Estimation of the soil organic carbon content is of utmost importance in understanding the chemical, physical, and biological functions of the soil. This study proposes machine learning algorithms of support vector machines, artificial neural networks, regression tree, random forest, extreme gradient boosting, and conventional deep neural network for advancing prediction models of SOC. Models are trained with 1879 composite surface soil samples, and 105 auxiliary data as predictors. The genetic algorithm is used as a feature selection approach to identify effective variables. The results indicate that precipitation is the most important predictor driving 15 percent of SOC spatial variability followed by the normalized difference vegetation index, day temperature index of moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer, multiresolution valley bottom flatness and land use, respectively. Based on 10 fold cross validation, the DNN model reported as a superior algorithm with the lowest prediction error and uncertainty. In terms of accuracy, DNN yielded a mean absolute error of 59 percent, a root mean squared error of 75 percent, a coefficient of determination of 0.65, and Lins concordance correlation coefficient of 0.83. The SOC content was the highest in udic soil moisture regime class with mean values of 4 percent, followed by the aquic and xeric classes, respectively. Soils in dense forestlands had the highest SOC contents, whereas soils of younger geological age and alluvial fans had lower SOC. The proposed DNN is a promising algorithm for handling large numbers of auxiliary data at a province scale, and due to its flexible structure and the ability to extract more information from the auxiliary data surrounding the sampled observations, it had high accuracy for the prediction of the SOC baseline map and minimal uncertainty.

We propose a new simulation-based estimation method, adversarial estimation, for structural models. The estimator is formulated as the solution to a minimax problem between a generator (which generates synthetic observations using the structural model) and a discriminator (which classifies if an observation is synthetic). The discriminator maximizes the accuracy of its classification while the generator minimizes it. We show that, with a sufficiently rich discriminator, the adversarial estimator attains parametric efficiency under correct specification and the parametric rate under misspecification. We advocate the use of a neural network as a discriminator that can exploit adaptivity properties and attain fast rates of convergence. We apply our method to the elderly's saving decision model and show that including gender and health profiles in the discriminator uncovers the bequest motive as an important source of saving across the wealth distribution, not only for the rich.

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the key learning algorithm for many machine learning tasks. Because of its computational costs, there is a growing interest in accelerating SGD on HPC resources like GPU clusters. However, the performance of parallel SGD is still bottlenecked by the high communication costs even with a fast connection among the machines. A simple approach to alleviating this problem, used in many existing efforts, is to perform communication every few iterations, using a constant averaging period. In this paper, we show that the optimal averaging period in terms of convergence and communication cost is not a constant, but instead varies over the course of the execution. Specifically, we observe that reducing the variance of model parameters among the computing nodes is critical to the convergence of periodic parameter averaging SGD. Given a fixed communication budget, we show that it is more beneficial to synchronize more frequently in early iterations to reduce the initial large variance and synchronize less frequently in the later phase of the training process. We propose a practical algorithm, named ADaptive Periodic parameter averaging SGD (ADPSGD), to achieve a smaller overall variance of model parameters, and thus better convergence compared with the Constant Periodic parameter averaging SGD (CPSGD). We evaluate our method with several image classification benchmarks and show that our ADPSGD indeed achieves smaller training losses and higher test accuracies with smaller communication compared with CPSGD. Compared with gradient-quantization SGD, we show that our algorithm achieves faster convergence with only half of the communication. Compared with full-communication SGD, our ADPSGD achieves 1:14x to 1:27x speedups with a 100Gbps connection among computing nodes, and the speedups increase to 1:46x ~ 1:95x with a 10Gbps connection.

Blowfish privacy is a recent generalisation of differential privacy that enables improved utility while maintaining privacy policies with semantic guarantees, a factor that has driven the popularity of differential privacy in computer science. This paper relates Blowfish privacy to an important measure of privacy loss of information channels from the communications theory community: min-entropy leakage. Symmetry in an input data neighbouring relation is central to known connections between differential privacy and min-entropy leakage. But while differential privacy exhibits strong symmetry, Blowfish neighbouring relations correspond to arbitrary simple graphs owing to the framework's flexible privacy policies. To bound the min-entropy leakage of Blowfish-private mechanisms we organise our analysis over symmetrical partitions corresponding to orbits of graph automorphism groups. A construction meeting our bound with asymptotic equality demonstrates sharpness.

