Abstract: Predicting traffic incident duration is a major challenge for many traffic centres around the world. Most research studies focus on predicting the incident duration on motorways rather than arterial roads, due to a high network complexity and lack of data. In this paper we propose a bi-level framework for predicting the accident duration on arterial road networks in Sydney, based on operational requirements of incident clearance target which is less than 45 minutes. Using incident baseline information, we first deploy a classification method using various ensemble tree models in order to predict whether a new incident will be cleared in less than 45min or not. If the incident was classified as short-term, then various regression models are developed for predicting the actual incident duration in minutes by incorporating various traffic flow features. After outlier removal and intensive model hyper-parameter tuning through randomized search and cross-validation, we show that the extreme gradient boost approach outperformed all models, including the gradient-boosted decision-trees by almost 53%. Finally, we perform a feature importance evaluation for incident duration prediction and show that the best prediction results are obtained when leveraging the real-time traffic flow in vicinity road sections to the reported accident location. Initial methods used to predict the incident duration were 1. Introduction Bayesian classifiers [5], discrete choice models (DCM) [6], probabilistic distribution analyses [7], and the hazard-based Traffic congestion is a major concern for many cities duration models (HBDM) [8].

A startup in China will be the first company in the world to begin mass-producing self-driving delivery vehicles for some of the country's biggest commerce giants. According to a report from Bloomberg, the company Neolix has begun production on 1,000 level four autonomous vehicles that it plans to roll out in China throughout the next year. The tiny vans, which are essentially four-wheeled robots outfitted with trunks for storage, are capable of navigating their environment without any human pilot and have already garnered interest from two of China's biggest retailers: Huawei and JD.com. Neolix's robotic courier will cost around $30,000 each and could usher in a new era for e-commerce in China where companies like Alibaba have exploded in scope. In 2019 alone, Alibaba has generated about $152 billion.

CEO at Things Foundation, Technology Manager at Let's Do It Foundation Head of Cortex Ventures- Africa's first AI only focused VC Fund

We study the parameterized complexity of the optimal defense and optimal attack problems in voting. In both the problems, the input is a set of voter groups (every voter group is a set of votes) and two integers $k_a$ and $k_d$ corresponding to respectively the number of voter groups the attacker can attack and the number of voter groups the defender can defend. A voter group gets removed from the election if it is attacked but not defended. In the optimal defense problem, we want to know if it is possible for the defender to commit to a strategy of defending at most $k_d$ voter groups such that, no matter which $k_a$ voter groups the attacker attacks, the outcome of the election does not change. In the optimal attack problem, we want to know if it is possible for the attacker to commit to a strategy of attacking $k_a$ voter groups such that, no matter which $k_d$ voter groups the defender defends, the outcome of the election is always different from the original (without any attack) one.

We introduce deep scale-spaces (DSS), a generalization of convolutional neural networks, exploiting the scale symmetry structure of conventional image recognition tasks. Put plainly, the class of an image is invariant to the scale at which it is viewed. We construct scale equivariant cross-correlations based on a principled extension of convolutions, grounded in the theory of scale-spaces and semigroups. As a very basic operation, these cross-correlations can be used in almost any modern deep learning architecture in a plug-and-play manner. We demonstrate our networks on the Patch Camelyon and Cityscapes datasets, to prove their utility and perform introspective studies to further understand their properties.

We introduce a new regularization-based continual learning algorithm, dubbed as Uncertainty-regularized Continual Learning (UCL), that stores much smaller number of additional parameters for regularization terms than the recent state-of-the-art methods. Our approach builds upon the Bayesian learning framework, but makes a fresh interpretation of the variational approximation based regularization term and defines a notion of "uncertainty" for each hidden node in the network. The regularization parameter of each weight is then set to be large when the uncertainty of either of the node that the weight connects is small, since the weights connected to an important node should be less updated when a new task comes. Moreover, we add two additional regularization terms; one that promotes freezing the weights that are identified to be important (i.e., certain) for past tasks, and the other that gives flexibility to control the actively learning parameters for a new task by gracefully forgetting what was learned before. In results, we show our UCL outperforms most of recent state-of-the-art baselines on both supervised learning and reinforcement learning benchmarks.

An important problem in forensic analyses is identifying the provenance of materials at a crime scene, such as biological material on a piece of clothing. This procedure, known as geolocation, is conventionally guided by expert knowledge of the biological evidence and therefore tends to be application-specific, labor-intensive, and subjective. Purely data-driven methods have yet to be fully realized due in part to the lack of a sufficiently rich data source. However, high-throughput sequencing technologies are able to identify tens of thousands of microbial taxa using DNA recovered from a single swab collected from nearly any object or surface. We present a new algorithm for geolocation that aggregates over an ensemble of deep neural network classifiers trained on randomly-generated Voronoi partitions of a spatial domain. We apply the algorithm to fungi present in each of 1300 dust samples collected across the continental United States and then to a global dataset of dust samples from 28 countries. Our algorithm makes remarkably good point predictions with more than half of the geolocation errors under 100 kilometers for the continental analysis and nearly 90% classification accuracy of a sample's country of origin for the global analysis. We suggest that the effectiveness of this model sets the stage for a new, quantitative approach to forensic geolocation.

Estimating the uncertainty of a Bayesian model has been investigated for decades. The model posterior is almost always intractable, such that approximation is necessary. In many real-world cases, even though a decent estimation of the model posterior is obtained, another approximation is required to compute the predictive distribution over the desired output. A common accurate solution is to use Monte Carlo (MC) integration. However, it needs to maintain a large number of samples, evaluate the model repeatedly and average multiple model outputs. In this paper, we propose a method to approximate the probability distribution over the simplex induced by model posterior, enabling tractable computation of the predictive distribution for classification. The aim is to approximate the induced uncertainty of a specific Bayesian model, meanwhile alleviating the heavy workload of MC integration in testing time. Methodologically, we adapt Wasserstein distance to learn the induced conditional distributions, which is novel for Bayesian learning. The proposed method is universally applicable to Bayesian classification models that allow for posterior sampling. Empirical results validate the strong practical performance of our approach.

With the advent of deep neural networks, some research focuses towards understanding their black-box behavior. In this paper, we propose a new type of self-interpretable models, that are, architectures designed to provide explanations along with their predictions. Our method proceeds in two stages and is trained end-to-end: first, our model builds a low-dimensional binary representation of any input where each feature denotes the presence or absence of concepts. Then, it computes a prediction only based on this binary representation through a simple linear model. This allows an easy interpretation of the model's output in terms of presence of particular concepts in the input. The originality of our approach lies in the fact that concepts are automatically discovered at training time, without the need for additional supervision. Concepts correspond to a set of patterns, built on local low-level features (e.g a part of an image, a word in a sentence), easily identifiable from the other concepts. We experimentally demonstrate the relevance of our approach using classification tasks on two types of data, text and image, by showing its predictive performance and interpretability.

As Europe (together with Australia and Israel) are glued to their TV sets watching the 64th Eurovision song competition, we asked ourselves What makes a Eurovision song memorable? We are a group of artists, musicians and programmers that wanted explore human creativity and challenge it. We have created a Eurovision AI song that celebrates Eurovision – its melodrama, kitsch and camp, its humor and its gimmicks. The result is comprised entirely of material written and composed by Artificial Intelligence, titled "Blue Jeans & Bloody Tears". The project team fed hundreds of Eurovision songs – melodies and lyrics – into a neuron network.