Robotics, machine learning, data science, and mathematical modelling are just some of the tools that a group of researchers will use to forecast environmental changes across Antarctica as part of a seven-year research project. To be led by Monash University, the Securing Antarctica's Environmental Future (SAEF) project will involve 30 Australian and overseas organisations, including Queensland University of Technology (QUT), University of Wollongong, University of New South Wales, James Cook University, University of Adelaide, the South Australian Museum, and the Western Australian Museum. According to QUT Institute for Future Environments executive director Kerrie Wilson, who will form part of the program's leadership team, the research aims to "bring new perspectives to Antarctic conservation". "Antarctica is facing unprecedented threats from climate change, fishing, visitation, and other human activities. Safeguarding its future will require new ideas, and collaborations between different fields of science," she told ZDNet.

This is a group for anyone interested in Artificial Intelligence (AI). All skill levels are welcome. The main focus of this group is to help people understand AI scenarios through real, hands-on technical solutions and explore how to develop AI solutions in today's world. We will look at a variety of technology from different providers. Guest speakers will include people working in the industry to demonstrate new technology.

This paper reviews current literature in the field of predictive maintenance from the system point of view. We differentiate the existing capabilities of condition estimation and failure risk forecasting as currently applied to simple components, from the capabilities needed to solve the same tasks for complex assets. System-level analysis faces more complex latent degradation states, it has to comprehensively account for active maintenance programs at each component level and consider coupling between different maintenance actions, while reflecting increased monetary and safety costs for system failures. As a result, methods that are effective for forecasting risk and informing maintenance decisions regarding individual components do not readily scale to provide reliable sub-system or system level insights. A novel holistic modeling approach is needed to incorporate available structural and physical knowledge and naturally handle the complexities of actively fielded and maintained assets.

Many tasks aim to measure machine reading comprehension (MRC), often focusing on question types presumed to be difficult. Rarely, however, do task designers start by considering what systems should in fact comprehend. In this paper we make two key contributions. First, we argue that existing approaches do not adequately define comprehension; they are too unsystematic about what content is tested. Second, we present a detailed definition of comprehension -- a "Template of Understanding" -- for a widely useful class of texts, namely short narratives. We then conduct an experiment that strongly suggests existing systems are not up to the task of narrative understanding as we define it.

Recently, in many systems such as speech recognition and visual processing, deep learning has been widely implemented. In this research, we are exploring the possibility of using deep learning in community detection among the graph datasets. Graphs have gained growing traction in different fields, including social networks, information graphs, the recommender system, and also life sciences. In this paper, we propose a method of community detection clustering the nodes of various graph datasets. We cluster different category datasets that belong to Affiliation networks, Animal networks, Human contact networks, Human social networks, Miscellaneous networks. The deep learning role in modeling the interaction between nodes in a network allows a revolution in the field of science relevant to graph network analysis. In this paper, we extend the gumbel softmax approach to graph network clustering. The experimental findings on specific graph datasets reveal that the new approach outperforms traditional clustering significantly, which strongly shows the efficacy of deep learning in graph community detection clustering. We do a series of experiments on our graph clustering algorithm, using various datasets: Zachary karate club, Highland Tribe, Train bombing, American Revolution, Dolphins, Zebra, Windsurfers, Les Mis\'erables, Political books.

We provide an insight into the open data resources pertinent to the study of the spread of Covid-19 pandemic and its control. We identify the variables required to analyze fundamental aspects like seasonal behaviour, regional mortality rates, and effectiveness of government measures. Open data resources, along with data-driven methodologies, provide many opportunities to improve the response of the different administrations to the virus. We describe the present limitations and difficulties encountered in most of the open-data resources. To facilitate the access to the main open-data portals and resources, we identify the most relevant institutions, at a world scale, providing Covid-19 information and/or auxiliary variables (demographics, mobility, etc.). We also describe several open resources to access Covid-19 data-sets at a country-wide level (i.e. China, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, U.S., etc.). In an attempt to facilitate the rapid response to the study of the seasonal behaviour of Covid-19, we enumerate the main open resources in terms of weather and climate variables. CONCO-Team: The authors of this paper belong to the CONtrol COvid-19 Team, which is composed of different researches from universities of Spain, Italy, France, Germany, United Kingdom and Argentina. The main goal of CONCO-Team is to develop data-driven methods for the better understanding and control of the pandemic.

