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Digital dystopia: how algorithms punish the poor

#artificialintelligence

All around the world, from small-town Illinois in the US to Rochdale in England, from Perth, Australia, to Dumka in northern India, a revolution is under way in how governments treat the poor. You can't see it happening, and may have heard nothing about it. It's being planned by engineers and coders behind closed doors, in secure government locations far from public view. Only mathematicians and computer scientists fully understand the sea change, powered as it is by artificial intelligence (AI), predictive algorithms, risk modeling and biometrics. But if you are one of the millions of vulnerable people at the receiving end of the radical reshaping of welfare benefits, you know it is real and that its consequences can be serious – even deadly.


Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Manufacturing Market to Hit $16bn by 2025: Global Market Insights, Inc.

#artificialintelligence

The artificial intelligence in manufacturing market is poised to hike from USD 1 billion in 2018 to over USD 16 billion by 2025, according to a 2019 Global Market Insights, Inc. report. The AI in manufacturing market is driven by the rapid adoption of industry 4.0 technologies. The growing need among the manufacturers to reduce the cost of operation and enhance operational efficiency is the primary factor driving the adoption of Industry 4.0. The new technology solutions are enhancing operational efficiency and reducing the time to market the products. It allows enterprises to analyze the customer demand, align their operations to meet the customer's requirement, and analyze the process in real-time.


Digital dystopia: how algorithms punish the poor

The Guardian

All around the world, from small-town Illinois in the US to Rochdale in England, from the Pacific shore of Perth, Australia, to Dumka in northern India, a revolution is under way in how governments treat the poor. You can't see it happening, and may have heard nothing about it. It's being planned by engineers and coders behind closed doors, in secure government locations far from public view. Only mathematicians and computer scientists fully understand the sea change, powered as it is by artificial intelligence (AI), predictive algorithms, risk modeling and biometrics. But if you are one of the millions of vulnerable people at the receiving end of the radical reshaping of welfare benefits, you know it is real and that its consequences can be serious – even deadly.


Project purple: IAG moves away from being an analogue business ZDNet

#artificialintelligence

Before Insurance Australia Group (IAG) can begin selling more than insurance products to consumers, the company realised it needed to shift what is currently a very analogue business into something that is more digitally orientated. "We really want to change the mindset, get some records and customer value, and build new businesses as well, including beyond insurance," IAG Digital Architecture director Ian Jamieson explained at New Relic Future Stack 2019 last week. "An insurance company not selling insurance is quite disruptive because a lot of the core systems is under insurance, so if we want to sell a solution that provides emergency assistance to your home that is not an insurance product, how would you bill someone for that so that it's not under insurance … there are a range of things we need to transform and add new capabilities to." Jamieson said some areas that IAG is looking to expand its business into include motor and home repair services, spinning up brand new businesses such as in mobility services, and through acquisitions of startups, such as its most recent purchase of Carbar, a subscription-based car ownership platform. To make sure these business plans become a reality, Jamieson said the company has moved away from taking traditional waterfall approaches to projects and using a cross-functional method.


PROFET: Construction and Inference of DBNs Based on Mathematical Models

arXiv.org Machine Learning

PROFET: Construction and Inference of DBNs Based on Mathematical Models Hamda Ajmal, Michael Madden and Catherine Enright School of Computer Science, National University of Ireland Galway h.ajmal1@nuigalway.ie, Abstract This paper presents, evaluates, and discusses a new software tool to automatically build Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs) from ordinary differential equations (ODEs) entered by the user. The DBNs generated from ODE models can handle both data uncertainty and model uncertainty in a principled manner. The application, named PROFET, can be used for temporal data mining with noisy or missing variables. It enables automatic re-estimation of model parameters using temporal evidence in the form of data streams. For temporal inference, PROFET includes both standard fixed time step particle filtering and its extension, adaptive-time particle filtering algorithms. Adaptive-time particle filtering enables the DBN to automatically adapt its time step length to match the dynamics of the model. We demonstrate PROFET's functionality by using it to infer the model variables by estimating the model parameters of four benchmark ODE systems. From the generation of the DBN model to temporal inference, the entire process is automated and is delivered as an open-source platform-independent software application with a comprehensive user interface. PROFET is released under the Apache License 2.0. Its source code, executable and documentation are available at http:://profet.


