Oceania
Twitter round-up: Evan Kirstel's tweet on bionic gloves most popular tweet in October 2020 - Verdict
Verdict lists ten of the most popular tweets on robotics in October 2020 based on data from GlobalData's Influencer Platform. The top tweets were chosen from influencers as tracked by GlobalData's Influencer Platform, which is based on a scientific process that works on pre-defined parameters. Influencers are selected after a deep analysis of the influencer's relevance, network strength, engagement, and leading discussions on new and emerging trends. Evan Kirstel, a top B2B analyst and influencer, shared a video on how a pair of bionic gloves helped an 80-year-old classical pianist, Joรฃo Carlos Martins, to play the piano again. The maestro had lost dexterity in his hands due to aging and health issues.
The State of 5G in 2020 -- Where the World and U.S. Are
In this post, we examine the state of 5G in 2020. And while the United States is seeing good growth with this technology, it lags in average download speeds. Last year, we presented a post asking and answering: Do YOU Know What 5G Is? In March 2020, we noted that a BI Intelligence study found that "39% of respondents to our survey saying they plan to support 5G in IoT products and services before 2021." All the things we hope will make our lives easier, safer, and healthier will require high-speed, always-on internet connections.
Mind Your Inflections! Improving NLP for Non-Standard Englishes with Base-Inflection Encoding
Tan, Samson, Joty, Shafiq, Varshney, Lav R., Kan, Min-Yen
Inflectional variation is a common feature of World Englishes such as Colloquial Singapore English and African American Vernacular English. Although comprehension by human readers is usually unimpaired by non-standard inflections, current NLP systems are not yet robust. We propose Base-Inflection Encoding (BITE), a method to tokenize English text by reducing inflected words to their base forms before reinjecting the grammatical information as special symbols. Fine-tuning pretrained NLP models for downstream tasks using our encoding defends against inflectional adversaries while maintaining performance on clean data. Models using BITE generalize better to dialects with non-standard inflections without explicit training and translation models converge faster when trained with BITE. Finally, we show that our encoding improves the vocabulary efficiency of popular data-driven subword tokenizers. Since there has been no prior work on quantitatively evaluating vocabulary efficiency, we propose metrics to do so.
Non-Linear Multiple Field Interactions Neural Document Ranking
Takiguchi, Kentaro, Twomey, Niall, Vaquero, Luis M.
Ranking tasks are usually based on the text of the main body of the page and the actions (clicks) of users on the page. There are other elements that could be leveraged to better contextualise the ranking experience (e.g. text in other fields, query made by the user, images, etc). We present one of the first in-depth analyses of field interaction for multiple field ranking in two separate datasets. While some works have taken advantage of full document structure, some aspects remain unexplored. In this work we build on previous analyses to show how query-field interactions, non-linear field interactions, and the architecture of the underlying neural model affect performance.
Introduction to Core-sets: an Updated Survey
In optimization or machine learning problems we are given a set of items, usually points in some metric space, and the goal is to minimize or maximize an objective function over some space of candidate solutions. For example, in clustering problems, the input is a set of points in some metric space, and a common goal is to compute a set of centers in some other space (points, lines) that will minimize the sum of distances to these points. In database queries, we may need to compute such a some for a specific query set of k centers. However, traditional algorithms cannot handle modern systems that require parallel real-time computations of infinite distributed streams from sensors such as GPS, audio or video that arrive to a cloud, or networks of weaker devices such as smartphones or robots. Core-set is a "small data" summarization of the input "big data", where every possible query has approximately the same answer on both data sets. Generic techniques enable efficient coreset maintenance of streaming, distributed and dynamic data. Traditional algorithms can then be applied on these coresets to maintain the approximated optimal solutions. The challenge is to design coresets with provable tradeoff between their size and approximation error. This survey summarizes such constructions in a retrospective way, that aims to unified and simplify the state-of-the-art. Bringing big data to the enterprise, 2012) are generated by cheap and numerous information-sensing mobile devices, remote sensing, software logs, cameras, microphones, RFID readers and wireless sensor networks (Segaran & Hammerbacher, 2009; Hellerstein, 2008; Funke & Laue, 2007). These require clustering algorithms that, unlike traditional algorithms, (a) learn unbounded streaming data that cannot fit into main memory, (b) run in parallel on distributed data among thousands of machines, (c) use low communication between the machines (d) apply real-time computations on the device, (e) handle privacy and security issues. A common approach is to reinvent computer science for handling these new computational models, and develop new algorithms "from scratch" independently of existing solutions.
