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The Complete Guide to Artificial Intelligence for Kids

#artificialintelligence

On top of the printed / ebook AI guide, if we can get the campaign to $4000, I will create a high quality video readthrough of the guide. Do you sometimes wonder how to best prepare your kids for an uncertain and technology-filled future? Does all the talk about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths), STEAM (the A is Art), STREAM (the R is robotics), artificial intelligence, automation and coding sometimes seem overwhelming? If you answered yes to any of the questions above, then you're not alone. Many teachers, parents and carers regularly have these thoughts.


Multi-Rate Gated Recurrent Convolutional Networks for Video-Based Pedestrian Re-Identification

AAAI Conferences

Matching pedestrians across multiple camera views has attracted lots of recent research attention due to its apparent importance in surveillance and security applications.While most existing works address this problem in a still-image setting, we consider the more informative and challenging video-based person re-identification problem, where a video of a pedestrian as seen in one camera needs to be matched to a gallery of videos captured by other non-overlapping cameras. We employ a convolutional network to extract the appearance and motion features from raw video sequences, and then feed them into a multi-rate recurrent network to exploit the temporal correlations, and more importantly, to take into account the fact that pedestrians, sometimes even the same pedestrian, move in different speeds across different camera views. The combined network is trained in an end-to-end fashion, and we further propose an initialization strategy via context reconstruction to largely improve the performance. We conduct extensive experiments on the iLIDS-VID and PRID-2011 datasets, and our experimental results confirm the effectiveness and the generalization ability of our model.


Assessing National Development Plans for Alignment With Sustainable Development Goals via Semantic Search

AAAI Conferences

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) helps countries implement the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), an agenda for tackling major societal issues such as poverty, hunger, and environmental degradation by the year 2030. A key service provided by UNDP to countries that seek it is a review of national development plans and sector strategies by policy experts to assess alignment of national targets with one or more of the 169 targets of the 17 SDGs. Known as the Rapid Integrated Assessment (RIA), this process involves manual review of hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of documents and takes weeks to complete. In this work, we develop a natural language processing-based methodology to accelerate the workflow of policy experts. Specifically we use paragraph embedding techniques to find paragraphs in the documents that match the semantic concepts of each of the SDG targets. One novel technical contribution of our work is in our use of historical RIAs from other countries as a form of neighborhood-based supervision for matches in the country under study. We have successfully piloted the algorithm to perform the RIA for Papua New Guinea’s national plan, with the UNDP estimating it will help reduce their completion time from an estimated 3-4 weeks to 3 days.


3D Box Proposals From a Single Monocular Image of an Indoor Scene

AAAI Conferences

Modern object detection methods typically rely on bounding box proposals as input. While initially popularized in the 2D case, this idea has received increasing attention for 3D bounding boxes. Nevertheless, existing 3D box proposal techniques all assume having access to depth as input, which is unfortunately not always available in practice. In this paper, we therefore introduce an approach to generating 3D box proposals from a single monocular RGB image. To this end, we develop an integrated, fully differentiable framework that inherently predicts a depth map, extracts a 3D volumetric scene representation and generates 3D object proposals. At the core of our approach lies a novel residual, differentiable truncated signed distance function module, which, accounting for the relatively low accuracy of the predicted depth map, extracts a 3D volumetric representation of the scene. Our experiments on the standard NYUv2 dataset demonstrate that our framework lets us generate high-quality 3D box proposals and that it outperforms the two-stage technique consisting of successively performing state-of-the-art depth prediction and depth-based 3D proposal generation.


HCVRD: A Benchmark for Large-Scale Human-Centered Visual Relationship Detection

AAAI Conferences

Visual relationship detection aims to capture interactions between pairs of objects in images. Relationships between objects and humans represent a particularly important subset of this problem, with implications for challenges such as understanding human behavior, and identifying affordances, amongst others. In addressing this problem we first construct a large-scale human-centric visual relationship detection dataset (HCVRD), which provides many more types of relationship annotations (nearly 10K categories) than the previous released datasets. This large label space better reflects the reality of human-object interactions, but gives rise to a long-tail distribution problem, which in turn demands a zero-shot approach to labels appearing only in the test set. This is the first time this issue has been addressed. We propose a webly-supervised approach to these problems and demonstrate that the proposed model provides a strong baseline on our HCVRD dataset.


