This paper deals with the identification of machines in a smart city environment. The concept of machine biometrics is proposed in this work for the first time, as a way to authenticate machine identities interacting with humans in everyday life. This definition is imposed in modern years where autonomous vehicles, social robots, etc. are considered active members of contemporary societies. In this context, the case of car identification from the engine behavioral biometrics is examined. For this purpose, 22 sound features were extracted and their discrimination capabilities were tested in combination with 9 different machine learning classifiers, towards identifying 5 car manufacturers. The experimental results revealed the ability of the proposed biometrics to identify cars with high accuracy up to 98% for the case of the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neural network model.

This paper presents our systems for the three Subtasks of SemEval Task4: Reading Comprehension of Abstract Meaning (ReCAM). We explain the algorithms used to learn our models and the process of tuning the algorithms and selecting the best model. Inspired by the similarity of the ReCAM task and the language pre-training, we propose a simple yet effective technology, namely, negative augmentation with language model. Evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Our models achieve the 4th rank on both official test sets of Subtask 1 and Subtask 2 with an accuracy of 87.9% and an accuracy of 92.8%, respectively. We further conduct comprehensive model analysis and observe interesting error cases, which may promote future researches.

Machine Learning (ML) provides important techniques for classification and predictions. Most of these are black-box models for users and do not provide decision-makers with an explanation. For the sake of transparency or more validity of decisions, the need to develop explainable/interpretable ML-methods is gaining more and more importance. Certain questions need to be addressed: How does an ML procedure derive the class for a particular entity? Why does a particular clustering emerge from a particular unsupervised ML procedure? What can we do if the number of attributes is very large? What are the possible reasons for the mistakes for concrete cases and models? For binary attributes, Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) offers techniques in terms of intents of formal concepts, and thus provides plausible reasons for model prediction. However, from the interpretable machine learning viewpoint, we still need to provide decision-makers with the importance of individual attributes to the classification of a particular object, which may facilitate explanations by experts in various domains with high-cost errors like medicine or finance. We discuss how notions from cooperative game theory can be used to assess the contribution of individual attributes in classification and clustering processes in concept-based machine learning. To address the 3rd question, we present some ideas on how to reduce the number of attributes using similarities in large contexts.

We study the problem of combinatorial multi-armed bandits (CMAB) under strategic manipulations of rewards, where each arm can modify the emitted reward signals for its own interest. Our setting elaborates a more realistic model of adaptive arms that imposes relaxed assumptions compared to adversarial corruptions and adversarial attacks. Algorithms designed under strategic arms gain robustness in real applications while avoiding being overcautious and hampering the performance. We bridge the gap between strategic manipulations and adversarial attacks by investigating the optimal colluding strategy among arms under the MAB problem. We then propose a strategic variant of the combinatorial UCB algorithm, which has a regret of at most $O(m\log T + m B_{max})$ under strategic manipulations, where $T$ is the time horizon, $m$ is the number of arms, and $B_{max}$ is the maximum budget. We further provide lower bounds on the strategic budgets for attackers to incur certain regret of the bandit algorithm. Extensive experiments corroborate our theoretical findings on robustness and regret bounds, in a variety of regimes of manipulation budgets.

The future of work is upon us and while we've been entrenched at home, the world has changed significantly. Getting back to work won't be getting back at all, it will be a new game. And success in the future will require new skills--some of which may come as a surprise. A study by Monster found 82% of companies are planning to hire in the new year. This is good news for your career and the opportunities you'll be able to pursue. But you'll also need different skills and as the saying goes, "What got you here, won't get you there."

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.