The University of Queensland Contact magazine has done a story on our documentary Toward Singularity. Big thanks to Harriet Dempsey-Jones for the write up and Editor Michael Jones. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Independent science writing and journalism, that is free to the public, is an important part of social change, especially in this age of rapidly developing technologies.

Machine behavior that is based on learning algorithms can be significantly influenced by the exposure to data of different qualities. Up to now, those qualities are solely measured in technical terms, but not in ethical ones, despite the significant role of training and annotation data in supervised machine learning. This is the first study to fill this gap by describing new dimensions of data quality for supervised machine learning applications. Based on the rationale that different social and psychological backgrounds of individuals correlate in practice with different modes of human-computer-interaction, the paper describes from an ethical perspective how varying qualities of behavioral data that individuals leave behind while using digital technologies have socially relevant ramification for the development of machine learning applications. The specific objective of this study is to describe how training data can be selected according to ethical assessments of the behavior it originates from, establishing an innovative filter regime to transition from the big data rationale n = all to a more selective way of processing data for training sets in machine learning. The overarching aim of this research is to promote methods for achieving beneficial machine learning applications that could be widely useful for industry as well as academia.

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are increasingly being used within safety-critical Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs). They are often co-located with traditional embedded software, and may perform advisory or control-based roles. It is important to validate both the timing and functional correctness of these systems. However, most approaches in the literature consider guaranteeing only the functionality of ANN based controllers. This issue stems largely from the implementation strategies used within common neural network frameworks -- their underlying source code is often simply unsuitable for formal techniques such as static timing analysis. As a result, developers of safety-critical CPS must rely on informal techniques such as measurement based approaches to prove correctness, techniques that provide weak guarantees at best. In this work we address this challenge. We propose a design pipeline whereby neural networks trained using the popular deep learning framework Keras are compiled to functionally equivalent C code. This C code is restricted to simple constructs that may be analysed by existing static timing analysis tools. As a result, if compiled to a suitable time-predictable platform all execution bounds may be statically derived. To demonstrate the benefits of our approach we execute an ANN trained to drive an autonomous vehicle around a race track. We compile the ANN to the Patmos time-predictable controller, and show that we can derive worst case execution timings.

We learn about the world from a diverse range of sensory information. Automated systems lack this ability as investigation has centred on processing information presented in a single form. Adapting architectures to learn from multiple modalities creates the potential to learn rich representations of the world - but current multimodal systems only deliver marginal improvements on unimodal approaches. Neural networks learn sampling noise during training with the result that performance on unseen data is degraded. This research introduces a second objective over the multimodal fusion process learned with variational inference. Regularisation methods are implemented in the inner training loop to control variance and the modular structure stabilises performance as additional neurons are added to layers. This framework is evaluated on a multilabel classification task with textual and visual inputs to demonstrate the potential for multiple objectives and probabilistic methods to lower variance and improve generalisation.

Inferring behavior model of a running software system is quite useful for several automated software engineering tasks, such as program comprehension, anomaly detection, and testing. Most existing dynamic model inference techniques are white-box, i.e., they require source code to be instrumented to get run-time traces. However, in many systems, instrumenting the entire source code is not possible (e.g., when using black-box third-party libraries) or might be very costly. Unfortunately, most black-box techniques that detect states over time are either univariate, or make assumptions on the data distribution, or have limited power for learning over a long period of past behavior. To overcome the above issues, in this paper, we propose a hybrid deep neural network that accepts as input a set of time series, one per input/output signal of the system, and applies a set of convolutional and recurrent layers to learn the non-linear correlations between signals and the patterns, over time. We have applied our approach on a real UAV auto-pilot solution from our industry partner with half a million lines of C code. We ran 888 random recent system-level test cases and inferred states, over time. Our comparison with several traditional time series change point detection techniques showed that our approach improves their performance by up to 102%, in terms of finding state change points, measured by F1 score. We also showed that our state classification algorithm provides on average 90.45% F1 score, which improves traditional classification algorithms by up to 17%.

