Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei tested facial recognition software that could identify minority Uyghur individuals and automatically send alerts to local authorities of their presence, according to a report obtained by The Washington Post. The document reportedly shows that in 2018 Huawei worked with Megvii, one of China's leading facial recognition startups, to test an AI-powered camera system that could attempt to identify the age, sex and ethnicity of people in a crowd. When it detected the face of an Uyghur individual, it would reportedly trigger an "Uyghur alarm" and alert police in China. The Uyghurs are a mostly Muslim Turkic ethnic group. There are approximately 11 million Uyghurs currently in China, with the majority living in the country's northern Xinjiang province.

Forecasting the number of Olympic medals for each nation is highly relevant for different stakeholders: Ex ante, sports betting companies can determine the odds while sponsors and media companies can allocate their resources to promising teams. Ex post, sports politicians and managers can benchmark the performance of their teams and evaluate the drivers of success. To significantly increase the Olympic medal forecasting accuracy, we apply machine learning, more specifically a two-staged Random Forest, thus outperforming more traditional na\"ive forecast for three previous Olympics held between 2008 and 2016 for the first time. Regarding the Tokyo 2020 Games in 2021, our model suggests that the United States will lead the Olympic medal table, winning 120 medals, followed by China (87) and Great Britain (74). Intriguingly, we predict that the current COVID-19 pandemic will not significantly alter the medal count as all countries suffer from the pandemic to some extent (data inherent) and limited historical data points on comparable diseases (model inherent).

Deep Neural Network (DNN) models have vulnerabilities related to security concerns, with attackers usually employing complex hacking techniques to expose their structures. Data poisoning-enabled perturbation attacks are complex adversarial ones that inject false data into models. They negatively impact the learning process, with no benefit to deeper networks, as they degrade a model's accuracy and convergence rates. In this paper, we propose an attack-agnostic-based defense method for mitigating their influence. In it, a Defensive Feature Layer (DFL) is integrated with a well-known DNN architecture which assists in neutralizing the effects of illegitimate perturbation samples in the feature space. To boost the robustness and trustworthiness of this method for correctly classifying attacked input samples, we regularize the hidden space of a trained model with a discriminative loss function called Polarized Contrastive Loss (PCL). It improves discrimination among samples in different classes and maintains the resemblance of those in the same class. Also, we integrate a DFL and PCL in a compact model for defending against data poisoning attacks. This method is trained and tested using the CIFAR-10 and MNIST datasets with data poisoning-enabled perturbation attacks, with the experimental results revealing its excellent performance compared with those of recent peer techniques.

River is a machine learning library for dynamic data streams and continual learning. It provides multiple state-of-the-art learning methods, data generators/transformers, performance metrics and evaluators for different stream learning problems. It is the result from the merger of the two most popular packages for stream learning in Python: Creme and scikit-multiflow. River introduces a revamped architecture based on the lessons learnt from the seminal packages. River's ambition is to be the go-to library for doing machine learning on streaming data. Additionally, this open source package brings under the same umbrella a large community of practitioners and researchers. The source code is available at https://github.com/online-ml/river.

Deep learning algorithms have been recently targeted by attackers due to their vulnerability. Several research studies have been conducted to address this issue and build more robust deep learning models. Non-continuous deep models are still not robust against adversarial, where most of the recent studies have focused on developing attack techniques to evade the learning process of the models. One of the main reasons behind the vulnerability of such models is that a learning classifier is unable to slightly predict perturbed samples. To address this issue, we propose a novel objective/loss function, the so-called marginal contrastive, which enforces the features to lie under a specified margin to facilitate their prediction using deep convolutional networks (i.e., Char-CNN). Extensive experiments have been conducted on continuous cases (e.g., UNSW NB15 dataset) and discrete ones (i.e, eight-large-scale datasets [32]) to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results revealed that the regularization of the learning process based on the proposed loss function can improve the performance of Char-CNN.

Anticipating what might happen as a result of an action is an essential ability humans have in order to perform tasks effectively. On the other hand, robots capabilities in this regard are quite lacking. While machine learning is used to increase the ability of prospection it is still limiting for novel situations. A possibility to improve the prospection ability of robots is through simulation of imagined motions and the physical results of these actions. Therefore, we present URoboSim, a robot simulator that allows robots to perform tasks as mental simulation before performing this task in reality. We show the capabilities of URoboSim in form of mental simulations, generating data for machine learning and the usage as belief state for a real robot.

In 2016, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) hosted the Cyber Grand Challenge (Song & Alves-Foss, 2015), a competition which invited participating finalist teams to develop automated cyber defense systems that can self-discover, prove, and correct software vulnerabilities at real-time - without human intervention. For the first time, the world witnessed hackers being automated at scale, i.e. cyber autonomy (Brumley, 2018). As the competition progressed, the systems were not only able to auto-detect and correct their software, but also able to attack other systems (other participants' machines) in the network. Even though the competition did not catch much mainstream media attention, the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge proved the feasibility of cyber autonomy, stretched the imagination of the national and cyber security industries and created a mix of perceptions ranging from hope to fear - the hope of increasingly secure computing systems at scale, and the fear of current jobs such as penetration testing being automated.

Predictive process analytics focuses on predicting the future states of running instances of a business process. While advanced machine learning techniques have been used to increase accuracy of predictions, the resulting predictive models lack transparency. Current explainable machine learning methods, such as LIME and SHAP, can be used to interpret black box models. However, it is unclear how fit for purpose these methods are in explaining process predictive models. In this paper, we draw on evaluation measures used in the field of explainable AI and propose functionally-grounded evaluation metrics for assessing explainable methods in predictive process analytics. We apply the proposed metrics to evaluate the performance of LIME and SHAP in interpreting process predictive models built on XGBoost, which has been shown to be relatively accurate in process predictions. We conduct the evaluation using three open source, real-world event logs and analyse the evaluation results to derive insights. The research contributes to understanding the trustworthiness of explainable methods for predictive process analytics as a fundamental and key step towards human user-oriented evaluation.

In this work, we study emergent communication through the lens of cooperative multi-agent behavior in nature. Using insights from animal communication, we propose a spectrum from low-bandwidth (e.g. pheromone trails) to high-bandwidth (e.g. compositional language) communication that is based on the cognitive, perceptual, and behavioral capabilities of social agents. Through a series of experiments with pursuit-evasion games, we identify multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms as a computational model for the low-bandwidth end of the communication spectrum.

This paper considers parameter estimation for nonlinear state-space models, which is an important but challenging problem. We address this challenge by employing a variational inference (VI) approach, which is a principled method that has deep connections to maximum likelihood estimation. This VI approach ultimately provides estimates of the model as solutions to an optimisation problem, which is deterministic, tractable and can be solved using standard optimisation tools. A specialisation of this approach for systems with additive Gaussian noise is also detailed. The proposed method is examined numerically on a range of simulation and real examples with a focus on robustness to parameter initialisations; we additionally perform favourable comparisons against state-of-the-art alternatives.