Classification of quantum data is essential for quantum machine learning and near-term quantum technologies. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid quantum-classical framework for supervised quantum learning, which we call Variational Shadow Quantum Learning (VSQL). Our method in particular utilizes the classical shadows of quantum data, which fundamentally represent the side information of quantum data with respect to certain physical observables. Specifically, we first use variational shadow quantum circuits to extract classical features in a convolution way and then utilize a fully-connected neural network to complete the classification task. We show that this method could sharply reduce the number of parameters and thus better facilitate quantum circuit training. Simultaneously, less noise will be introduced since fewer quantum gates are employed in such shadow circuits. Moreover, we show that the Barren Plateau issue, a significant gradient vanishing problem in quantum machine learning, could be avoided in VSQL. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency of VSQL in quantum classification via numerical experiments on the classification of quantum states and the recognition of multi-labeled handwritten digits. In particular, our VSQL approach outperforms existing variational quantum classifiers in the test accuracy in the binary case of handwritten digit recognition and notably requires much fewer parameters.

Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) are at the heart of evidence-based research, setting the foundation for future research and practice. However, producing good quality timely contributions is a challenging and highly cognitive endeavor, which has lately motivated the exploration of automation and support in the SLR process. In this paper we address an often overlooked phase in this process, that of planning literature reviews, and explore under the lenses of cognitive process augmentation how to overcome its most salient challenges. In doing so, we report on the insights from 24 SLR authors on planning practices, its challenges as well as feedback on support strategies inspired by recent advances in cognitive computing.

With the continuous development of NoSQL databases, more and more developers choose to use semi-structured data for development and data management, which puts forward requirements for schema management of semi-structured data stored in NoSQL databases. Schema extraction plays an important role in understanding schemas, optimizing queries, and validating data consistency. Therefore, in this survey we investigate structural methods based on tree and graph and statistical methods based on distributed architecture and machine learning to extract schemas. The schemas obtained by the structural methods are more interpretable, and the statistical methods have better applicability and generalization ability. Moreover, we also investigate tools and systems for schemas extraction. Schema extraction tools are mainly used for spark or NoSQL databases, and are suitable for small datasets or simple application environments. The system mainly focuses on the extraction and management of schemas in large data sets and complex application scenarios. Furthermore, we also compare these techniques to facilitate data managers' choice.

Spectral methods have emerged as a simple yet surprisingly effective approach for extracting information from massive, noisy and incomplete data. In a nutshell, spectral methods refer to a collection of algorithms built upon the eigenvalues (resp. singular values) and eigenvectors (resp. singular vectors) of some properly designed matrices constructed from data. A diverse array of applications have been found in machine learning, data science, and signal processing. Due to their simplicity and effectiveness, spectral methods are not only used as a stand-alone estimator, but also frequently employed to initialize other more sophisticated algorithms to improve performance. While the studies of spectral methods can be traced back to classical matrix perturbation theory and methods of moments, the past decade has witnessed tremendous theoretical advances in demystifying their efficacy through the lens of statistical modeling, with the aid of non-asymptotic random matrix theory. This monograph aims to present a systematic, comprehensive, yet accessible introduction to spectral methods from a modern statistical perspective, highlighting their algorithmic implications in diverse large-scale applications. In particular, our exposition gravitates around several central questions that span various applications: how to characterize the sample efficiency of spectral methods in reaching a target level of statistical accuracy, and how to assess their stability in the face of random noise, missing data, and adversarial corruptions? In addition to conventional $\ell_2$ perturbation analysis, we present a systematic $\ell_{\infty}$ and $\ell_{2,\infty}$ perturbation theory for eigenspace and singular subspaces, which has only recently become available owing to a powerful "leave-one-out" analysis framework.

