Oceania
Top 10 IT trends in 2020 that will heighten Digital Transformation in Australia
Australia is known worldwide for its exceptionally developed market economy. Its progressive achievement relies much upon the capacity of nearby organizations to improve technologically, fabricate new items and find new markets. We have assembled all the tech bits of knowledge in this article to reveal the fate of the Australian IT industry. As the measure of time we're spending in a "virtual workspace" keeps on expanding, employees and representatives are replacing face to face gatherings and water cooler minutes with video meetings and Slack messages. The LinkedIn platform is the new business handshake.
Biomechanic Posture Stabilisation via Iterative Training of Multi-policy Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents
Hossny, Mohammed, Iskander, Julie
It is not until we become senior citizens do we recognise how much we took maintaining a simple standing posture for granted. It is truly fascinating to observe the magnitude of control the human brain exercises, in real time, to activate and deactivate the lower body muscles and solve a multi-link 3D inverted pendulum problem in order to maintain a stable standing posture. This realisation is even more apparent when training an artificial intelligence (AI) agent to maintain a standing posture of a digital musculoskeletal avatar due to the error propagation problem. In this work we address the error propagation problem by introducing an iterative training procedure for deep reinforcement learning which allows the agent to learn a finite set of actions and how to coordinate between them in order to achieve a stable standing posture. The proposed training approach allowed the agent to increase standing duration from 4 seconds using the traditional training method to 348 seconds using the proposed method. The proposed training method allowed the agent to generalise and accommodate perception and actuation noise for almost 108 seconds.
Entropia: A Family of Entropy-Based Conformance Checking Measures for Process Mining
Polyvyanyy, Artem, Alkhammash, Hanan, Di Ciccio, Claudio, García-Bañuelos, Luciano, Kalenkova, Anna, Leemans, Sander J. J., Mendling, Jan, Moffat, Alistair, Weidlich, Matthias
This paper presents a command-line tool, called Entropia, that implements a family of conformance checking measures for process mining founded on the notion of entropy from information theory. The measures allow quantifying classical non-deterministic and stochastic precision and recall quality criteria for process models automatically discovered from traces executed by IT-systems and recorded in their event logs. A process model has "good" precision with respect to the log it was discovered from if it does not encode many traces that are not part of the log, and has "good" recall if it encodes most of the traces from the log. By definition, the measures possess useful properties and can often be computed fast.
Machine Learning and Meta-Analysis Approach to Identify Patient Comorbidities and Symptoms that Increased Risk of Mortality in COVID-19
Aktar, Sakifa, Talukder, Ashis, Ahamad, Md. Martuza, Kamal, A. H. M., Khan, Jahidur Rahman, Protikuzzaman, Md., Hossain, Nasif, Quinn, Julian M. W., Summers, Mathew A., Liaw, Teng, Eapen, Valsamma, Moni, Mohammad Ali
Background: Providing appropriate care for people suffering from COVID-19, the disease caused by the pandemic SARS-CoV-2 virus is a significant global challenge. Many individuals who become infected have pre-existing conditions that may interact with COVID-19 to increase symptom severity and mortality risk. COVID-19 patient comorbidities are likely to be informative about individual risk of severe illness and mortality. Accurately determining how comorbidities are associated with severe symptoms and mortality would thus greatly assist in COVID-19 care planning and provision. Methods: To assess the interaction of patient comorbidities with COVID-19 severity and mortality we performed a meta-analysis of the published global literature, and machine learning predictive analysis using an aggregated COVID-19 global dataset. Results: Our meta-analysis identified chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cerebrovascular disease (CEVD), cardiovascular disease (CVD), type 2 diabetes, malignancy, and hypertension as most significantly associated with COVID-19 severity in the current published literature. Machine learning classification using novel aggregated cohort data similarly found COPD, CVD, CKD, type 2 diabetes, malignancy and hypertension, as well as asthma, as the most significant features for classifying those deceased versus those who survived COVID-19. While age and gender were the most significant predictor of mortality, in terms of symptom-comorbidity combinations, it was observed that Pneumonia-Hypertension, Pneumonia-Diabetes and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS)-Hypertension showed the most significant effects on COVID-19 mortality. Conclusions: These results highlight patient cohorts most at risk of COVID-19 related severe morbidity and mortality which have implications for prioritization of hospital resources.
