Welcome to the fourth edition of the AI Index Report. This year we significantly expanded the amount of data available in the report, worked with a broader set of external organizations to calibrate our data, and deepened our connections with the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). The AI Index Report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence. Its mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, and globally sourced data for policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop intuitions about the complex field of AI. The report aims to be the most credible and authoritative source for data and insights about AI in the world.

Deformable image registration is fundamental for many medical image analyses. A key obstacle for accurate image registration is the variations in image appearance. Recently, deep learning-based registration methods (DLRs), using deep neural networks, have computational efficiency that is several orders of magnitude greater than traditional optimization-based registration methods (ORs). A major drawback, however, of DLRs is a disregard for the target-pair-specific optimization that is inherent in ORs and instead they rely on a globally optimized network that is trained with a set of training samples to achieve faster registration. Thus, DLRs inherently have degraded ability to adapt to appearance variations and perform poorly, compared to ORs, when image pairs (fixed/moving images) have large differences in appearance. Hence, we propose an Appearance Adjustment Network (AAN) where we leverage anatomy edges, through an anatomy-constrained loss function, to generate an anatomy-preserving appearance transformation. We designed the AAN so that it can be readily inserted into a wide range of DLRs, to reduce the appearance differences between the fixed and moving images. Our AAN and DLR's network can be trained cooperatively in an unsupervised and end-to-end manner. We evaluated our AAN with two widely used DLRs - Voxelmorph (VM) and FAst IMage registration (FAIM) - on three public 3D brain magnetic resonance (MR) image datasets - IBSR18, Mindboggle101, and LPBA40. The results show that DLRs, using the AAN, improved performance and achieved higher results than state-of-the-art ORs.

Unlike theoretical distributed learning (DL), DL over wireless edge networks faces the inherent dynamics/uncertainty of wireless connections and edge nodes, making DL less efficient or even inapplicable under the highly dynamic wireless edge networks (e.g., using mmW interfaces). This article addresses these problems by leveraging recent advances in coded computing and the deep dueling neural network architecture. By introducing coded structures/redundancy, a distributed learning task can be completed without waiting for straggling nodes. Unlike conventional coded computing that only optimizes the code structure, coded distributed learning over the wireless edge also requires to optimize the selection/scheduling of wireless edge nodes with heterogeneous connections, computing capability, and straggling effects. However, even neglecting the aforementioned dynamics/uncertainty, the resulting joint optimization of coding and scheduling to minimize the distributed learning time turns out to be NP-hard. To tackle this and to account for the dynamics and uncertainty of wireless connections and edge nodes, we reformulate the problem as a Markov Decision Process and then design a novel deep reinforcement learning algorithm that employs the deep dueling neural network architecture to find the jointly optimal coding scheme and the best set of edge nodes for different learning tasks without explicit information about the wireless environment and edge nodes' straggling parameters. Simulations show that the proposed framework reduces the average learning delay in wireless edge computing up to 66% compared with other DL approaches. The jointly optimal framework in this article is also applicable to any distributed learning scheme with heterogeneous and uncertain computing nodes.

Sentiment analysis is the basis of intelligent human-computer interaction. As one of the frontier research directions of artificial intelligence, it can help computers better identify human intentions and emotional states so that provide more personalized services. However, as human present sentiments by spoken words, gestures, facial expressions and others which involve variable forms of data including text, audio, video, etc., it poses many challenges to this study. Due to the limitations of unimodal sentiment analysis, recent research has focused on the sentiment analysis of videos containing time series data of multiple modalities. When analyzing videos with multimodal data, the key problem is how to fuse these heterogeneous data. In consideration that the contribution of each modality is different, current fusion methods tend to extract the important information of single modality prior to fusion, which ignores the consistency and complementarity of bimodal interaction and has influences on the final decision. To solve this problem, a video sentiment analysis method using multi-head attention with bimodal information augmented is proposed. Based on bimodal interaction, more important bimodal features are assigned larger weights. In this way, different feature representations are adaptively assigned corresponding attention for effective multimodal fusion. Extensive experiments were conducted on both Chinese and English public datasets. The results show that our approach outperforms the existing methods and can give an insight into the contributions of bimodal interaction among three modalities.

There is no denying that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the future of cybersecurity. In other words, the future of cybersecurity lies in the hands of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Companies or medium-sized corporations can counter various cyber threats using the advanced concepts of AI. If you want to know about different AI predictions that will positively influence cybersecurity in 2021 and in the future, read this post in detail. According to a recent research conducted by Trend Micro, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will replace the need for human beings by the end of 2030.