BaitBuster: A Clickbait Identification Framework

AAAI Conferences

The use of tempting and often misleading headlines (clickbait) to allure readers has become a growing practice nowadays among the media outlets. The widespread use of clickbait risks the reader's trust in media. In this paper, we present BaitBuster, a browser extension and social bot based framework, that detects clickbaits floating on the web, provides brief explanation behind its decision, and regularly makes users aware of potential clickbaits.


Deep Stereo Matching With Explicit Cost Aggregation Sub-Architecture

AAAI Conferences

Deep neural networks have shown excellent performance for stereo matching. Many efforts focus on the feature extraction and similarity measurement of the matching cost computation step while less attention is paid on cost aggregation which is crucial for stereo matching. In this paper, we present a learning-based cost aggregation method for stereo matching by a novel sub-architecture in the end-to-end trainable pipeline. We reformulate the cost aggregation as a learning process of the generation and selection of cost aggregation proposals which indicate the possible cost aggregation results. The cost aggregation sub-architecture is realized by a two-stream network: one for the generation of cost aggregation proposals, the other for the selection of the proposals. The criterion for the selection is determined by the low-level structure information obtained from a light convolutional network. The two-stream network offers a global view guidance for the cost aggregation to rectify the mismatching value stemming from the limited view of the matching cost computation. The comprehensive experiments on challenge datasets such as KITTI and Scene Flow show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.


Multiagent Simple Temporal Problem: The Arc-Consistency Approach

AAAI Conferences

The Simple Temporal Problem (STP) is a fundamental temporal reasoning problem and has recently been extended to the Multiagent Simple Temporal Problem (MaSTP). In this paper we present a novel approach that is based on enforcing arc-consistency (AC) on the input (multiagent) simple temporal network. We show that the AC-based approach is sufficient for solving both the STP and MaSTP and provide efficient algorithms for them. As our AC-based approach does not impose new constraints between agents, it does not violate the privacy of the agents and is superior to the state-of-the-art approach to MaSTP. Empirical evaluations on diverse benchmark datasets also show that our AC-based algorithms for STP and MaSTP are significantly more efficient than existing approaches.


Meta-Search Through the Space of Representations and Heuristics on a Problem by Problem Basis

AAAI Conferences

Two key aspects of problem solving are representation and search heuristics. Both theoretical and experimental studies have shown that there is no one best problem representation nor one best search heuristic. Therefore, some recent methods, e.g., portfolios, learn a good combination of problem solvers to be used in a given domain or set of domains. There are even dynamic portfolios that select a particular combination of problem solvers specific to a problem. These approaches: (1) need to perform a learning step; (2) do not usually focus on changing the representation of the input domain/problem; and (3) frequently do not adapt the portfolio to the specific problem. This paper describes a meta-reasoning system that searches through the space of combinations of representations and heuristics to find one suitable for optimally solving the specific problem. We show that this approach can be better than selecting a combination to use for all problems within a domain and is competitive with state of the art optimal planners.


Knowledge, Fairness, and Social Constraints

AAAI Conferences

In the context of fair allocation of indivisible items, fairness concepts often compare the satisfaction of an agent to the satisfaction she would have from items that are not allocated to her: in particular, envy-freeness requires that no agent prefers the share of someone else to her own share. We argue that these notions could also be defined relative to the knowledge that an agent has on how the items that she does not receive are distributed among other agents. We define a family of epistemic notions of envy-freeness, parameterized by a social graph, where an agent observes the share of her neighbours but not of her non-neighbours. We also define an intermediate notion between envy-freeness and proportionality, also parameterized by a social graph. These weaker notions of envy-freeness are useful when seeking a fair allocation, since envy-freeness is often too strong. We position these notions with respect to known ones, thus revealing new rich hierarchies of fairness concepts. Finally, we present a very general framework that covers all the existing and many new fairness concepts.