Much of artificial intelligence (AI) in common use is dedicated to predicting people's behavior. It tries to anticipate your next purchase, your next mouse-click, your next job move. But such techniques can run into problems when they are used to analyze data for health and development programs. If we do not know the root causes of behavior, we could easily make poor decisions and support ineffective and prejudicial policies. AI, for example, has made it possible for health-care systems to predict which patients are likely to have the most complex medical needs. In the United States, risk-prediction software is being applied to roughly 200 million people to anticipate which patients would benefit from extra medical care now, based on how much they are likely to cost the health-care system in the future. It employs predictive machine learning, a class of self-adaptive algorithms that improve their accuracy as they are provided new data. But as health researcher Ziad Obermeyer and his colleagues showed in a recent article in Science magazine, this particular tool had an unintended consequence: black patients who had more chronic illnesses than white patients were not flagged as needing extra care. The algorithm used insurance claims data to predict patients' future health needs based on their recent health costs.

Question Generation (QG) is fundamentally a simple syntactic transformation; however, many aspects of semantics influence what questions are good to form. We implement this observation by developing Syn-QG, a set of transparent syntactic rules leveraging universal dependencies, shallow semantic parsing, lexical resources, and custom rules which transform declarative sentences into question-answer pairs. We utilize PropBank argument descriptions and VerbNet state predicates to incorporate shallow semantic content, which helps generate questions of a descriptive nature and produce inferential and semantically richer questions than existing systems. In order to improve syntactic fluency and eliminate grammatically incorrect questions, we employ back-translation over the output of these syntactic rules. A set of crowd-sourced evaluations shows that our system can generate a larger number of highly grammatical and relevant questions than previous QG systems and that back-translation drastically improves grammaticality at a slight cost of generating irrelevant questions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to play a major role in shaping global competitiveness and productivity over the next couple of decades, granting early adopters significant societal, economic, and strategic advantages. As the pace of AI innovation and development picks up--underpinned by advancements in big data and high-performance computing--the United States and China are both in the driver's seat.

Electronically excited states of molecules are at the heart of photochemistry, photophysics, as well as photobiology and also play a role in material science. Their theoretical description requires highly accurate quantum chemical calculations, which are computationally expensive. In this review, we focus on how machine learning is employed not only to speed up such excited-state simulations but also how this branch of artificial intelligence can be used to advance this exciting research field in all its aspects. Discussed applications of machine learning for excited states include excited-state dynamics simulations, static calculations of absorption spectra, as well as many others. In order to put these studies into context, we discuss the promises and pitfalls of the involved machine learning techniques. Since the latter are mostly based on quantum chemistry calculations, we also provide a short introduction into excited-state electronic structure methods, approaches for nonadiabatic dynamics simulations and describe tricks and problems when using them in machine learning for excited states of molecules.

Grammatical tense and mood are important linguistic phenomena to consider in natural language processing (NLP) research. We consider the correspondence between English and German tense and mood in translation. Human translators do not find this correspondence easy, and as we will show through careful analysis, there are no simplistic ways to map tense and mood from one language to another. Our observations about the challenges of human translation of tense and mood have important implications for multilingual NLP. Of particular importance is the challenge of modeling tense and mood in rule-based, phrase-based statistical and neural machine translation.

Analyzing encircling situation is the most crucial part of autonomous adaptation. Since there are many unknown and constantly changing factors in the real environment, momentary adjustment to the consistently alternating circumstances is highly required for addressing autonomy. To respond properly to changing environment, an utterly self-ruling vehicle ought to have the capacity to realize/comprehend its particular position and the surrounding environment. However, these vehicles extremely rely on human involvement to resolve entangled missions that cannot be precisely characterized in advance, which restricts their applications and accuracy. Reducing dependence on human supervision can be achieved by improving level of autonomy. Over the previous decades, autonomy and mission planning have been extensively researched on different structures and diverse conditions; nevertheless, aiming at robust mission planning in extreme conditions, here we provide exhaustive study of UVs autonomy as well as its related properties in internal and external situation awareness. In the following discussion, different difficulties in the scope of AUVs and UAVs will be discussed.