Analysis of water and environmental data is an important aspect of many intelligent water and environmental system applications where inference from such analysis plays a significant role in decision making. Quite often these data that are collected through sensible sensors can be anomalous due to different reasons such as systems breakdown, malfunctioning of sensor detectors, and more. Regardless of their root causes, such data severely affect the results of the subsequent analysis. This paper demonstrates data cleaning and preparation for time-series data and further proposes cost-sensitive machine learning algorithms as a solution to detect anomalous data points in time-series data. The following models: Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Support Vector Machines have been modified to support the cost-sensitive learning which penalizes misclassified samples thereby minimizing the total misclassification cost. Our results showed that Random Forest outperformed the rest of the models at predicting the positive class (i.e anomalies). Applying predictive model improvement techniques like data oversampling seems to provide little or no improvement to the Random Forest model. Interestingly, with recursive feature elimination, we achieved a better model performance thereby reducing the dimensions in the data. Finally, with Influxdb and Kapacitor the data was ingested and streamed to generate new data points to further evaluate the model performance on unseen data, this will allow for early recognition of undesirable changes in the drinking water quality and will enable the water supply companies to rectify on a timely basis whatever undesirable changes abound.

DBIC Ventures, the venture arm of Dublin BIC, today announces details of a co-investment in AI-powered construction software company Evercam, representing the first investment by DBIC Ventures' new seed and early stage fund which is backed by Enterprise Ireland and a number of leading Irish technology entrepreneurs and business leaders. The investment round totalled €600,000 and will support the creation of 50 new jobs and the company's continued strong growth in international markets. It is the first investment by DBIC Ventures' latest fund which plans to back around 30 leading high growth early stage Irish tech companies over the next four years. Elkstone, the Irish multi-family office, is a co-investor in the round. Evercam enhances construction site productivity by improving project visibility with verifiable intelligence from high-resolution time-lapse cameras located on client sites.

While the industry loves to combine "R&D" and we see this in every tech company's P&L, research and development are very different. Research is high risk, market making investments and discoveries that are unattached to products. Development is applying that research and other's IP to create an end product or services. Very few companies do research, and Intel has had a heritage in research for decades. One of the most exciting aspects of working as a tech analyst is, quite frankly, being one of the first to learn of these new, research-driven, cutting-edge technologies coming down the pipeline in the not-so-distant future--from the expected to the truly mind-boggling.

The world is currently facing an unprecedented health crisis. The coronavirus known as COVID-19 has already taken the lives of thousands of people worldwide and has infected many more. At the time of writing, the crisis is not over yet, and there are concerns that it might lead into a new financial crisis. At these times of crisis, humanity needs any weapon at its disposal. So, what can AI and data science do in order to help with this crisis?

Bigger boats, better equipment, accurate weather forecasts, social media and climate change are threatening fish populations. Four artificial reefs have been sitting off the NT coast for a year, and early results are promising for the $8.3 million project. But environmentalists wish the NT Government would invest "as much energy, money and enthusiasm into existing reefs", which have shown evidence of coral bleaching. A total of 116 Reefpyramids, weighing 24 tonnes each, have been dropped across four sites. NT Fisheries aquatic biosecurity liaison Evan Needham said the reefs were positioned on barren seabed around Darwin to provide fish-breeding areas and destinations for fishers.

The massive amounts of digitized historical documents acquired over the last decades naturally lend themselves to automatic processing and exploration. Research work seeking to automatically process facsimiles and extract information thereby are multiplying with, as a first essential step, document layout analysis. If the identification and categorization of segments of interest in document images have seen significant progress over the last years thanks to deep learning techniques, many challenges remain with, among others, the use of finer-grained segmentation typologies and the consideration of complex, heterogeneous documents such as historical newspapers. Besides, most approaches consider visual features only, ignoring textual signal. In this context, we introduce a multimodal approach for the semantic segmentation of historical newspapers that combines visual and textual features. Based on a series of experiments on diachronic Swiss and Luxembourgish newspapers, we investigate, among others, the predictive power of visual and textual features and their capacity to generalize across time and sources. Results show consistent improvement of multimodal models in comparison to a strong visual baseline, as well as better robustness to high material variance.