AI can help contractors track progress, spot dangerous behaviors and prevent accidents. AI will one day completely transform the jobsite -- construction equipment will leverage machine learning to become more and more adept at performing complex tasks autonomously. In the meantime, though, here are three ways AI is changing construction now, at least for large contractors with deep pockets. Nothing throws off a schedule like a construction deficiency that's discovered when the work is almost completed. AI systems can help contractors keep a closer eye on all parts of a project throughout the construction process so they can make any necessary corrections right away.

Following the recent successful examples of large technology companies, many modern enterprises seek to build knowledge graphs to provide a unified view of corporate knowledge and to draw deep insights using machine learning and logical reasoning. There is currently a perceived disconnect between the traditional approaches for data science, typically based on machine learning and statistical modelling, and systems for reasoning with domain knowledge. In this paper we present a state-of-the-art Knowledge Graph Management System, Vadalog, which delivers highly expressive and efficient logical reasoning and provides seamless integration with modern data science toolkits, such as the Jupyter platform. We demonstrate how to use Vadalog to perform traditional data wrangling tasks, as well as complex logical and probabilistic reasoning. We argue that this is a significant step forward towards combining machine learning and reasoning in data science.

This paper proposes an enhancement of convolutional neural networks for object detection in resource-constrained robotics through a geometric input transformation called Visual Mesh. It uses object geometry to create a graph in vision space, reducing computational complexity by normalizing the pixel and feature density of objects. The experiments compare the Visual Mesh with several other fast convolutional neural networks. The results demonstrate execution times sixteen times quicker than the fastest competitor tested, while achieving outstanding accuracy.

More than 2,400 researchers, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and others have signed a pledge – organised by the Future of Life Institute (FLI) – promising not to develop lethal autonomous weapons. In addition to many prominent individuals, the list of signatories also includes over 160 AI-related firms and organisations from around the world – such as Google DeepMind, XPRIZE Foundation, University College London, the European Association for AI (EurAI), Swedish AI Society (SAIS), ClearPath Robotics and OTTO Motors. The pledge is being announced today at the annual International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Sweden, which draws over 5,000 of the world's leading AI researchers. Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to play an increasing role in military systems. There is an urgent opportunity and necessity for citizens, policymakers, and leaders to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable uses of AI.

White matter hyperintensity (WMH) is commonly found in elder individuals and appears to be associated with brain diseases. U-net is a convolutional network that has been widely used for biomedical image segmentation. Recently, U-net has been successfully applied to WMH segmentation. Random initialization is usally used to initialize the model weights in the U-net. However, the model may coverage to different local optima with different randomly initialized weights. We find a combination of thresholding and averaging the outputs of U-nets with different random initializations can largely improve the WMH segmentation accuracy. Based on this observation, we propose a post-processing technique concerning the way how averaging and thresholding are conducted. Specifically, we first transfer the score maps from three U-nets to binary masks via thresholding and then average those binary masks to obtain the final WMH segmentation. Both quantitative analysis (via the Dice similarity coefficient) and qualitative analysis (via visual examinations) reveal the superior performance of the proposed method. This post-processing technique is independent of the model used. As such, it can also be applied to situations where other deep learning models are employed, especially when random initialization is adopted and pre-training is unavailable.

This paper examines to what degree current deep learning architectures for image caption generation capture spatial language. On the basis of the evaluation of examples of generated captions from the literature we argue that systems capture what objects are in the image data but not where these objects are located: the captions generated by these systems are the output of a language model conditioned on the output of an object detector that cannot capture fine-grained location information. Although language models provide useful knowledge for image captions, we argue that deep learning image captioning architectures should also model geometric relations between objects.

Industrial Revolution (4IR) (Xing and Marwala, 2017), many countries (Shah et al., 2015; Ding and Li, 2015) are setting out an overarching goal of building/securing an "innovation-driven" economy. As innovation emphasizes the implementation of ideas, creativity is typically regarded as the first stage of innovation in which generating ideas becomes the dominant focus (Tang and Werner, 2017; Amabile, 1996; Mumford and Gustafson, 1988; Rank et al., 2004; West, 2002). In other words, if creativity is absent, innovation could be just luck. Though creativity can be generally understood as the capability of producing original and novel work or knowledge, the universal definition of creativity remains rather controversial, mainly due to its complex nature (Tang and Werner, 2017; Hernández-Romero, 2017). But putting it informally, by famous innovator Steve Jobs in 1995, we can think creativity like this way (Sanchez-Burks et al., 2015): "Creative people [are] able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things."

Deep Learning is one of the newest trends in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence research. It is also one of the most popular scientific research trends now-a-days. Deep learning methods have brought revolutionary advances in computer vision and machine learning. Every now and then, new and new deep learning techniques are being born, outperforming state-of-the-art machine learning and even existing deep learning techniques. In recent years, the world has seen many major breakthroughs in this field. Since deep learning is evolving at a huge speed, its kind of hard to keep track of the regular advances especially for new researchers. In this paper, we are going to briefly discuss about recent advances in Deep Learning for past few years.

This work develops novel strategies for optimal planning with semantic observations using continuous state Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (CPOMDPs). Two major innovations are presented in relation to Gaussian mixture (GM) CPOMDP policy approximation methods. While existing methods have many theoretically nice properties, they are hampered by the inability to efficiently represent and reason over hybrid continuous-discrete probabilistic models. The first major innovation is the derivation of closed-form variational Bayes GM approximations of Point-Based Value Iteration Bellman policy backups, using softmax models of continuous-discrete semantic observation probabilities. A key benefit of this approach is that dynamic decision-making tasks can be performed with complex non-Gaussian uncertainties, while also exploiting continuous dynamic state space models (thus avoiding cumbersome and costly discretization). The second major innovation is a new clustering-based technique for mixture condensation that scales well to very large GM policy functions and belief functions. Simulation results for a target search and interception task with semantic observations show that the GM policies resulting from these innovations are more effective than those produced by other state of the art GM and Monte Carlo based policy approximations, but require significantly less modeling overhead and runtime cost. Additional results demonstrate the robustness of this approach to model errors.

The race to become the global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) has officially begun. In the past fifteen months, Canada, China, Denmark, the EU Commission, Finland, France, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Nordic-Baltic region, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, the UAE, and the UK have all released strategies to promote the use and development of AI. No two strategies are alike, with each focusing on different aspects of AI policy: scientific research, talent development, skills and education, public and private sector adoption, ethics and inclusion, standards and regulations, and data and digital infrastructure. This article summarizes the key policies and goals of each strategy, as well as related policies and initiatives that have announced since the release of the initial strategies. It also includes countries that have announced their intention to develop a strategy or have related AI policies in place. I plan to continuously update this article as new strategies and initiatives are announced. If a country or policy is missing (or if something in the summary is incorrect), please leave a comment and I will update the article as soon as possible. I also plan to write an article for each country that provides an in-depth look at AI policy. Once these articles are written, I will include a link to the bottom of each country's summary. June 28: Publication of original article, included Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, EU Commission, Finland, France, Germany, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, UAE, US, and UK.