Oceania
QTIP: Quick simulation-based adaptation of Traffic model per Incident Parameters
Peled, Inon, Kamalakar, Raghuveer, Azevedo, Carlos Lima, Pereira, Francisco C.
Current data-driven traffic prediction models are usually trained with large datasets, e.g. several months of speeds and flows. Such models provide very good fit for ordinary road conditions, but often fail just when they are most needed: when traffic suffers a sudden and significant disruption, such as a road incident. In this work, we describe QTIP: a simulation-based framework for quasi-instantaneous adaptation of prediction models upon traffic disruption. In a nutshell, QTIP performs real-time simulations of the affected road for multiple scenarios, analyzes the results, and suggests a change to an ordinary prediction model accordingly. QTIP constructs the simulated scenarios per properties of the incident, as conveyed by immediate distress signals from affected vehicles. Such real-time signals are provided by In-Vehicle Monitor Systems, which are becoming increasingly prevalent world-wide. We experiment QTIP in a case study of a Danish motorway, and the results show that QTIP can improve traffic prediction in the first critical minutes of road incidents.
Exploring Unknown States with Action Balance
Song, Yan, Chen, Yingfeng, Hu, Yujing, Fan, Changjie
Exploration is a key problem in reinforcement learning. Recently bonus-based methods have achieved considerable successes in environments where exploration is difficult such as Montezuma's Revenge, which assign additional bonus (e.g., intrinsic reward) to guide the agent to rarely visited states. Since the bonus is calculated according to the novelty of the next state after performing an action, we call such methods the next-state bonus methods. However, the next-state bonus methods bring extra issues. It may lead agent to be trapped in states that fewer being visited and ignore to explore unknown states. Moreover, the behavior policy of the agent is also influenced by the bonus added to the state (or state-action) values indirectly. In contrast to the bonus-based methods which explore in known states, in this paper, we focus on the other part of exploration: exploration for finding unknown states. We propose the action balance exploration method to overcome the defects of the next-state bonus methods, which balances the chosen time of each action in each state and can be treated as an extension of upper confidence bound (UCB) to deep reinforcement learning. To take both the advantages of the next-state bonus method and our action balance exploration method, we propose the action balance RND method, which takes both parts of exploration into consideration. The experiments on grid world and Atari games demonstrate action balance exploration has a better capability in finding unknown states and can improve the real performance of RND in some hard exploration environments respectively.
KGvec2go -- Knowledge Graph Embeddings as a Service
Portisch, Jan, Hladik, Michael, Paulheim, Heiko
Currently, we serve pre-trained embeddings for four knowledge graphs. We introduce the service and its usage, and we show further that the trained models have semantic value by evaluating them on multiple semantic benchmarks. The evaluation also reveals that the combination of multiple models can lead to a better outcome than the best individual model.
Neuro-symbolic Architectures for Context Understanding
Oltramari, Alessandro, Francis, Jonathan, Henson, Cory, Ma, Kaixin, Wickramarachchi, Ruwan
Computational context understanding refers to an agent's ability to fuse disparate sources of information for decision-making and is, therefore, generally regarded as a prerequisite for sophisticated machine reasoning capabilities, such as in artificial intelligence (AI). Data-driven and knowledge-driven methods are two classical techniques in the pursuit of such machine sense-making capability. However, while data-driven methods seek to model the statistical regularities of events by making observations in the real-world, they remain difficult to interpret and they lack mechanisms for naturally incorporating external knowledge. Conversely, knowledge-driven methods, combine structured knowledge bases, perform symbolic reasoning based on axiomatic principles, and are more interpretable in their inferential processing; however, they often lack the ability to estimate the statistical salience of an inference. To combat these issues, we propose the use of hybrid AI methodology as a general framework for combining the strengths of both approaches. Specifically, we inherit the concept of neuro-symbolism as a way of using knowledge-bases to guide the learning progress of deep neural networks. We further ground our discussion in two applications of neuro-symbolism and, in both cases, show that our systems maintain interpretability while achieving comparable performance, relative to the state-of-the-art.
