National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists are preparing to use machine learning (ML) to more easily monitor threatened ice seal populations in Alaska between April and May. Ice flows are critical to seal life cycles but are melting due to climate change -- which has hit the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions hardest. So scientists are trying to track species' population distributions. But surveying millions of aerial photographs of sea ice a year for ice seals takes months. And the data is outdated by the time statisticians analyze it and share it with the NOAA assistant regional administrator for protected resources in Juneau, according to a Microsoft blog post.

Moreland's project combines AI technology with improved cameras on a NOAA turboprop airplane that will fly over the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska this April and May, scanning and classifying the imagery to produce a population count of ice seals and polar bears that will be ready in hours instead of months. Her colleague Manuel Castellote, a NOAA affiliate scientist, will apply a similar algorithm to the recordings he'll pick up from equipment scattered across the bottom of Alaska's Cook Inlet, helping him quickly decipher how the shrinking population of endangered belugas spent its winter.

On Saturday morning, I used an app on my phone to unlock a vehicle from Gig, a car sharing startup, and set off for a Valentine's Day weekend trip to northern California with my partner. By late Sunday afternoon, we were sitting on the side of a remote highway, a software issue on our smart car rendering it unusable. It was getting dark, we had no way of getting home, and I was contemplating the limits of the sharing economy and the ultimate costs of convenience. Gig is a company that rents a fleet of hybrid Toyota Priuses and electric Chevrolet Bolts in the Bay Area and Sacramento to 65,000 users, according to a spokesman for the company. It is part of a growing field of car-sharing services – including Zipcar, the now-defunct Share Now, and recently Uber and Lyft – that allow users to rent standardized vehicles on the go.

Most people only think about the systems that power their cities when something goes wrong. Unfortunately, many people in the San Francisco Bay Area had a lot to think about recently when their utility company began scheduled power outages in an attempt to prevent wildfires. The decision came after devastating fires last year were found to be the result of faulty equipment, including transformers. Transformers are the links between power plants, power transmission lines, and distribution networks. If something goes wrong with a transformer, entire power plants can go dark.

Efficient and interpretable spatial analysis is crucial in many fields such as geology, sports, and climate science. Large-scale spatial data often contains complex higher-order correlations across features and locations. While tensor latent factor models can describe higher-order correlations, they are inherently computationally expensive to train. Furthermore, for spatial analysis, these models should not only be predictive but also be spatially coherent. However, latent factor models are sensitive to initialization and can yield inexplicable results. We develop a novel Multi-resolution Tensor Learning (MRTL) algorithm for efficiently learning interpretable spatial patterns. MRTL initializes the latent factors from an approximate full-rank tensor model for improved interpretability and progressively learns from a coarse resolution to the fine resolution for an enormous computation speedup. We also prove the theoretical convergence and computational complexity of MRTL. When applied to two real-world datasets, MRTL demonstrates 4 ~ 5 times speedup compared to a fixed resolution while yielding accurate and interpretable models.

The simplified series is obtained by first applying their univariate technique to each of the variables independently; that is, each univariate batch of data is separated into variable-length subsequences, and the obtained subsequences are then clustered as explained in Section 4.1. With this process, a set of representative univariate subsequences is obtained for each variable. Each new multivariate batch of data is then represented by a vector of distances, (d 1,d 2,...,d l), where d j represents the Euclidean distance between the j th variable-length subsequence of the new batch and its corresponding representative subsequence. As with their univariate technique, the reference of normality that is considered by this method is the same time series. The technique proposed by Hu et al. [2019] is also based on reducing the dimensionality of the time series and allows us to detect variable-length discords, while using the same time series as the reference of normality. This is based on the fact that the most unusual subsequences tend to have local regions with significantly different densities (points that are similar) in comparison to the other subsequences in the series. Each point in the new univariate time series describes the density of a local region of the input multivariate time series obtained by a sliding window. This series is also used to obtain the variable-length subsequences. Discords are identified using the Euclidean and Bhattacharyya distances simultaneously.

When people hear about the race for Artificial Intelligence (AI) dominance, they often think that the main competition is between the US and China. After all, the US and China have most of the largest and most well funded AI companies on the planet, and the pace of funding, company growth, and adoption doesn't seem to be slowing anytime soon. However, if you look closely, you'll see that many other countries have a stake in the AI race, and indeed, some countries have AI efforts, funding, technologies, and intellectual property that make them serious contenders in the jostling for AI dominance. In fact according to a recent report from analyst firm Cognilytica, France, Israel, United Kingdom, and the United States all are equally strong when it comes to AI, with China, Canada, Germany, Japan, and South Korea equally close in their AI strategic strength. AI startups are raising more money than ever.

"If somebody graduated from a great university, that may be an indication that they will be capable of great things, but it's not necessarily the case. If you look at, say, people like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, these guys didn't graduate from college, but if you had a chance to hire them, of course that would be a good idea," Musk said. Instead, Musk said he looks for "evidence of exceptional ability. And if there is a track record of exceptional achievement, then it is likely that that will continue into the future," he told Auto Bild. Tesla needs artificial intelligence talent to work on its self-driving vehicle ambitions.

Can meta-learning discover generic ways of processing time-series (TS) from a diverse dataset so as to greatly improve generalization on new TS coming from different datasets? This work provides positive evidence to demonstrate this using a broad meta-learning framework which we show subsumes many existing meta-learning algorithms as specific cases. We further identify via theoretical analysis the meta-learning adaptation mechanisms within N-BEATS, a recent neural TS forecasting model. Our meta-learning theory predicts that N-BEATS iteratively generates a subset of its task-specific parameters based on a given TS input, thus gradually expanding the expressive power of the architecture on-the-fly. Our empirical results emphasize the importance of meta-learning for successful zero-shot forecasting to new sources of TS, supporting the claim that it is viable to train a neural network on a source TS dataset and deploy it on a different target TS dataset without retraining, resulting in performance that is at least as good as that of state-of-practice univariate forecasting models.

The world's tech powers are sending giant sums of money spinning into Canada, but while many see this as a sign of success, others are worried about researchers and intellectual property being swallowed wholesale. The country is in the midst of an artificial intelligence (AI) boom, with Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Huawei and other global heavyweights spending millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars on research hubs in Quebec, Ontario and Alberta. Canadian doors are open – some fear too open. Jim Hinton, an IP lawyer and founder of the Own Innovation consultancy, reckons that more than half of all AI patents in Canada end up being owned by foreign companies. What we need to be doing is getting money out of our ideas ourselves, instead of seeing foreign talent scoop it all up," said Hinton. "Otherwise we'll never have a Canadian champion." The country is home to hundreds of fledgling AI companies, including much-talked-about start-ups like Element AI and Deep Genomics, but they remain relatively small. "They don't have a strong market position yet," Hinton says. Deep learning pioneers such as Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton (no relation to Jim) have nurtured top-notch talent in AI in Canada for years, back when AI was an emerging field. But despite Canadian inheriting this brilliant AI lead from the country's AI "godfathers", big foreign players have an unassailable advantage over homegrown efforts, Hinton said. "It's not an easy go for the average company to make a business out of AI.