In order to create effective machine learning and deep learning models, you need copious amounts of data, a way to clean the data and perform feature engineering on it, and a way to train models on your data in a reasonable amount of time. Then you need a way to deploy your models, monitor them for drift over time, and retrain them as needed. You can do all of that on-premises if you have invested in compute resources and accelerators such as GPUs, but you may find that if your resources are adequate, they are also idle much of the time. On the other hand, it can sometimes be more cost-effective to run the entire pipeline in the cloud, using large amounts of compute resources and accelerators as needed, and then releasing them. The major cloud providers -- and a number of minor clouds too -- have put significant effort into building out their machine learning platforms to support the complete machine learning lifecycle, from planning a project to maintaining a model in production.

A burst of technology in the 1960s--the Green Revolution--raised agricultural output significantly across developing economies. Since then, rising incomes have boosted protein consumption worldwide, and elevated new challenges: greenhouse-gas emissions from agriculture are increasing (more than a fifth of all emissions worldwide), while a host of practices, from waste to overfishing, threaten the sustainability of food supplies. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought these concerns to the fore: the disease has disrupted supply chains and demand, perversely increasing the amount of food waste in farms and fields while threatening food security for many. As agriculture gradually regains its footing, participants and stakeholders should be casting an eye ahead, to safeguarding food supplies against the potentially greater and more disruptive effects of climate change. Once again, innovation and advanced technologies could make a powerful contribution to secure and sustainable food production. For example, digital and biotechnologies could improve the health of ruminant livestock, requiring fewer methane-producing animals to meet the world's protein needs. Genetic technologies could play a supporting role by enabling the breeding of animals that produce less methane. Meanwhile, AI and sensors could help food processors sort better and slash waste, and other smart technologies could identify inedible by-products for reprocessing. Data and advanced analytics also could help authorities better monitor and manage the seas to limit overfishing--while enabling boat crews to target and find fish with less effort and waste.

With so much reliance on digital payments and other financial technology (fintech), going through some form of purportedly secure, digital verification process (often referred to as'know your customer', or KYC, processes) is often par for the course these days. But with pervasive cyber threats like data breaches and identity theft delivering blows to what the end-user hopes is an un-breach-able system, "taking a single selfie just isn't enough to ensure your customer's identity [anymore]," laments Philipp Pointner, chief product officer at digital security specialist Jumio. "It leaves banks and financial institutions vulnerable to spoofing attacks as a fraudster can easily find a picture of someone else online and pass that off as genuine." "But using solutions that employ biometrics, and specifically 3D face maps and certified liveness detection, ensures the [people] behind a transaction [are] who they say they are," Pointner recently told PYMNTS. Biometrics – working in concert with a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to scan, analyze and then to create what could be a varied biometric identity database capable of verifying and storing fingerprints, facial features, even voice and device data – could allow for not only tougher, more meticulous identity security, but also a deeper understanding of a financial institute's customer profile – giving banks and other fintech a truer way to "know your customer".

Reinforcement Learning (RL) (Sutton and Barto 2018) has A significant factor causing the complexity might be its excessive recently achieved impressive successes in fields such as generality (Kakade and Langford 2002; Pirotta et al. robotic manipulation (OpenAI 2019), video game playing 2013); Those bounds do not focus on any particular class (Mnih et al. 2015) and the game of Go (Silver et al. 2016). of value-based RL algorithms. In this paper, in order to develop However, compared with supervised learning that has widerange more tractable bounds, we focus on an RL class known of practical applications, RL applications have primarily as entropy-regularized value-based methods (Azar, Gómez, been limited to casual game playing or laboratory and Kappen 2012; Fox, Pakman, and Tishby 2016; Haarnoja based robotics. A crucial reason for limiting applications et al. 2017, 2018), where the entropies of policies are introduced to these environments is that it is not guaranteed that the

Students' perception of classes measured through their opinions on teaching surveys allows to identify deficiencies and problems, both in the environment and in the learning methodologies. The purpose of this paper is to study, through sentiment analysis using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques, those opinions in order to identify topics that are relevant for students, as well as predicting the associated sentiment via polarity analysis. As a result, it is implemented, trained and tested two algorithms to predict the associated sentiment as well as the relevant topics of such opinions. The combination of both approaches then becomes useful to identify specific properties of the students' opinions associated with each sentiment label (positive, negative or neutral opinions) and topic. Furthermore, we explore the possibility that students' perception surveys are carried out without closed questions, relying on the information that students can provide through open questions where they express their opinions about their classes.