Alphabet, the parent company of Google GOOG, is the leading tech company that decided to invest a lot of resources and funding in artificial intelligence. So much so, that the WSJ recently announced that AI is central to Google's future. Not surprisingly, Google has been dealing with different challenges concerning its top AI executives and researchers. Activists shareholders are also showing interest in this. Recently, there is a rise in shareholder proposals calling on boards to ensure proper AI governance.

This work considers variational Bayesian inference as an inexpensive and scalable alternative to a fully Bayesian approach in the context of sparsity-promoting priors. In particular, the priors considered arise from scale mixtures of Normal distributions with a generalized inverse Gaussian mixing distribution. This includes the variational Bayesian LASSO as an inexpensive and scalable alternative to the Bayesian LASSO introduced in [56]. It also includes priors which more strongly promote sparsity. For linear models the method requires only the iterative solution of deterministic least squares problems. Furthermore, for $n\rightarrow \infty$ data points and p unknown covariates the method can be implemented exactly online with a cost of O(p$^3$) in computation and O(p$^2$) in memory. For large p an approximation is able to achieve promising results for a cost of O(p) in both computation and memory. Strategies for hyper-parameter tuning are also considered. The method is implemented for real and simulated data. It is shown that the performance in terms of variable selection and uncertainty quantification of the variational Bayesian LASSO can be comparable to the Bayesian LASSO for problems which are tractable with that method, and for a fraction of the cost. The present method comfortably handles n = p = 131,073 on a laptop in minutes, and n = 10$^5$, p = 10$^6$ overnight.

A promising characteristic of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is its capability to learn optimal policy in an end-to-end manner without relying on feature engineering. However, most approaches assume a fully observable state space, i.e. fully observable Markov Decision Process (MDP). In real-world robotics, this assumption is unpractical, because of the sensor issues such as sensors' capacity limitation and sensor noise, and the lack of knowledge about if the observation design is complete or not. These scenarios lead to Partially Observable MDP (POMDP) and need special treatment. In this paper, we propose Long-Short-Term-Memory-based Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (LSTM-TD3) by introducing a memory component to TD3, and compare its performance with other DRL algorithms in both MDPs and POMDPs. Our results demonstrate the significant advantages of the memory component in addressing POMDPs, including the ability to handle missing and noisy observation data.

We propose a novel CP-Net based composition approach to qualitatively select an optimal set of consumers for an IaaS provider. The IaaS provider's and consumers' qualitative preferences are captured using CP-Nets. We propose a CP-Net composability model using the semantic congruence property of a qualitative composition. A greedy-based and a heuristic-based consumer selection approaches are proposed that effectively reduce the search space of candidate consumers in the composition. Experimental results prove the feasibility of the proposed composition approach.

Natural Language Processing algorithms have made incredible progress recently, but they still struggle when applied to out-of-distribution examples. In this paper, we address a very challenging and previously underexplored version of this domain adaptation problem. In our setup an algorithm is trained on several source domains, and then applied to examples from an unseen domain that is unknown at training time. Particularly, no examples, labeled or unlabeled, or any other knowledge about the target domain are available to the algorithm at training time. We present PADA: A Prompt-based Autoregressive Domain Adaptation algorithm, based on the T5 model. Given a test example, PADA first generates a unique prompt and then, conditioned on this prompt, labels the example with respect to the NLP task. The prompt is a sequence of unrestricted length, consisting of pre-defined Domain Related Features (DRFs) that characterize each of the source domains. Intuitively, the prompt is a unique signature that maps the test example to the semantic space spanned by the source domains. In experiments with two tasks: Rumour Detection and Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference (MNLI), for a total of 10 multi-source adaptation scenarios, PADA strongly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches and additional strong baselines.

It's not enough to have a pressure cooker, you need an Instant Pot that's also a slow cooker, and a rice cooker, and a yogurt maker. Your video game console is also now a media center and live streaming platform. And if your printer doesn't also make copies and send faxes, then what are you even doing with your life? This obsession with do-it-all gadgets has even hit the world of music gear. While there were certainly earlier examples, it really started to take off in the '90s with the emergence of the groovebox.

This article presents a large-scale automated analysis of gender trends in the authorship of Computer Science literature. We answer these questions by performing an automated study of literature metadata from scientific conferences and journals, using data from the Semantic Scholar academic search engine.a Our study incorporates metadata from 11.8M Computer Science publications. To provide a basis for comparison, we also analyze more than 140M articles from other fields of study. Our results demonstrate that although progress has been made, there is still a significant gap in gender representation among Computer Science authors. Continued delay in addressing the gender gap may perpetuate imbalances for generations to come. Our analysis was performed over the Semantic Scholar literature corpus.2 The corpus contains publications between 1940 and the end of November 2019, and associated metadata such as title, abstract, authors, publication venue, and year of publication.

A United Kingdom court dropped Epic Games' suit against Apple and its request to make the tech giant reinstate its popular video game "Fortnite" into the App Store. In the meantime, sorry, Apple users, you are still shut out from playing "Fortnite" with your friends who are blasting away on PlayStations and Xboxes, for instance. The U.S., where Epic Games and Apple are headquartered, would be "the appropriate forum" for the cases to be tried, said Judge Justice Roth of the Competition Appeal Tribunal in a ruling Monday. This legal battle, which began in August 2020 when Epic offered a direct payment method for Fortnite mobile players, spans the globe. Last week, Epic Games filed an antitrust complaint against Apple in the European Union.

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is the task of matching current visual imagery from a camera to images stored in a reference map of the environment. While initial VPR systems used simple direct image methods or hand-crafted visual features, recent work has focused on learning more powerful visual features and further improving performance through either some form of sequential matcher / filter or a hierarchical matching process. In both cases the performance of the initial single-image based system is still far from perfect, putting significant pressure on the sequence matching or (in the case of hierarchical systems) pose refinement stages. In this paper we present a novel hybrid system that creates a high performance initial match hypothesis generator using short learnt sequential descriptors, which enable selective control sequential score aggregation using single image learnt descriptors. Sequential descriptors are generated using a temporal convolutional network dubbed SeqNet, encoding short image sequences using 1-D convolutions, which are then matched against the corresponding temporal descriptors from the reference dataset to provide an ordered list of place match hypotheses. We then perform selective sequential score aggregation using shortlisted single image learnt descriptors from a separate pipeline to produce an overall place match hypothesis. Comprehensive experiments on challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate the proposed method outperforming recent state-of-the-art methods using the same amount of sequential information. Source code and supplementary material can be found at https://github.com/oravus/seqNet.

Providing meaningful privacy to users of location based services is particularly challenging when multiple locations are revealed in a short period of time. This is primarily due to the tremendous degree of dependence that can be anticipated between points. We propose a R\'enyi divergence based privacy framework for bounding expected privacy loss for conditionally dependent data. Additionally, we demonstrate an algorithm for achieving this privacy under Gaussian process conditional priors. This framework both exemplifies why conditionally dependent data is so challenging to protect and offers a strategy for preserving privacy to within a fixed radius for sensitive locations in a user's trace.