Pacific Ocean
Multilingual Event Linking to Wikidata
Pratapa, Adithya, Gupta, Rishubh, Mitamura, Teruko
We present a task of multilingual linking of events to a knowledge base. We automatically compile a large-scale dataset for this task, comprising of 1.8M mentions across 44 languages referring to over 10.9K events from Wikidata. We propose two variants of the event linking task: 1) multilingual, where event descriptions are from the same language as the mention, and 2) crosslingual, where all event descriptions are in English. On the two proposed tasks, we compare multiple event linking systems including BM25+ (Lv and Zhai, 2011) and multilingual adaptations of the biencoder and crossencoder architectures from BLINK (Wu et al., 2020). In our experiments on the two task variants, we find both biencoder and crossencoder models significantly outperform the BM25+ baseline. Our results also indicate that the crosslingual task is in general more challenging than the multilingual task. To test the out-of-domain generalization of the proposed linking systems, we additionally create a Wikinews-based evaluation set. We present qualitative analysis highlighting various aspects captured by the proposed dataset, including the need for temporal reasoning over context and tackling diverse event descriptions across languages.
How do tuna schools associate to dFADs? A study using echo-sounder buoys to identify global patterns
Navarro-García, Manuel, Precioso, Daniel, Gavira-O'Neill, Kathryn, Torres-Barrán, Alberto, Gordo, David, Gallego, Víctor, Gómez-Ullate, David
As fishermen have noticed this behaviour, they have used both natural and man-made floating objects, or drifting Fish Aggregating Devices (dFADs), as a tool for finding and catching tropical tunas. The use of dFADs in tuna purse-seine fisheries has gradually increased since the 1980s to the present time, where vessels using dFADs now contribute to 36% of the world's total tropical tuna catch (Davies et al., 2014; Wain et al., 2021; ISSF, 2021). These widespread changes have highlighted the need to better understand the potential ecological effects of dFADs on tuna ecology and the marine environment, in order to ensure adequate management of fish stocks and dFAD usage. Indeed, both the dynamics of how and why tuna associate to dFADs are still poorly understood. Regarding the reasons behind tuna aggregation to dFADs, a number of hypotheses have been suggested (Fréon and Dagorn, 2000; Dempster and Taquet, 2004; Castro et al., 2002). Of these, two have gained traction: the "meeting-point" hypothesis, which considers that dFADs facilitate the encounter between individuals or schools, thus constituting larger schools that could benefit survival rates (Castro et al., 2002); and the "indicator-log" hypothesis, by which tunas may be safeguarding the survival of their eggs, larvae and juvenile stages by using drifting objects as indicators of areas where plankton and food is readily available (Hall et al., 1992). This scenario has led some authors to postulate that man-made dFADs could have detrimental effects on tuna populations by creating a so-called "ecological trap" which would lead tuna to remain associated to dFADs even as these drift into areas that could negatively affect the tuna's behaviour and biology (Marsac et al., 2000; Hallier and Gaertner, 2008). To the best of our knowledge, there is yet no sufficient evidence to either confirm or reject this hypothesis (see Dagorn et al. (2012) and references therein). Given the concerns around the widespread use of dFADs in tuna fisheries today, it is not surprising that a considerable amount of research has been devoted to characterizing the dynamics at play when tunas aggregate to dFADs.
Parallel Bayesian Optimization of Agent-based Transportation Simulation
Chhatre, Kiran, Feygin, Sidney, Sheppard, Colin, Waraich, Rashid
MATSim (Multi-Agent Transport Simulation Toolkit) is an open source large-scale agent-based transportation planning project applied to various areas like road transport, public transport, freight transport, regional evacuation, etc. BEAM (Behavior, Energy, Autonomy, and Mobility) framework extends MATSim to enable powerful and scalable analysis of urban transportation systems. The agents from the BEAM simulation exhibit 'mode choice' behavior based on multinomial logit model. In our study, we consider eight mode choices viz. bike, car, walk, ride hail, driving to transit, walking to transit, ride hail to transit, and ride hail pooling. The 'alternative specific constants' for each mode choice are critical hyperparameters in a configuration file related to a particular scenario under experimentation. We use the 'Urbansim-10k' BEAM scenario (with 10,000 population size) for all our experiments. Since these hyperparameters affect the simulation in complex ways, manual calibration methods are time consuming. We present a parallel Bayesian optimization method with early stopping rule to achieve fast convergence for the given multi-in-multi-out problem to its optimal configurations. Our model is based on an open source HpBandSter package. This approach combines hierarchy of several 1D Kernel Density Estimators (KDE) with a cheap evaluator (Hyperband, a single multidimensional KDE). Our model has also incorporated extrapolation based early stopping rule. With our model, we could achieve a 25% L1 norm for a large-scale BEAM simulation in fully autonomous manner. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first of its kind applied to large-scale multi-agent transportation simulations. This work can be useful for surrogate modeling of scenarios with very large populations.
AlphaFold, GPT-3 and How to Augment Intelligence with AI
Around the same time that Alan Turing was shaping his theories of machine intelligence in Manchester, another future giant of the computing world, Douglas Engelbart, was developing an alternative computing paradigm over 5,000 miles away in the Bay Area. Engelbart believed that computers, with their ability to synthesize and manipulate vast quantities of information, should help humans solve problems, rather than remove them from the problem-solving loop. This ideology is now known as augmented intelligence. Engelbart's contributions to the field (both as a PhD student at UC Berkeley and at SRI in the decades after) were perhaps best exemplified through "The Mother of All Demos" in 1968, where he unveiled for the first time many of the computing features we now take for granted -- the mouse, GUIs, hyperlinks, word processing, version control, and even video conferencing -- in a single demonstration. Although it's enticing to think about artificial intelligence passing human equivalency tests like Turing's Imitation Game (or maybe something more sophisticated for today's generalist AI models), we really should be thinking about how Engelbart's ideas translate to our modern AI era. Put another way, how do we build the next Mother of All Demos?