Those Three Clever Dogs Trained To Drive A Car Provide Valuable Lessons For AI Self-Driving Cars
Perhaps this dog would prefer driving the car, just like three dogs that were trained to do so. We've all seen dogs traveling in cars, including how they like to peek out an open window and enjoy the fur-fluffing breeze and dwell in the cacophony of scents that blow along in the flavorful wind. Dogs have also frequently been used as living props in commercials for cars, pretending in some cases to drive a car, such as the Subaru "Barkleys" advertising campaign that initially launched on TV in 2018 and continued in 2019, proclaiming that Subaru cars were "officially" dog tested and dog approved. What you might not know or might not remember is that there were three dogs that were trained on driving a car and had their moment of unveiling in December of 2012 when they were showcased by driving a car on an outdoor track (the YouTube posted video has amassed millions of views). Yes, three dogs named Monty, Ginny, and Porter were destined to become the first true car drivers on behalf of the entire canine family. Monty at the time was an 18-month-old giant schnauzer cross, while the slightly younger Ginny at one year of age was a beardie whippet cross, and Porter was a youthful 10-month-old beardie.
Data privacy risks to consider when using AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to solve many routine business challenges -- from quickly spotting a few questionable charges in thousands of invoices to predicting consumers' needs and wants. But there may be a flipside to these advances. Privacy concerns are cropping up as companies feed more and more consumer and vendor data into advanced, AI-fuelled algorithms to create new bits of sensitive information, unbeknownst to affected consumers and employees. This means that AI may create personal data. When it does, "it's data that has not been provided with [an individual's] consent or even with knowledge", said Chantal Bernier, assistant and interim privacy commissioner in the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada from 2008 until 2014 who now consults in the privacy and cybersecurity practice of global law firm Dentons.
Data privacy risks to consider when using AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to solve many routine business challenges -- from quickly spotting a few questionable charges in thousands of invoices to predicting consumers' needs and wants. But there may be a flipside to these advances. Privacy concerns are cropping up as companies feed more and more consumer and vendor data into advanced, AI-fuelled algorithms to create new bits of sensitive information, unbeknownst to affected consumers and employees. This means that AI may create personal data. When it does, "it's data that has not been provided with [an individual's] consent or even with knowledge", said Chantal Bernier, assistant and interim privacy commissioner in the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada from 2008 until 2014 who now consults in the privacy and cybersecurity practice of global law firm Dentons.
Tech Talk: We Need More Women Designing, Building And Testing AI Systems
There is a gender gap in artificial intelligence (AI). A study by the World Economic Forum and LinkedIn found that only 22% of AI professionals are women. Research by the AI Now Institute found that women make up only 15% of the AI research staff at Facebook and only 10% at Google. Although the gender gap in AI echoes those in cybersecurity and information technology in general, the repercussions of a lack of diversity in AI broaden because the details of the how the systems work are not fully known. As a result, identifying and correcting bias introduced by the decisions of the development teams or the data they select to train their algorithms is difficult.
A General Approach for Using Deep Neural Network for Digital Watermarking
Ming, Yurui, Ding, Weiping, Cao, Zehong, Lin, Chin-Teng
Abstract--Technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT) facilitate digital contents such as images being acquired in a massive way. However, consideration from the privacy or legislation perspective still demands the need for intellectual content protection. In this paper, we propose a general deep neural network (DNN) based watermarking method to fulfill this goal. Instead of training a neural network for protecting a specific image, we train on an image set and use the trained model to protect a distinct test image set in a bulk manner. Respective evaluations both from the subjective and objective aspects confirm the supremacy and practicability of our proposed method. To demonstrate the robustness of this general neural watermarking mechanism, commonly used manipulations are applied to the watermarked image to examine the corresponding extracted watermark, which still retains sufficient recognizable traits. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a general way to perform watermarking using DNN. Considering its performance and economy, it is concluded that subsequent studies that generalize our work on utilizing DNN for intellectual content protection is a promising research trend.
A working likelihood approach to support vector regression with a data-driven insensitivity parameter
The insensitive parameter in support vector regression determines the set of support vectors that greatly impacts the prediction. A data-driven approach is proposed to determine an approximate value for this insensitive parameter by minimizing a generalized loss function originating from the likelihood principle. This data-driven support vector regression also statistically standardizes samples using the scale of noises. Nonlinear and linear numerical simulations with three types of noises ($\epsilon$-Laplacian distribution, normal distribution, and uniform distribution), and in addition, five real benchmark data sets, are used to test the capacity of the proposed method. Based on all of the simulations and the five case studies, the proposed support vector regression using a working likelihood, data-driven insensitive parameter is superior and has lower computational costs.