A Blockchain Transaction Graph based Machine Learning Method for Bitcoin Price Prediction
Bitcoin, as one of the most popular cryptocurrency, is recently attracting much attention of investors. Bitcoin price prediction task is consequently a rising academic topic for providing valuable insights and suggestions. Existing bitcoin prediction works mostly base on trivial feature engineering, that manually designs features or factors from multiple areas, including Bticoin Blockchain information, finance and social media sentiments. The feature engineering not only requires much human effort, but the effectiveness of the intuitively designed features can not be guaranteed. In this paper, we aim to mining the abundant patterns encoded in bitcoin transactions, and propose k-order transaction graph to reveal patterns under different scope. We propose the transaction graph based feature to automatically encode the patterns. A novel prediction method is proposed to accept the features and make price prediction, which can take advantage from particular patterns from different history period. The results of comparison experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the most recent state-of-art methods.
Topological Gradient-based Competitive Learning
Barbiero, Pietro, Ciravegna, Gabriele, Randazzo, Vincenzo, Cirrincione, Giansalvo
Topological learning is a wide research area aiming at uncovering the mutual spatial relationships between the elements of a set. Some of the most common and oldest approaches involve the use of unsupervised competitive neural networks. However, these methods are not based on gradient optimization which has been proven to provide striking results in feature extraction also in unsupervised learning. Unfortunately, by focusing mostly on algorithmic efficiency and accuracy, deep clustering techniques are composed of overly complex feature extractors, while using trivial algorithms in their top layer. The aim of this work is to present a novel comprehensive theory aspiring at bridging competitive learning with gradient-based learning, thus allowing the use of extremely powerful deep neural networks for feature extraction and projection combined with the remarkable flexibility and expressiveness of competitive learning. In this paper we fully demonstrate the theoretical equivalence of two novel gradient-based competitive layers. Preliminary experiments show how the dual approach, trained on the transpose of the input matrix i.e. $X^T$, lead to faster convergence rate and higher training accuracy both in low and high-dimensional scenarios.
Neural Machine Translation without Embeddings
Many NLP models follow the embed-contextualize-predict paradigm, in which each sequence token is represented as a dense vector via an embedding matrix, and fed into a contextualization component that aggregates the information from the entire sequence in order to make a prediction. Could NLP models work without the embedding component? To that end, we omit the input and output embeddings from a standard machine translation model, and represent text as a sequence of bytes via UTF-8 encoding, using a constant 256-dimension one-hot representation for each byte. Experiments on 10 language pairs show that removing the embedding matrix consistently improves the performance of byte-to-byte models, often outperforms character-to-character models, and sometimes even produces better translations than standard subword models.
Adversarial Training Reduces Information and Improves Transferability
Terzi, Matteo, Achille, Alessandro, Maggipinto, Marco, Susto, Gian Antonio
Recent results show that features of adversarially trained networks for classification, in addition to being robust, enable desirable properties such as invertibility. The latter property may seem counter-intuitive as it is widely accepted by the community that classification models should only capture the minimal information (features) required for the task. Motivated by this discrepancy, we investigate the dual relationship between Adversarial Training and Information Theory. We show that the Adversarial Training can improve linear transferability to new tasks, from which arises a new trade-off between transferability of representations and accuracy on the source task. We validate our results employing robust networks trained on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet on several datasets. Moreover, we show that Adversarial Training reduces Fisher information of representations about the input and of the weights about the task, and we provide a theoretical argument which explains the invertibility of deterministic networks without violating the principle of minimality. Finally, we leverage our theoretical insights to remarkably improve the quality of reconstructed images through inversion.
A typo created a 212-story monolith in 'Microsoft Flight Simulator'
Microsoft's latest Flight Simulator entry doesn't do anything small. It's a title that comes on 10 DVDs and allows you to explore the world in almost its entirety. It turns out that scale even extends to its accidental inclusions. Flight Simulator users recently found an unusual landmark: a 212-story monolith towering over an otherwise nondescript suburb in Melbourne, Australia. In Microsoft Flight Simulator a bizarrely eldritch, impossibly narrow skyscraper pierces the skies of Melbourne's North like a suburban Australian version of Half-Life 2's Citadel, and I am -all for it- pic.twitter.com/6AH4xgIAWg
Machine Learning in Finance Market Outlook 2020
"Machine Learning in Finance Market 2020" report share informative Covid-19 Outbreak data figures as well as important insights regarding some of the market component which is considered to be future course architects for the market. This includes factors such as market size, market share, market segmentation, significant growth drivers, market competition, different aspects impacting economic cycles in the market, demand, expected business up-downs, changing customer sentiments, key companies operating in the Machine Learning in Finance Market, etc. In order to deliver a complete understanding of the global market, the report also shares some of the useful details regarding regional as well as significant domestic markets. The report presents a 360-degree overview and SWOT analysis of the competitive landscape of the industries. The report also incorporates premium quality data figures associated with financial figures of the industry including market size (in USD), expected market size growth (in percentage), sales data, revenue figures and more.