The rigorous quantification of uncertainty in geophysical inversions is a challenging problem. Inversions are often ill-posed and the likelihood surface may be multi-modal; properties of any single mode become inadequate uncertainty measures, and sampling methods become inefficient for irregular posteriors or high-dimensional parameter spaces. We explore the influences of different choices made by the practitioner on the efficiency and accuracy of Bayesian geophysical inversion methods that rely on Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling to assess uncertainty, using a multi-sensor inversion of the three-dimensional structure and composition of a region in the Cooper Basin of South Australia as a case study. The inversion is performed using an updated version of the Obsidian distributed inversion software. We find that the posterior for this inversion has complex local covariance structure, hindering the efficiency of adaptive sampling methods that adjust the proposal based on the chain history. Within the context of a parallel-tempered Markov chain Monte Carlo scheme for exploring high-dimensional multi-modal posteriors, a preconditioned Crank-Nicholson proposal outperforms more conventional forms of random walk. Aspects of the problem setup, such as priors on petrophysics or on 3-D geological structure, affect the shape and separation of posterior modes, influencing sampling performance as well as the inversion results. Use of uninformative priors on sensor noise can improve inversion results by enabling optimal weighting among multiple sensors even if noise levels are uncertain. Efficiency could be further increased by using posterior gradient information within proposals, which Obsidian does not currently support, but which could be emulated using posterior surrogates.

The economic and social impact of poor air quality in towns and cities is increasingly being recognised, together with the need for effective ways of creating awareness of real-time air quality levels and their impact on human health. With local authority maintained monitoring stations being geographically sparse and the resultant datasets also featuring missing labels, computational data-driven mechanisms are needed to address the data sparsity challenge. In this paper, we propose a machine learning-based method to accurately predict the Air Quality Index (AQI), using environmental monitoring data together with meteorological measurements. To do so, we develop an air quality estimation framework that implements a neural network that is enhanced with a novel Non-linear Autoregressive neural network with exogenous input (NARX), especially designed for time series prediction. The framework is applied to a case study featuring different monitoring sites in London, with comparisons against other standard machine-learning based predictive algorithms showing the feasibility and robust performance of the proposed method for different kinds of areas within an urban region.

Deep learning models are known to be overconfident in their predictions on out of distribution inputs. There have been several pieces of work to address this issue, including a number of approaches for building Bayesian neural networks, as well as closely related work on detection of out of distribution samples. Recently, there has been work on building classifiers that are robust to out of distribution samples by adding a regularization term that maximizes the entropy of the classifier output on out of distribution data. To approximate out of distribution samples (which are not known apriori), a GAN was used for generation of samples at the edges of the training distribution. In this paper, we introduce an alternative GAN based approach for building a robust classifier, where the idea is to use the GAN to explicitly generate out of distribution samples that the classifier is confident on (low entropy), and have the classifier maximize the entropy for these samples.

A survey by research firm Gartner found that the use of AI in digital commerce companies is usually considered a success, with 70% of the organisations claiming very, or extremely successful, implementation of the technology. A total of 307 digital commerce organisations were surveyed for the study. These companies are currently using or piloting the technology to understand the adoption, value, success and challenges of AI in digital commerce. Organisations participated in this study were from the US, Canada, Brazil, France, Germany, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India and China. Among the respondents, three-quarters said that they are seeing double-digit improvements in the outcomes they measure.

Classification of description logic (DL) ontologies is a key computational problem in modern data management applications, so considerable effort has been devoted to the development and optimisation of practical reasoning calculi. Consequence-based calculi combine ideas from hypertableau and resolution in a way that has proved very effective in practice. However, existing consequence-based calculi can handle either Horn DLs (which do not support disjunction) or DLs without number restrictions. In this paper, we overcome this important limitation and present the first consequence-based calculus for deciding concept subsumption in the DL ALCHIQ+. Our calculus runs in exponential time assuming unary coding of numbers, and on ELH ontologies it runs in polynomial time. The extension to disjunctions and number restrictions is technically involved: we capture the relevant consequences using first-order clauses, and our inference rules adapt paramodulation techniques from first-order theorem proving. By using a well-known preprocessing step, the calculus can also decide concept subsumptions in SRIQ---a rich DL that covers all features of OWL 2 DL apart from nominals and datatypes. We have implemented our calculus in a new reasoner called Sequoia. We present the architecture of our reasoner and discuss several novel and important implementation techniques such as clause indexing and redundancy elimination. Finally, we present the results of an extensive performance evaluation, which revealed Sequoia to be competitive with existing reasoners. Thus, the calculus and the techniques we present in this paper provide an important addition to the repertoire of practical implementation techniques for description logic reasoning.

