We propose a projection pursuit (PP) algorithm based on Gaussian mixture models (GMMs). The negentropy obtained from a multivariate density estimated by GMMs is adopted as the PP index to be maximised. For a fixed dimension of the projection subspace, the GMM-based density estimation is projected onto that subspace, where an approximation of the negentropy for Gaussian mixtures is computed. Then, Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are used to find the optimal, orthogonal projection basis by maximising the former approximation. We show that this semi-parametric approach to PP is flexible and allows highly informative structures to be detected, by projecting multivariate datasets onto a subspace, where the data can be feasibly visualised. The performance of the proposed approach is shown on both artificial and real datasets.

The failure of landing a job for college students could cause serious social consequences such as drunkenness and suicide. In addition to academic performance, unconscious biases can become one key obstacle for hunting jobs for graduating students. Thus, it is necessary to understand these unconscious biases so that we can help these students at an early stage with more personalized intervention. In this paper, we develop a framework, i.e., MAYA (Multi-mAjor emploYment stAtus) to predict students' employment status while considering biases. The framework consists of four major components. Firstly, we solve the heterogeneity of student courses by embedding academic performance into a unified space. Then, we apply a generative adversarial network (GAN) to overcome the class imbalance problem. Thirdly, we adopt Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) with a novel dropout mechanism to comprehensively capture sequential information among semesters. Finally, we design a bias-based regularization to capture the job market biases. We conduct extensive experiments on a large-scale educational dataset and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our prediction framework.

A major component of overfitting in model-free reinforcement learning (RL) involves the case where the agent may mistakenly correlate reward with certain spurious features from the observations generated by the Markov Decision Process (MDP). We provide a general framework for analyzing this scenario, which we use to design multiple synthetic benchmarks from only modifying the observation space of an MDP. When an agent overfits to different observation spaces even if the underlying MDP dynamics is fixed, we term this observational overfitting. Our experiments expose intriguing properties especially with regards to implicit regularization, and also corroborate results from previous works in RL generalization and supervised learning (SL).

A shepherd is out tending a flock when a presence appears above. It descends from the sky and communicates vital information. It may sound like a nativity scene, but for an increasing number of farmers it's a daily occurrence – and that celestial being is a drone. Corey Lambeth, a New Zealand farmer, originally purchased a drone for photography, but he quickly realised the device had more practical applications. "I thought'I'll just give it a nudge on the sheep and see what that goes like' and it actually worked out quite well," he says.

Fake video and audio streams that appear to be real can ruin the reputations of your executives and your company. They can cost you money. They can even cost you your job. Fortunately, there are steps you can take that can help. If you're at all familiar with the term "deep fake" you probably think about it in terms of fake videos about celebrities or politicians where they're already being used as parts of disinformation campaigns.

When Carol Clark was diagnosed with sepsis, a potentially deadly condition caused by her body's response to a foot infection, her future was touch and go. "I was a very, very sick lady," she said. "Thankfully, they didn't want me up there yet." As soon as the ambulance collected Ms Clark from her Guildford home and took her to Westmead Hospital, a computer system began collecting her data. Every blood-pressure and heart-rate check was meticulously recorded into the hospital's electronic medical database.

The family of methods collectively known as classifier chains has become a popular approach to multi-label learning problems. This approach involves linking together off-the-shelf binary classifiers in a chain structure, such that class label predictions become features for other classifiers. Such methods have proved flexible and effective and have obtained state-of-the-art empirical performance across many datasets and multi-label evaluation metrics. This performance led to further studies of how exactly it works, and how it could be improved, and in the recent decade numerous studies have explored classifier chains mechanisms on a theoretical level, and many improvements have been made to the training and inference procedures, such that this method remains among the state-of-the-art options for multi-label learning. Given this past and ongoing interest, which covers a broad range of applications and research themes, the goal of this work is to provide a review of classifier chains, a survey of the techniques and extensions provided in the literature, as well as perspectives for this approach in the domain of multi-label classification in the future. We conclude positively, with a number of recommendations for researchers and practitioners, as well as outlining a number of areas for future research.

In this paper, we investigate the robust dictionary learning (DL) to discover the hybrid salient low-rank and sparse representation in a factorized compressed space. A Joint Robust Factorization and Projective Dictionary Learning (J-RFDL) model is presented. The setting of J-RFDL aims at improving the data representations by enhancing the robustness to outliers and noise in data, encoding the reconstruction error more accurately and obtaining hybrid salient coefficients with accurate reconstruction ability. Specifically, J-RFDL performs the robust representation by DL in a factorized compressed space to eliminate the negative effects of noise and outliers on the results, which can also make the DL process efficient. To make the encoding process robust to noise in data, J-RFDL clearly uses sparse L2, 1-norm that can potentially minimize the factorization and reconstruction errors jointly by forcing rows of the reconstruction errors to be zeros. To deliver salient coefficients with good structures to reconstruct given data well, J-RFDL imposes the joint low-rank and sparse constraints on the embedded coefficients with a synthesis dictionary. Based on the hybrid salient coefficients, we also extend J-RFDL for the joint classification and propose a discriminative J-RFDL model, which can improve the discriminating abilities of learnt coeffi-cients by minimizing the classification error jointly. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our formulations can deliver superior performance over other state-of-the-art methods.

We use synthetic data and a reinforcement learning algorithm to train a system controlling a full-size real-world vehicle in a number of restricted driving scenarios. The driving policy uses RGB images as input. We analyze how design decisions about perception, control and training impact the real-world performance.

Microsoft is devising a new roadmap for Cortana by integrating it with various applications. Earlier in 2019, Satya Nadela, CEO of Microsoft, said that the firm no longer sees Cortana as a competitor to other prominent virtual assistants Alexa and Google Now. The company is rather working towards revamping the way Cortana is being leveraged across the world. In an announcement on Friday, Microsoft notified users of several countries that they are pulling out Cortana support from Android and iOS platforms. Come 31 January 2020, Cortana will disappear from India, UK, Australia, Mexico, Spain, Canada, Germany, and China.