As summer slowly winds to a close and the first day of remote learning remains weeks away (for many of us, anyway), it's easy--way too easy--to let the kids go nuts on their iPads while the grown-ups toil at home. Luckily, Google Assistant has a new feature to help keep young ones from disappearing into their bean bags. Slated to roll out starting today in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, and India, the new Family Bell feature lets you create bells that sound on your Google smart speakers and displays, just like the bells at school. For example, you can day "Hey Google, create a Family Bell" to set reminder bells for breakfast, the start of a virtual camp day, recess in the backyard, or dinner time. You can ask Google Assistant to set a Family Bell on recurring days of the week, and in specific rooms.

Artificial intelligence is already impacting our lives. And the use of AI for social functioning is on an all-time high. Be it getting riding directions through our smartphone or getting daily reminders by using our health system to extend our workouts; all these are manifestations of how artificial talent is altering the way we function. What is often much less understood is the vast function synthetic brain can play in the social sector. The Artificial Intelligence for social good can probably assist in solving some of the country's most pressing problems. As a count number of facts, it can contribute in some way or every other to tackling and addressing all of the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals, supporting large sections of the populace in both growing and developed countries. AI is already helping in several real-life situations, from assisting blind humans in navigating and diagnosing cancer to identify sexual harassment victims and helping with catastrophe relief. Let us take a look briefly at integral social domains where AI can be carried out effectively.

Events are occurrences in specific locations, time, and semantics that nontrivially impact either our society or the nature, such as civil unrest, system failures, and epidemics. It is highly desirable to be able to anticipate the occurrence of such events in advance in order to reduce the potential social upheaval and damage caused. Event prediction, which has traditionally been prohibitively challenging, is now becoming a viable option in the big data era and is thus experiencing rapid growth. There is a large amount of existing work that focuses on addressing the challenges involved, including heterogeneous multi-faceted outputs, complex dependencies, and streaming data feeds. Most existing event prediction methods were initially designed to deal with specific application domains, though the techniques and evaluation procedures utilized are usually generalizable across different domains. However, it is imperative yet difficult to cross-reference the techniques across different domains, given the absence of a comprehensive literature survey for event prediction. This paper aims to provide a systematic and comprehensive survey of the technologies, applications, and evaluations of event prediction in the big data era. First, systematic categorization and summary of existing techniques are presented, which facilitate domain experts' searches for suitable techniques and help model developers consolidate their research at the frontiers. Then, comprehensive categorization and summary of major application domains are provided. Evaluation metrics and procedures are summarized and standardized to unify the understanding of model performance among stakeholders, model developers, and domain experts in various application domains. Finally, open problems and future directions for this promising and important domain are elucidated and discussed.

Whether to give rights to artificial intelligence (AI) and robots has been a sensitive topic since the European Parliament proposed advanced robots could be granted "electronic personalities." Numerous scholars who favor or disfavor its feasibility have participated in the debate. This paper presents an experiment (N=1270) that 1) collects online users' first impressions of 11 possible rights that could be granted to autonomous electronic agents of the future and 2) examines whether debunking common misconceptions on the proposal modifies one's stance toward the issue. The results indicate that even though online users mainly disfavor AI and robot rights, they are supportive of protecting electronic agents from cruelty (i.e., favor the right against cruel treatment). Furthermore, people's perceptions became more positive when given information about rights-bearing non-human entities or myth-refuting statements. The style used to introduce AI and robot rights significantly affected how the participants perceived the proposal, similar to the way metaphors function in creating laws. For robustness, we repeated the experiment over a more representative sample of U.S. residents (N=164) and found that perceptions gathered from online users and those by the general population are similar.

In unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), a classifier for the target domain is trained with massive true-label data from the source domain and unlabeled data from the target domain. However, collecting fully-true-label data in the source domain is high-cost and sometimes impossible. Compared to the true labels, a complementary label specifies a class that a pattern does not belong to, hence collecting complementary labels would be less laborious than collecting true labels. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel setting that the source domain is composed of complementary-label data, and a theoretical bound for it is first proved. We consider two cases of this setting, one is that the source domain only contains complementary-label data (completely complementary unsupervised domain adaptation, CC-UDA), and the other is that the source domain has plenty of complementary-label data and a small amount of true-label data (partly complementary unsupervised domain adaptation, PC-UDA). To this end, a complementary label adversarial network} (CLARINET) is proposed to solve CC-UDA and PC-UDA problems. CLARINET maintains two deep networks simultaneously, where one focuses on classifying complementary-label source data and the other takes care of source-to-target distributional adaptation. Experiments show that CLARINET significantly outperforms a series of competent baselines on handwritten-digits-recognition and objects-recognition tasks.

