In public media as well as in scientific publications, the term \emph{bias} is used in conjunction with machine learning in many different contexts, and with many different meanings. This paper proposes a taxonomy of these different meanings, terminology, and definitions by surveying the, primarily scientific, literature on machine learning. In some cases, we suggest extensions and modifications to promote a clear terminology and completeness. The survey is followed by an analysis and discussion on how different types of biases are connected and depend on each other. We conclude that there is a complex relation between bias occurring in the machine learning pipeline that leads to a model, and the eventual bias of the model (which is typically related to social discrimination). The former bias may or may not influence the latter, in a sometimes bad, and sometime good way.

The rise in the number of self-driving cars will lead to more binge drinking as people stop worrying about having to drive home from a pub or club, a study claims. Researchers from Curtin University, Australia, say if a group don't need to assign a designated driver due to having an autonomous car, they will likely drink more. The team found that more than a third of adults would increase the amount they usually drink if they could rely on a driverless car to get them home. Lead author Leon Booth said driverless cars would cut drink-driving rates but increase the amount of alcohol drunk by the population. The rise in the number of self-driving cars will lead to more binge drinking as people stop worrying about having to drive home from a pub or club, a study claims.

My view, and that of the majority of my colleagues in AI, is that it'll be at least half a century before we see computers matching humans. Given that various breakthroughs are needed, and it's very hard to predict when breakthroughs will happen, it might even be a century or more. If that's the case, you don't need to lose too much sleep tonight. One reason for believing that machines will get to human-level or even superhuman-level intelligence quickly is the dangerously seductive idea of the technological singularity. This idea can be traced back to a number of people over fifty years ago: John von Neumann, one of the fathers of computing, and the mathematician and Bletchley Park cryptographer IJ Good. More recently, it's an idea that has been popularised by the science-fiction author Vernor Vinge and the futurist Ray Kurzweil.

Active learning (AL) selects the most beneficial unlabeled samples to label, and hence a better machine learning model can be trained from the same number of labeled samples. Most existing active learning for regression (ALR) approaches are supervised, which means the sampling process must use some label information, or an existing regression model. This paper considers completely unsupervised ALR, i.e., how to select the samples to label without knowing any true label information. We propose a novel unsupervised ALR approach, iterative representativeness-diversity maximization (iRDM), to optimally balance the representativeness and the diversity of the selected samples. Experiments on 12 datasets from various domains demonstrated its effectiveness. Our iRDM can be applied to both linear regression and kernel regression, and it even significantly outperforms supervised ALR when the number of labeled samples is small.

Researchers have long been interested in the role that norms can play in governing agent actions in multi-agent systems. Much work has been done on formalising normative concepts from human society and adapting them for the government of open software systems, and on the simulation of normative processes in human and artificial societies. However, there has been comparatively little work on applying normative MAS mechanisms to understanding the norms in human society. This work investigates this issue in the context of international politics. Using the GDELT dataset, containing machine-encoded records of international events extracted from news reports, we extracted bilateral sequences of inter-country events and applied a Bayesian norm mining mechanism to identify norms that best explained the observed behaviour. A statistical evaluation showed that the normative model fitted the data significantly better than a probabilistic discrete event model.