Game Plan: What AI can do for Football, and What Football can do for AI
Tuyls, Karl, Omidshafiei, Shayegan, Muller, Paul, Wang, Zhe, Connor, Jerome, Hennes, Daniel, Graham, Ian, Spearman, William, Waskett, Tim, Steele, Dafydd, Luc, Pauline, Recasens, Adria, Galashov, Alexandre, Thornton, Gregory, Elie, Romuald, Sprechmann, Pablo, Moreno, Pol, Cao, Kris, Garnelo, Marta, Dutta, Praneet, Valko, Michal, Heess, Nicolas, Bridgland, Alex, Perolat, Julien, De Vylder, Bart, Eslami, Ali, Rowland, Mark, Jaegle, Andrew, Munos, Remi, Back, Trevor, Ahamed, Razia, Bouton, Simon, Beauguerlange, Nathalie, Broshear, Jackson, Graepel, Thore, Hassabis, Demis
The rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning has opened unprecedented analytics possibilities in various team and individual sports, including baseball, basketball, and tennis. More recently, AI techniques have been applied to football, due to a huge increase in data collection by professional teams, increased computational power, and advances in machine learning, with the goal of better addressing new scientific challenges involved in the analysis of both individual players' and coordinated teams' behaviors. The research challenges associated with predictive and prescriptive football analytics require new developments and progress at the intersection of statistical learning, game theory, and computer vision. In this paper, we provide an overarching perspective highlighting how the combination of these fields, in particular, forms a unique microcosm for AI research, while offering mutual benefits for professional teams, spectators, and broadcasters in the years to come. We illustrate that this duality makes football analytics a game changer of tremendous value, in terms of not only changing the game of football itself, but also in terms of what this domain can mean for the field of AI. We review the state-of-the-art and exemplify the types of analysis enabled by combining the aforementioned fields, including illustrative examples of counterfactual analysis using predictive models, and the combination of game-theoretic analysis of penalty kicks with statistical learning of player attributes. We conclude by highlighting envisioned downstream impacts, including possibilities for extensions to other sports (real and virtual).
Report outlines route toward better jobs, wider prosperity
Decades of technological change have polarized the earnings of the American workforce, helping highly educated white-collar workers thrive, while hollowing out the middle class. Yet present-day advances like robots and artificial intelligence do not spell doom for middle-tier or lower-wage workers, since innovations create jobs as well. With better policies in place, more people could enjoy good careers even as new technology transforms workplaces. The report, "The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines," was released today, and the task force is hosting an online conference on Wednesday, the "AI & the Future of Work Congress." At the core of the task force's findings: A robot-driven jobs apocalypse is not on the immediate horizon.
Estimates of daily ground-level NO2 concentrations in China based on big data and machine learning approaches
Dou, Xinyu, Liao, Cuijuan, Wang, Hengqi, Huang, Ying, Tu, Ying, Huang, Xiaomeng, Peng, Yiran, Zhu, Biqing, Tan, Jianguang, Deng, Zhu, Wu, Nana, Sun, Taochun, Ke, Piyu, Liu, Zhu
Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is one of the most important atmospheric pollutants. However, current ground-level NO2 concentration data are lack of either high-resolution coverage or full coverage national wide, due to the poor quality of source data and the computing power of the models. To our knowledge, this study is the first to estimate the ground-level NO2 concentration in China with national coverage as well as relatively high spatiotemporal resolution (0.25 degree; daily intervals) over the newest past 6 years (2013-2018). We advanced a Random Forest model integrated K-means (RF-K) for the estimates with multi-source parameters. Besides meteorological parameters, satellite retrievals parameters, we also, for the first time, introduce socio-economic parameters to assess the impact by human activities. The results show that: (1) the RF-K model we developed shows better prediction performance than other models, with cross-validation R2 = 0.64 (MAPE = 34.78%). (2) The annual average concentration of NO2 in China showed a weak increasing trend . While in the economic zones such as Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, Yangtze River Delta, and Pearl River Delta, the NO2 concentration there even decreased or remained unchanged, especially in spring. Our dataset has verified that pollutant controlling targets have been achieved in these areas. With mapping daily nationwide ground-level NO2 concentrations, this study provides timely data with high quality for air quality management for China. We provide a universal model framework to quickly generate a timely national atmospheric pollutants concentration map with a high spatial-temporal resolution, based on improved machine learning methods.
MG-GCN: Fast and Effective Learning with Mix-grained Aggregators for Training Large Graph Convolutional Networks
Huang, Tao, Zhang, Yihan, Wu, Jiajing, Fang, Junyuan, Zheng, Zibin
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been employed as a kind of significant tool on many graph-based applications recently. Inspired by convolutional neural networks (CNNs), GCNs generate the embeddings of nodes by aggregating the information of their neighbors layer by layer. However, the high computational and memory cost of GCNs due to the recursive neighborhood expansion across GCN layers makes it infeasible for training on large graphs. To tackle this issue, several sampling methods during the process of information aggregation have been proposed to train GCNs in a mini-batch Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) manner. Nevertheless, these sampling strategies sometimes bring concerns about insufficient information collection, which may hinder the learning performance in terms of accuracy and convergence. To tackle the dilemma between accuracy and efficiency, we propose to use aggregators with different granularities to gather neighborhood information in different layers. Then, a degree-based sampling strategy, which avoids the exponential complexity, is constructed for sampling a fixed number of nodes. Combining the above two mechanisms, the proposed model, named Mix-grained GCN (MG-GCN) achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy, training speed, convergence speed, and memory cost through a comprehensive set of experiments on four commonly used benchmark datasets and a new Ethereum dataset.