Space-filling curves like the Hilbert-curve, Peano-curve and Z-order map natural or real numbers from a two or higher dimensional space to a one dimensional space preserving locality. They have numerous applications like search structures, computer graphics, numerical simulation, cryptographics and can be used to make various algorithms cache-oblivious. In this paper, we describe some details of the Hilbert-curve. We define the Hilbert-curve in terms of a finite automaton of Mealy-type which determines from the two-dimensional coordinate space the Hilbert order value and vice versa in a logarithmic number of steps. And we define a context-free grammar to generate the whole curve in a time which is linear in the number of generated coordinate/order value pairs, i.e. a constant time per coordinate pair or order value. We also review two different strategies which enable the generation of curves without the usual restriction to square-like grids where the side-length is a power of two. Finally, we elaborate on a few applications, namely matrix multiplication, Cholesky decomposition, the Floyd-Warshall algorithm, k-Means clustering, and the similarity join.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. However, alongside all its advancements, problems have also emerged, such as privacy violations, security issues and model fairness. Differential privacy, as a promising mathematical model, has several attractive properties that can help solve these problems, making it quite a valuable tool. For this reason, differential privacy has been broadly applied in AI but to date, no study has documented which differential privacy mechanisms can or have been leveraged to overcome its issues or the properties that make this possible. In this paper, we show that differential privacy can do more than just privacy preservation. It can also be used to improve security, stabilize learning, build fair models, and impose composition in selected areas of AI. With a focus on regular machine learning, distributed machine learning, deep learning, and multi-agent systems, the purpose of this article is to deliver a new view on many possibilities for improving AI performance with differential privacy techniques.

This paper introduces an algorithm for discovering implicit and delayed causal relations between events observed by a robot at arbitrary times, with the objective of improving data-efficiency and interpretability of model-based reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. The proposed algorithm initially predicts observations with the Markov assumption, and incrementally introduces new hidden variables to explain and reduce the stochasticity of the observations. The hidden variables are memory units that keep track of pertinent past events. Such events are systematically identified by their information gains. The learned transition and reward models are then used for planning. Experiments on simulated and real robotic tasks show that this method significantly improves over current RL techniques.

Carsales.com, the company I work for, is holding a hackathon event. This is an annual event where everyone (tech or non tech) comes together to form a team and build anything -- anything at all. Well, preferably you would build something that has a business purpose, but it is really up to you. This idea for this chatbot actually came from Jason Blackman, our Chief Information Officer at carsales.com. Given that our next hackathon is an online event, thanks to COVID-19, wouldn't it be cool if we could host a Zoom webinar, where any carsales.com After tossing around ideas, I came up with a high-level scope. Jarvis would need to have a visual presence, just as would a human webinar participant. He needs to be able to listen to what you say and respond contextually with a voice.

Current strategies employed for maritime target search and tracking are primarily based on the use of agents following a predetermined path to perform a systematic sweep of a search area. Recently, dynamic Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms have been used together with swarming multi-robot systems (MRS), giving search and tracking solutions the added properties of robustness, scalability, and flexibility. Swarming MRS also give the end-user the opportunity to incrementally upgrade the robotic system, inevitably leading to the use of heterogeneous swarming MRS. However, such systems have not been well studied and incorporating upgraded agents into a swarm may result in degraded mission performances. In this paper, we propose a PSO-based strategy using a topological k-nearest neighbor graph with tunable exploration and exploitation dynamics with an adaptive repulsion parameter. This strategy is implemented within a simulated swarm of 50 agents with varying proportions of fast agents tracking a target represented by a fictitious binary function. Through these simulations, we are able to demonstrate an increase in the swarm's collective response level and target tracking performance by substituting in a proportion of fast buoys.