as unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) between a previous disaster with labeled data (source) and a current disaster (target). However, if the amount of labeled data available is limited, it restricts the learning capabilities of the model. To handle this challenge, we utilize limited labeled data along with abundantly available unlabeled data, generated during a source disaster to propose a novel two-part graph neural network. The first-part extracts domain-agnostic global information by constructing a token level graph across domains and the second-part preserves local instance-level semantics. In our experiments, we show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques by $2.74\%$ weighted F$_1$ score on average on two standard public dataset in the area of disaster management. We also report experimental results for granular actionable multi-label classification datasets in disaster domain for the first time, on which we outperform BERT by $3.00\%$ on average w.r.t weighted F$_1$. Additionally, we show that our approach can retain performance when very limited labeled data is available.