Spatial and Colour Opponency in Anatomically Constrained Deep Networks

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Colour vision has long fascinated scientists, who have sought to understand both the physiology of the mechanics of colour vision and the psychophysics of colour perception. We consider representations of colour in anatomically constrained convolutional deep neural networks. Following ideas from neuroscience, we classify cells in early layers into groups relating to their spectral and spatial functionality. We show the emergence of single and double opponent cells in our networks and characterise how the distribution of these cells changes under the constraint of a retinal bottleneck. Our experiments not only open up a new understanding of how deep networks process spatial and colour information, but also provide new tools to help understand the black box of deep learning. The code for all experiments is avaialable at \url{https://github.com/ecs-vlc/opponency}.


Deep learning for Aerosol Forecasting

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Reanalysis datasets combining numerical physics models and limited observations to generate a synthesised estimate of variables in an Earth system, are prone to biases against ground truth. Biases identified with the NASA Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2) aerosol optical depth (AOD) dataset, against the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) ground measurements in previous studies, motivated the development of a deep learning based AOD prediction model globally. This study combines a convolutional neural network (CNN) with MERRA-2, tested against all AERONET sites. The new hybrid CNN-based model provides better estimates validated versus AERONET ground truth, than only using MERRA-2 reanalysis.


Shapley Homology: Topological Analysis of Sample Influence for Neural Networks

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Data samples collected for training machine learning models are typically assumed to be independent and identically distributed (iid). Recent research has demonstrated that this assumption can be problematic as it simplifies the manifold of structured data. This has motivated different research areas such as data poisoning, model improvement, and explanation of machine learning models. In this work, we study the influence of a sample on determining the intrinsic topological features of its underlying manifold. We propose the Shapley Homology framework, which provides a quantitative metric for the influence of a sample of the homology of a simplicial complex. By interpreting the influence as a probability measure, we further define an entropy which reflects the complexity of the data manifold. Our empirical studies show that when using the 0-dimensional homology, on neighboring graphs, samples with higher influence scores have more impact on the accuracy of neural networks for determining the graph connectivity and on several regular grammars whose higher entropy values imply more difficulty in being learned.


Understanding the Curse of Horizon in Off-Policy Evaluation via Conditional Importance Sampling

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Due in part to the growing sources of data about past sequences of decisions and their outcomes - from marketing to energy management to healthcare - there is increasing interest in developing accurate and efficient algorithms for off-policy policy evaluation. For Markov Decision Processes, this problem was addressed (Precup et al., 2000) early on by importance sampling (IS)(Rubinstein, 1981), a method prone to large variance due to rare events (Glynn, 1994; L'Ecuyer et al., 2009). The per-decision importance sampling estimator of Precup et al. (2000) tries to mitigate this problem by leveraging the temporal structure - earlier rewards cannot depend on later decisions - of the domain. While neither importance sampling (IS) nor per-decision IS (PDIS) assumes the underlying domain is Markov, more recently, a new class of estimators (Hallak and Mannor, 2017; Liu et al., 2018; Gelada and Bellemare, 2019) has been proposed that leverages the Markovian structure. In particular, these approaches propose performing importance sampling over the stationary state-action distributions induced by the corresponding Markov chain for a particular policy. By avoiding the explicit accumulation of likelihood ratios along the trajectories, it is hypothesized that such ratios of stationary distributions could substantially reduce the variance of the resulting estimator, thereby overcoming the "curse of horizon" (Liu et al., 2018) plaguing off-policy evaluation. The recent flurry of empirical results shows significant performance improvements over the alternative methods on a variety of simulation domains. Yet so far there has not been a formal analysis of the accuracy of IS, PDIS, and stationary state-action IS which will strengthen our understanding of their properties, benefits and limitations.


Quantitative stability of optimal transport maps and linearization of the 2-Wasserstein space

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This work studies an explicit embedding of the set of probability measures into a Hilbert space, defined using optimal transport maps from a reference probability density. This embedding linearizes to some extent the 2 -Wasserstein space, and enables the direct use of generic supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms on measure data. Our main result is that the embedding is (bi-)Hölder continuous, when the reference density is uniform over a convex set, and can be equivalently phrased as a dimension-independent Hölder-stability results for optimal transport maps. 1. Introduction Numerous problems involve the comparison of point clouds, i.e. sets of points that lie in a metric space and for which the spatial distribution is of interest. Seeing the point clouds as discrete probability measures in a metric space, it is natural to compare them using Wasserstein distances defined by the optimal transport theory [37]. These distances have indeed been successfully used in a variety of applications in machine learning [11, 3, 25, 23, 19, 1] and in statistics [39, 12, 8, 35]. In the discrete setting, many efficient algorithms have been proposed to compute or approximate the Wasserstein distances, such as Sinkhorn-Knopp and auction algorithms - see [34] and references therein.