Roof falls due to geological conditions are major safety hazards in mining and tunneling industries, causing lost work times, injuries, and fatalities. Several large-opening limestone mines in the Eastern and Midwestern United States have roof fall problems caused by high horizontal stresses. The typical hazard management approach for this type of roof fall hazard relies heavily on visual inspections and expert knowledge. In this study, we propose an artificial intelligence (AI) based system for the detection roof fall hazards caused by high horizontal stresses. We use images depicting hazardous and non-hazardous roof conditions to develop a convolutional neural network for autonomous detection of hazardous roof conditions. To compensate for limited input data, we utilize a transfer learning approach. In transfer learning, an already-trained network is used as a starting point for classification in a similar domain. Results confirm that this approach works well for classifying roof conditions as hazardous or safe, achieving a statistical accuracy of 86%. However, accuracy alone is not enough to ensure a reliable hazard management system. System constraints and reliability are improved when the features being used by the network are understood. Therefore, we used a deep learning interpretation technique called integrated gradients to identify the important geologic features in each image for prediction. The analysis of integrated gradients shows that the system mimics expert judgment on roof fall hazard detection. The system developed in this paper demonstrates the potential of deep learning in geological hazard management to complement human experts, and likely to become an essential part of autonomous tunneling operations in those cases where hazard identification heavily depends on expert knowledge.

Domain adaptation solves the learning problem in a target domain by leveraging the knowledge in a relevant source domain. While remarkable advances have been made, almost all existing domain adaptation methods heavily require large amounts of unlabeled target domain data for learning domain invariant representations to achieve good generalizability on the target domain. In fact, in many real-world applications, target domain data may not always be available. In this paper, we study the cases where at the training phase the target domain data is unavailable and only well-labeled source domain data is available, called robust domain adaptation. To tackle this problem, under the assumption that causal relationships between features and the class variable are robust across domains, we propose a novel Causal AutoEncoder (CAE), which integrates deep autoencoder and causal structure learning into a unified model to learn causal representations only using data from a single source domain. Specifically, a deep autoencoder model is adopted to learn low-dimensional representations, and a causal structure learning model is designed to separate the low-dimensional representations into two groups: causal representations and task-irrelevant representations. Using three real-world datasets the extensive experiments have validated the effectiveness of CAE compared to eleven state-of-the-art methods.

Anomaly detection is an important research problem because anomalies often contain critical insights for understanding the unusual behavior in data. One type of anomaly detection approach is dependency-based, which identifies anomalies by examining the violations of the normal dependency among variables. These methods can discover subtle and meaningful anomalies with better interpretation. Existing dependency-based methods adopt different implementations and show different strengths and weaknesses. However, the theoretical fundamentals and the general process behind them have not been well studied. This paper proposes a general framework, DepAD, to provide a unified process for dependency-based anomaly detection. DepAD decomposes unsupervised anomaly detection tasks into feature selection and prediction problems. Utilizing off-the-shelf techniques, the DepAD framework can have various instantiations to suit different application domains. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted over one hundred instantiated DepAD methods with 32 real-world datasets to evaluate the performance of representative techniques in DepAD. To show the effectiveness of DepAD, we compare two DepAD methods with nine state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods, and the results show that DepAD methods outperform comparison methods in most cases. Through the DepAD framework, this paper gives guidance and inspiration for future research of dependency-based anomaly detection and provides a benchmark for its evaluation.

Object detection is an elementary Computer Vision task which deals with the classification of objects in a digital image to a particular class (such as airplanes, cars, humans, etc). This can further be used in the implementation of real-world systems like face detection, pedestrian detection, automated driving systems, video surveillance, among other applications. It has gathered a lot of attention in the last few years since it is closely related to video analysis. They also help provide keen insights on the image contents. In recent years, deep learning methods have gained momentum and are now able to learn large amount of features, at comparatively deeper levels, and are thus able to address the problems faced earlier in traditional network architectures, such as artificial neural networks.