Adaptive Graph Spatial-Temporal Transformer Network for Traffic Flow Forecasting
Feng, Aosong, Tassiulas, Leandros
Traffic flow forecasting on graphs has real-world applications in many fields, such as transportation system and computer networks. Traffic forecasting can be highly challenging due to complex spatial-temporal correlations and non-linear traffic patterns. Existing works mostly model such spatial-temporal dependencies by considering spatial correlations and temporal correlations separately and fail to model the direct spatial-temporal correlations. Inspired by the recent success of transformers in the graph domain, in this paper, we propose to directly model the cross-spatial-temporal correlations on the spatial-temporal graph using local multi-head self-attentions. To reduce the time complexity, we set the attention receptive field to the spatially neighboring nodes, and we also introduce an adaptive graph to capture the hidden spatial-temporal dependencies. Based on these attention mechanisms, we propose a novel Adaptive Graph Spatial-Temporal Transformer Network (ASTTN), which stacks multiple spatial-temporal attention layers to apply self-attention on the input graph, followed by linear layers for predictions. Experimental results on public traffic network datasets, METR-LA PEMS-BAY, PeMSD4, and PeMSD7, demonstrate the superior performance of our model.
Cruise's Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco
Around midnight on June 28, Calvin Hu was driving with his girlfriend near San Francisco's Golden Gate Park when he pulled up at an intersection behind two white and orange autonomous Chevrolet Bolts operated by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors. Another was stopped to his right in the adjacent lane. The light turned green but the cars, which operate in the city without drivers, didn't move. When Hu prepared to reverse to make space to go around the frozen vehicles, he says, he noticed that several more Cruise vehicles had stopped in the lanes behind him. Hu, another driver, and a paratransit bus were trapped in a robotaxi sandwich.
ControlBurn: Nonlinear Feature Selection with Sparse Tree Ensembles
Liu, Brian, Xie, Miaolan, Yang, Haoyue, Udell, Madeleine
ControlBurn is a Python package to construct feature-sparse tree ensembles that support nonlinear feature selection and interpretable machine learning. The algorithms in this package first build large tree ensembles that prioritize basis functions with few features and then select a feature-sparse subset of these basis functions using a weighted lasso optimization criterion. The package includes visualizations to analyze the features selected by the ensemble and their impact on predictions. Hence ControlBurn offers the accuracy and flexibility of tree-ensemble models and the interpretability of sparse generalized additive models. ControlBurn is scalable and flexible: for example, it can use warm-start continuation to compute the regularization path (prediction error for any number of selected features) for a dataset with tens of thousands of samples and hundreds of features in seconds. For larger datasets, the runtime scales linearly in the number of samples and features (up to a log factor), and the package support acceleration using sketching. Moreover, the ControlBurn framework accommodates feature costs, feature groupings, and $\ell_0$-based regularizers. The package is user-friendly and open-source: its documentation and source code appear on https://pypi.org/project/ControlBurn/ and https://github.com/udellgroup/controlburn/.
Cluelessly Clueless AI
Douglas Hofstadter, a cognitive scientist, recently wrote in the Economist that he believes that GPT-3 is "cluelessly clueless." By this he means that GPT-3 has no idea about what it is saying. To illustrate, he and a colleague asked it a few questions. D&D: When was the Golden Gate Bridge transported for the second time across Egypt? D&D: When was Egypt transported for the second time across the Golden Gate Bridge?
Rules-based order key to Indo-Pacific security, Japan defense chief tells ASEAN
PHNOM PENH – Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said Wednesday during talks with his ASEAN counterparts that maintaining a rules-based international order in the Indo-Pacific region is important, apparently with China's growing maritime assertiveness in mind. In pushing for Japan's vision of a "free and open" Indo-Pacific, Kishi called for a regional code of conduct in the South China Sea to be "effective, substantial and consistent with international law," his ministry said in a press release. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites. If this does not resolve the issue or you are unable to add the domains to your allowlist, please see this support page.
Physics-Informed Statistical Modeling for Wildfire Aerosols Process Using Multi-Source Geostationary Satellite Remote-Sensing Data Streams
Wei, Guanzhou, Krishnan, Venkat, Xie, Yu, Sengupta, Manajit, Zhang, Yingchen, Liao, Haitao, Liu, Xiao
Increasingly frequent wildfires significantly affect solar energy production as the atmospheric aerosols generated by wildfires diminish the incoming solar radiation to the earth. Atmospheric aerosols are measured by Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD), and AOD data streams can be retrieved and monitored by geostationary satellites. However, multi-source remote-sensing data streams often present heterogeneous characteristics, including different data missing rates, measurement errors, systematic biases, and so on. To accurately estimate and predict the underlying AOD propagation process, there exist practical needs and theoretical interests to propose a physics-informed statistical approach for modeling wildfire AOD propagation by simultaneously utilizing, or fusing, multi-source heterogeneous satellite remote-sensing data streams. Leveraging a spectral approach, the proposed approach integrates multi-source satellite data streams with a fundamental advection-diffusion equation that governs the AOD propagation process. A bias correction process is included in the statistical model to account for the bias of the physics model and the truncation error of the Fourier series. The proposed approach is applied to California wildfires AOD data streams obtained from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Comprehensive numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the predictive capabilities and model interpretability of the proposed approach. Computer code has been made available on GitHub.