Rapid advances in data collection and processing capabilities have allowed for the use of increasingly complex models that give rise to nonconvex optimization problems. These formulations, however, can be arbitrarily difficult to solve in general, in the sense that even simply verifying that a given point is a local minimum can be NPhard [1]. Still, some relatively simple algorithms have been shown to lead to surprisingly good empirical results in many contexts of interest. Perhaps the most prominent example is the success of the backpropagation algorithm for training neural networks. Several recent works have pursued rigorous analytical justification for this phenomenon by studying the structure of the nonconvex optimization problems and establishing that simple algorithms, such as gradient descent and its variations, perform well in converging towards local minima and avoiding saddle-points. A key insight in these analyses is that gradient perturbations play a critical role in allowing local descent algorithms to efficiently distinguish desirable from undesirable stationary points and escape from the latter. In this article, we cover recent results on second-order guarantees for stochastic first-order optimization algorithms in centralized, federated, and decentralized architectures. A key desirable feature of automated learning algorithms is the ability to learn models directly from data with minimal need for direct intervention by the designer. The authors are with the Institute of Electrical Engineering, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Recently, deep neural networks (DNNs) have made great progress on automated diagnosis with chest X-rays images. However, DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which may cause misdiagnoses to patients when applying the DNN based methods in disease detection. Recently, there is few comprehensive studies exploring the influence of attack and defense methods on disease detection, especially for the multi-label classification problem. In this paper, we aim to review various adversarial attack and defense methods on chest X-rays. First, the motivations and the mathematical representations of attack and defense methods are introduced in details. Second, we evaluate the influence of several state-of-the-art attack and defense methods for common thorax disease classification in chest X-rays. We found that the attack and defense methods have poor performance with excessive iterations and large perturbations. To address this, we propose a new defense method that is robust to different degrees of perturbations. This study could provide new insights into methodological development for the community.

Bidding and acceptance strategies have a substantial impact on the outcome of negotiations in scenarios with linear additive and nonlinear utility functions. Over the years, it has become clear that there is no single best strategy for all negotiation settings, yet many fixed strategies are still being developed. We envision a shift in the strategy design question from: What is a good strategy?, towards: What could be a good strategy? For this purpose, we developed a method leveraging automated algorithm configuration to find the best strategies for a specific set of negotiation settings. By empowering automated negotiating agents using automated algorithm configuration, we obtain a flexible negotiation agent that can be configured automatically for a rich space of opponents and negotiation scenarios. To critically assess our approach, the agent was tested in an ANAC-like bilateral automated negotiation tournament setting against past competitors. We show that our automatically configured agent outperforms all other agents, with a 5.1% increase in negotiation payoff compared to the next-best agent. We note that without our agent in the tournament, the top-ranked agent wins by a margin of only 0.01%.

New machine translations (MT) technologies are emerging rapidly and with them, bold claims of achieving human parity such as: (i) the results produced approach "accuracy achieved by average bilingual human translators" (Wu et al., 2017b) or (ii) the "translation quality is at human parity when compared to professional human translators" (Hassan et al., 2018) have seen the light of day (Laubli et al., 2018). Aside from the fact that many of these papers craft their own definition of human parity, these sensational claims are often not supported by a complete analysis of all aspects involved in translation. Establishing the discrepancies between the strengths of statistical approaches to MT and the way humans translate has been the starting point of our research. By looking at MT output and linguistic theory, we were able to identify some remaining issues. The problems range from simple number and gender agreement errors to more complex phenomena such as the correct translation of aspectual values and tenses. Our experiments confirm, along with other studies (Bentivogli et al., 2016), that neural MT has surpassed statistical MT in many aspects. However, some problems remain and others have emerged. We cover a series of problems related to the integration of specific linguistic features into statistical and neural MT, aiming to analyse and provide a solution to some of them. Our work focuses on addressing three main research questions that revolve around the complex relationship between linguistics and MT in general. We identify linguistic information that is lacking in order for automatic translation systems to produce more accurate translations and integrate additional features into the existing pipelines. We identify overgeneralization or 'algorithmic bias' as a potential drawback of neural MT and link it to many of the remaining linguistic issues.

Autonomous technology continues to make an impact on the supply chain. The autonomous supply chain, as I am writing about it here, applies to moving goods without human intervention (to some degree at least). One of the more interesting examples I have seen is from the Belgian brewery De Halve Maan, which in an effort to reduce congestion on the city streets, built a beer pipeline under the streets. The pipeline is capable of carrying 1,500 gallons of beer an hour at 12 mph to a bottling facility two miles away. As we've written about here quite often, autonomous technology is mainly seen in warehouses, on highways, and in last mile deliveries.