Machine learning can be intimidating for folks coming from a non-technical background. All machine learning jobs seem to require a healthy understanding of Python (or R). So how do non-programmers gain coding experience? Here's the good news – there are plenty of tools out there that let us perform machine learning tasks without having to code. You can easily build algorithms like decision trees from scratch in a beautiful graphical interface.

Spoiler alert: Quantum computers may not make your cats and dogs classifiers go any faster. Here's how you can still get a free Windows 10 upgrade You can still use Microsoft's free upgrade tools to install Windows 10 on an old PC running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. No product key is required, and the digital license says you're activated and ready to go. Google this week announced a new version of its TensorFlow framework for building machine learning models, a kind of mash-up between TensorFlow and Cinq, another framework developed at Google that's designed for building quantum computing algorithms. Together, they could let you build a deep learning model to run on a future quantum computer with no more than a bunch of lines of Python.

We introduce a model-based asynchronous multi-fidelity hyperparameter optimization (HPO) method, combining strengths of asynchronous Hyperband and Gaussian process-based Bayesian optimization. Our method obtains substantial speed-ups in wall-clock time over, both, synchronous and asynchronous Hyperband, as well as a prior model-based extension of the former. Candidate hyperparameters to evaluate are selected by a novel jointly dependent Gaussian process-based surrogate model over all resource levels, allowing evaluations at one level to be informed by evaluations gathered at all others. We benchmark several covariance functions and conduct extensive experiments on hyperparameter tuning for multi-layer perceptrons on tabular data, convolutional networks on image classification, and recurrent networks on language modelling, demonstrating the benefits of our approach.

We consider the problem of robust matrix completion, which aims to recover a low rank matrix $L_*$ and a sparse matrix $S_*$ from incomplete observations of their sum $M=L_*+S_*\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$. Algorithmically, the robust matrix completion problem is transformed into a problem of solving a system of nonlinear equations, and the alternative direction method is then used to solve the nonlinear equations. In addition, the algorithm is highly parallelizable and suitable for large scale problems. Theoretically, we characterize the sufficient conditions for when $L_*$ can be approximated by a low rank approximation of the observed $M_*$. And under proper assumptions, it is shown that the algorithm converges to the true solution linearly. Numerical simulations show that the simple method works as expected and is comparable with state-of-the-art methods.

We introduce a cluster evaluation technique called Tree Index. Our Tree Index algorithm aims at describing the structural information of the clustering rather than the quantitative format of cluster-quality indexes (where the representation power of clustering is some cumulative error similar to vector quantization). Our Tree Index is finding margins amongst clusters for easy learning without the complications of Minimum Description Length. Our Tree Index produces a decision tree from the clustered data set, using the cluster identifiers as labels. It combines the entropy of each leaf with their depth. Intuitively, a shorter tree with pure leaves generalizes the data well (the clusters are easy to learn because they are well separated). So, the labels are meaningful clusters. If the clustering algorithm does not separate well, trees learned from their results will be large and too detailed. We show that, on the clustering results (obtained by various techniques) on a brain dataset, Tree Index discriminates between reasonable and non-sensible clusters. We confirm the effectiveness of Tree Index through graphical visualizations. Tree Index evaluates the sensible solutions higher than the non-sensible solutions while existing cluster-quality indexes fail to do so.

Use of deep generative models for unsupervised anomaly detection has shown great promise partially owing to their ability to learn proper representations of complex input data distributions. Current methods, however, lack a strong latent representation of the data, thereby resulting in sub-optimal unsupervised anomaly detection results. In this work, we propose a novel representation learning technique using deep autoencoders to tackle the problem of unsupervised anomaly detection. Our approach replaces the $L_{p}$ reconstruction loss in the autoencoder optimization objective with a novel adversarial loss to enforce semantic-level reconstruction. In addition, we propose a novel simplex interpolation loss to improve the structure of the latent space representation in the autoencoder. Our technique improves the state-of-the-art unsupervised anomaly detection performance by a large margin on several image datasets including MNIST, fashion MNIST, CIFAR and Coil-100 as well as on several non-image datasets including KDD99, Arrhythmia and Thyroid. For example, On the CIFAR-10 dataset, using a standard leave-one-out evaluation protocol, our method achieves a substantial performance gain of 0.23 AUC points compared to the state-of-the-art.

A U-Net is trained to recover acoustic interference striations (AISs) from distorted ones. A random mode-coupling matrix model is introduced to generate a large number of training data quickly, which are used to train the U-Net. The performance of AIS recovery of the U-Net is tested in range-dependent waveguides with nonlinear internal waves (NLIWs). Although the random mode-coupling matrix model is not an accurate physical model, the test results show that the U-Net successfully recovers AISs under different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and different amplitudes and widths of NLIWs for different shapes.

This article surveys engineering and neuroscientific models of planning as a cognitive function, which is regarded as a typical function of fluid intelligence in the discussion of general intelligence. It aims to present existing planning models as references for realizing the planning function in brain-inspired AI or artificial general intelligence (AGI). It also proposes themes for the research and development of brain-inspired AI from the viewpoint of tasks and architecture.

An Australian team is using machine learning to tackle the threat of space junk wrecking new satellites. Research to tackle the growing need to find, capture and remove junk from space is advancing at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning in Adelaide, South Australia. Machine Learning for Space director Tat-Jun Chin and his Adelaide-based team have won a $600,000 grant from Australia's SmartSat CRC to continue their work in detecting, tracking and cataloging space junk. SmartSat CRC was established last year to work with the Australian Space Agency based in Adelaide, contributing to the Australian government's goal of tripling the size of the space sector to $12 billion and creating as many as 20,000 jobs by 2030. The space junk project is based on developing a space-based surveillance network and tackling the growing challenge of crowding in space.

Time series models predominantly, over the years, have focussed on individual time series via local models. This changed with the popularisation of deep learning techniques. This was also supported by the increase of temporal data availability, which led to many deep learning-based time series algorithms. Due to their natural temporal ordering, time-series data are present in almost every task that is registered, taking into account some notion of ordering. From electronic health records and human activity recognition to acoustic scene classification and cyber-security, time series is encountered in many real-world applications.