Positional games are a mathematical class of two-player games comprising Tictac-toe and its generalizations. We propose a novel encoding of these games into Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBFs) such that a game instance admits a winning strategy for first player if and only if the corresponding formula is true. Our approach improves over previous QBF encodings of games in multiple ways. First, it is generic and lets us encode other positional games, such as Hex. Second, structural properties of positional games together with a careful treatment of illegal moves let us generate more compact instances that can be solved faster by state-of-the-art QBF solvers. We establish the latter fact through extensive experiments. Finally, the compactness of our new encoding makes it feasible to translate realistic game problems. We identify a few such problems of historical significance and put them forward to the QBF community as milestones of increasing difficulty.

Information gathering in a partially observable environment can be formulated as a reinforcement learning (RL), problem where the reward depends on the agent's uncertainty. For example, the reward can be the negative entropy of the agent's belief over an unknown (or hidden) variable. Typically, the rewards of an RL agent are defined as a function of the state-action pairs and not as a function of the belief of the agent; this hinders the direct application of deep RL methods for such tasks. This paper tackles the challenge of using belief-based rewards for a deep RL agent, by offering a simple insight that maximizing any convex function of the belief of the agent can be approximated by instead maximizing a prediction reward: a reward based on prediction accuracy. In particular, we derive the exact error between negative entropy and the expected prediction reward. This insight provides theoretical motivation for several fields using prediction rewards---namely visual attention, question answering systems, and intrinsic motivation---and highlights their connection to the usually distinct fields of active perception, active sensing, and sensor placement. Based on this insight we present deep anticipatory networks (DANs), which enables an agent to take actions to reduce its uncertainty without performing explicit belief inference. We present two applications of DANs: building a sensor selection system for tracking people in a shopping mall and learning discrete models of attention on fashion MNIST and MNIST digit classification.

As humanity struggles to contain the global Covid-19 infection, prophylactic actions are grandly slowed down by the shortage of testing kits. Governments have taken several measures to work around this shortage: the FDA has become more liberal on the approval of Covid-19 tests in the US. In the UK emergency measures allowed to increase the daily number of locally produced test kits to 100,000. China has recently launched a massive test manufacturing program. However, all those efforts are very insufficient and many poor countries are still under threat. A popular method for reducing the number of tests consists in pooling samples, i.e. mixing patient samples and testing the mixed samples once. If all the samples are negative, pooling succeeds at a unitary cost. However, if a single sample is positive, failure does not indicate which patient is infected. This paper describes how to optimally detect infected patients in pools, i.e. using a minimal number of tests to precisely identify them, given the a priori probabilities that each of the patients is healthy. Those probabilities can be estimated using questionnaires, supervised machine learning or clinical examinations. The resulting algorithms, which can be interpreted as informed divide-and-conquer strategies, are non-intuitive and quite surprising. They are patent-free. Co-authors are listed in alphabetical order.

More than three-quarters (78%) of consumers worldwide say companies must address bias in artificial intelligence (AI) and new research from Genpact (NYSE: G), a global professional services firm focused on delivering digital transformation, finds that they will reward businesses that take action. The study, now in its third year, underscores how AI continues to present opportunities for growth, but businesses still have work to do to address customers' concerns about bias and workers' concerns about equity in re-skilling opportunities. Empathising deeply with customer concerns is what will separate the winners from losers. Genpact's study, AI 360: Hold, fold, or double down?, shows that while 69% of UK consumers worry about AI discriminating against them, and 64% fear that AI will make decisions that affect them without their knowledge, companies that understand these issues and act accordingly can succeed. The study analyses perceptions of three distinct audiences that are critical to AI's widespread adoption in business: senior executives, workers, and consumers.