Level-set optimization formulations with data-driven constraints minimize a regularization functional subject to matching observations to a given error level. These formulations are widely used, particularly for matrix completion and sparsity promotion in data interpolation and denoising. The misfit level is typically measured in the l2 norm, or other smooth metrics. In this paper, we present a new flexible algorithmic framework that targets nonsmooth level-set constraints, including L1, Linf, and even L0 norms. These constraints give greater flexibility for modeling deviations in observation and denoising, and have significant impact on the solution. Measuring error in the L1 and L0 norms makes the result more robust to large outliers, while matching many observations exactly. We demonstrate the approach for basis pursuit denoise (BPDN) problems as well as for extensions of BPDN to matrix factorization, with applications to interpolation and denoising of 5D seismic data. The new methods are particularly promising for seismic applications, where the amplitude in the data varies significantly, and measurement noise in low-amplitude regions can wreak havoc for standard Gaussian error models.

Deep learning has undoubtedly offered tremendous improvements in the performance of state-of-the-art speech emotion recognition (SER) systems. However, recent research on adversarial examples poses enormous challenges on the robustness of SER systems by showing the susceptibility of deep neural networks to adversarial examples as they rely only on small and imperceptible perturbations. In this study, we evaluate how adversarial examples can be used to attack SER systems and propose the first black-box adversarial attack on SER systems. We also explore potential defenses including adversarial training and generative adversarial network (GAN) to enhance robustness. Experimental evaluations suggest various interesting aspects of the effective utilization of adversarial examples useful for achieving robustness for SER systems opening up opportunities for researchers to further innovate in this space.

Being able to navigate to a target with minimal supervision and prior knowledge is critical to creating human-like assistive agents. Prior work on map-based and map-less approaches have limited generalizability. In this paper, we present a novel approach, Hybrid Asynchronous Universal Successor Representations (HAUSR), which overcomes the problem of generalizability to new goals by adapting recent work on Universal Successor Representations with Asynchronous Actor-Critic Agents. We show that the agent was able to successfully reach novel goals and we were able to quickly fine-tune the network for adapting to new scenes. This opens up novel application scenarios where intelligent agents could learn from and adapt to a wide range of environments with minimal human input.

The typical pipeline for a supervised machine learning project involves firstly the collection of a significant sample of labelled examples typically referred to as training data. Depending on whether the labels are continuous or categorical, the supervised learning task is known as regression or classification respectively. Next, once the training data is sufficiently clean and complete, it is used to directly build a predictive model using the machine learning algorithm of choice. The predictive model is then used to label new unlabelled examples, and if the labels of the new examples are known a priori by the user (but not used by the learning algorithm) then the predictive accuracy of the model can be evaluated. Different models can therefore be directly compared. In the usual case, the training data is "real", i.e. the model is learned directly from labelled examples that were collected specifically for that purpose. However, quite frequently, modifications are made to the training data after it is collected. For example, it is standard practice to remove outlier examples and normalise numeric values. Moreover, the machine learning algorithm itself may specify modifications to the training data.

Technology is fighting death with data – including machine learning and artificial intelligence. Last week marked the annual Health Informatics New Zealand conference, in which local and global innovators spoke about how their work is changing local healthcare models. Amongst the New Zealand companies leading the way are Umbrellar and Auckland's Mercy Radiology and Clinics. "If we want healthcare service delivery to be consistent across the country, and we want to provide the best value to patients, we need to embrace digital technology," comments Mercy Radiology and Clinics CEO Lloyd McCann. "We need to address cultural barriers to change in the sector. Data, information and intelligence will help us drive this cultural transformation."