Harm wrought by AI tends to fall most heavily on marginalized communities. In the United States, algorithmic harm may lead to the false arrest of Black men, disproportionately reject female job candidates, or target people who identify as queer. In India, those impacts can further impact marginalized populations like Muslim minority groups or people oppressed by the caste system. And algorithmic fairness frameworks developed in the West may not transfer directly to people in India or other countries in the Global South, where algorithmic fairness requires understanding of local social structures and power dynamics and a legacy of colonialism. That's the argument behind "De-centering Algorithmic Power: Towards Algorithmic Fairness in India," a paper accepted for publication at the Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) conference, which begins this week. Other works that seek to move beyond a Western-centric focus include Shinto or Buddhism-based frameworks for AI design and an approach to AI governance based on the African philosophy of Ubuntu.

Farmers Edge Inc, an AI startup to help growers increase crop yields, plans to go public on Canada's largest Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "FDGE". The company seeks to raise CAD 100 million (approximately USD 79 million). Founded in 2005, Farmers Edge uses AI technology to collect and analyze local weather, soil moisture and satellite data to help farmers improve crop efficiency and yield. Besides the Canadian Prairie, the company currently hosts offices in the United States, Australia, Russia, Brazil and Ukraine. As of the end of 2020, more than 3,000 growers have used the Farmers Edge products, covering more than 23 million acres of land in six countries.

The information presented in Lega-Tech Artificial Intelligence Market Report 2021 includes qualitative and quantitative insights. Under the qualitative analysis part, manufacturing base, raw materials data, Lega-Tech Artificial Intelligence status, trends, SWOT analysis, PESTEL Analysis, distribution channels, driving factors, and a competitive structure is presented. Under the qualitative analysis part, market value/volume, production analysis, consumption data, import-export data, or each region and country are explained. Also, industry size by Lega-Tech Artificial Intelligence type, application, demand and supply scenario, and economic status are explained. Also, comprehensive information on the latest product development, growth opportunities, industry strategies, cost structures, and recent policies are enlightened in the Lega-Tech Artificial Intelligence report.

In many real-world scenarios, the time it takes for a mobile agent, e.g., a robot, to move from one location to another may vary due to exogenous events and be difficult to predict accurately. Planning in such scenarios is challenging, especially in the context of Multi-Agent Pathfinding (MAPF), where the goal is to find paths to multiple agents and temporal coordination is necessary to avoid collisions. In this work, we consider a MAPF problem with this form of time uncertainty, where we are only given upper and lower bounds on the time it takes each agent to move. The objective is to find a safe solution, which is a solution that can be executed by all agents and is guaranteed to avoid collisions. We propose two complete and optimal algorithms for finding safe solutions based on well-known MAPF algorithms, namely, A* with Operator Decomposition (A* + OD) and Conflict-Based Search (CBS). Experimentally, we observe that on several standard MAPF grids the CBS-based algorithm performs better. We also explore the option of online replanning in this context, i.e., modifying the agents' plans during execution, to reduce the overall execution cost. We consider two online settings: (a) when an agent can sense the current time and its current location, and (b) when the agents can also communicate seamlessly during execution. For each setting, we propose a replanning algorithm and analyze its behavior theoretically and empirically. Our experimental evaluation confirms that indeed online replanning in both settings can significantly reduce solution cost.

Deep learning has been the engine powering many successes of data science. However, the deep neural network (DNN), as the basic model of deep learning, is often excessively over-parameterized, causing many difficulties in training, prediction and interpretation. We propose a frequentist-like method for learning sparse DNNs and justify its consistency under the Bayesian framework: the proposed method could learn a sparse DNN with at most $O(n/\log(n))$ connections and nice theoretical guarantees such as posterior consistency, variable selection consistency and asymptotically optimal generalization bounds. In particular, we establish posterior consistency for the sparse DNN with a mixture Gaussian prior, show that the structure of the sparse DNN can be consistently determined using a Laplace approximation-based marginal posterior inclusion probability approach, and use Bayesian evidence to elicit sparse DNNs learned by an optimization method such as stochastic gradient descent in multiple runs with different initializations. The proposed method is computationally more efficient than standard Bayesian methods for large-scale sparse DNNs. The numerical results indicate that the proposed method can perform very well for large-scale network compression and high-dimensional nonlinear variable selection, both advancing interpretable machine learning.