Different theories have been proposed model's ability to rank a well-organized document to describe the properties that contribute to higher than its noisy counterparts created by discourse coherence and some have been integrated corrupting sentence order in the original document with computational models for empirical (binary discrimination task), and neural evaluation. A popular approach is the entitybased models have achieved remarkable accuracy on model which hypothesizes that coherence this task. Recent efforts have targeted additional can be assessed in terms of the distribution of tasks such as recovering the correct sentence and transitions between entities in a text - by order (Logeswaran et al., 2018; Cui et al., 2018), constructing an entity-grid (Egrid) representation evaluating on realistic data (Lai and Tetreault, (Barzilay and Lapata, 2005, 2008), building 2018; Farag and Yannakoudakis, 2019) and on Centering Theory (Grosz et al., 1995). Subsequent focusing on open-domain models of coherence work has adapted and further extended (Li and Jurafsky, 2017; Xu et al., 2019). Egrid representations (Filippova and Strube, However, less attention has been directed to 2007; Burstein et al., 2010; Elsner and Charniak, investigating and analyzing the properties of coherence 2011; Guinaudeau and Strube, 2013). Other that current models can capture, nor what research has focused on syntactic patterns knowledge is encoded in their representations and that cooccur in text (Louis and Nenkova, how it might relate to aspects of coherence.

Mathematicians formulate complex mathematical models based on user requirements to solve a diverse range of problems in different domains. These models are, in most cases, represented through several mathematical equations and constraints. This modelling task comprises several time-intensive processes that require both mathematical expertise and (problem) domain knowledge. In an attempt to automate these processes, we have developed an ontology for Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problems to formulate expert mathematician knowledge and in this paper, we show how this new ontology can be utilized for modelling a relatively straightforward MILP problem, a Machine Scheduling example. We also show that more complex MILP problems, such as the Asymmetric Travelling Salesman Problem (ATSP), however, are not readily amenable to simple elicitation of user requirements and the utilization of the proposed mathematical model ontology. Therefore, an automatic mathematical modelling framework is proposed for such complex MILP problems, which includes a problem (requirement) elicitation module connected to a model extraction module through a translation engine that bridges between the non-expert problem domain and the expert mathematical model domain. This framework is argued to have the necessary components to effectively tackle the automation of modelling task of the more intricate MILP problems such as the ATSP.

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) plays a pivotal role in reduction of uncertainties during both optimization and decision making processes. It can be applied to solve a variety of real-world applications in science and engineering. Bayesian approximation and ensemble learning techniques are two most widely-used UQ methods in the literature. In this regard, researchers have proposed different UQ methods and examined their performance in a variety of applications such as computer vision (e.g., self-driving cars and object detection), image processing (e.g., image restoration), medical image analysis (e.g., medical image classification and segmentation), natural language processing (e.g., text classification, social media texts and recidivism risk-scoring), bioinformatics, etc.This study reviews recent advances in UQ methods used in deep learning. Moreover, we also investigate the application of these methods in reinforcement learning (RL). Then, we outline a few important applications of UQ methods. Finally, we briefly highlight the fundamental research challenges faced by UQ methods and discuss the future research directions in this field.

It's been called'the future of warfare'. Off-the-shelf unmanned aerial systems (UAS), carrying a'payload' of explosives or biological material, flown by terrorists or enemy armed forces into a crowded building or military base. Now the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and Sydney ASX-listed defence tech company DroneShield have produced next-generation drone technology to better identify threats from these aggressive UAS. In a partnership funded by the NSW and Australian Governments, UTS and DroneShield – an Australian developer of counter-UAS solutions – have produced an optical system for detection, identification and tracking of fast-moving threats such as nefarious UAS, comprised of a camera and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). UTS and DroneShield began working together in October 2019 – just a month after one of the most recent examples of aggressive use of drones when the oil facilities at Abqaiq–Khurais in Saudi Arabia were attacked by a swarm of UAS.

A polar bear on melting ice: It's a favorite image of nature documentaries and charity ads alike, never failing to put you in the emotional dumps for a simple reason--it forces you to grapple with a changing world, a darker future. But that emotion is often temporary, replaced quickly by others, because its effects are not immediately or directly felt, explained Peter Schlosser, the vice president and vice provost of global futures at Arizona State University. Footage of houses on fire in California, Oregon, and Australia alarms us, but falls short of making us understand that our own home may be next. These "delusions of escape," in the words of science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, or "failures of imagination," in the words of Future Tense academic director Ed Finn, placate us into reactive, piecemeal, short-sighted decision-making. But storytelling lights the path forward, agreed Robinson, Finn, Schlosser, Future Tense fellow Alexandra Zapata Hojel, and Malka Older, also a sci-fi author.

For this week's ML practitioner's series, Analytics India Magazine got in touch with Hiroki Yamamoto (tereka), a Kaggle Master. Hiroki is currently working as a data scientist and is ranked in the top 100 of the world's largest platforms for data science competitions– Kaggle. In this interview, Hiroki shares his experience of competing on Kaggle and how it has helped in growing as a data scientist. Hiroki: I got a master's degree in information technology back in 2015. During my graduation, I have worked on image processing research using deep learning -- for example, autoencoders.