South America
Sport, TV, tech and fashion: what does 2023 have in store for us?
There has been an audible buzz about Jack Draper in tennis circles for a while. But in 2023 expect the 21-year-old from Sutton in south-west London, who also has a contract with IMG Models, to crash into the mainstream. He certainly has enough of the right stuff, including the whiplash serve and punishing groundstrokes on the court, and the looks and personality off it. Draper first advertised his talents by taking a set off Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon in 2021, but it was in 2022 that he really made his mark – shooting from No 265 in the world rankings at the start of the year to a career-high 42nd by the end. Along the way, he has taken several high-profile scalps, including the 2020 US Open winner Dominic Thiem and world No 4 Stefanos Tsitsipas. He still needs to improve his fitness and ability to see out big games, but when he does, anything is possible. His fellow Brit Cameron Norrie says he is "sure" Draper "can easily get into the top 10". Expect Draper to make bounding strides towards that goal in the coming months. It may feel as if footballer Beth Mead has already made her mark.
How China is building a parallel generative AI universe • TechCrunch
The gigantic technological leap that machine learning models have shown in the last few months is getting everyone excited about the future of AI -- but also nervous about its uncomfortable consequences. After text-to-image tools from Stability AI and OpenAI became the talk of the town, ChatGPT's ability to hold intelligent conversations is the new obsession in sectors across the board. In China, where the tech community has always watched progress in the West closely, entrepreneurs, researchers, and investors are looking for ways to make their dent in the generative AI space. Tech firms are devising tools built on open source models to attract consumer and enterprise customers. Individuals are cashing in on AI-generated content.
AmbieGen: A Search-based Framework for Autonomous Systems Testing
Humeniuk, Dmytro, Khomh, Foutse, Antoniol, Giuliano
Thorough testing of safety-critical autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars, autonomous robots, and drones, is essential for detecting potential failures before deployment. One crucial testing stage is model-in-the-loop testing, where the system model is evaluated by executing various scenarios in a simulator. However, the search space of possible parameters defining these test scenarios is vast, and simulating all combinations is computationally infeasible. To address this challenge, we introduce AmbieGen, a search-based test case generation framework for autonomous systems. AmbieGen uses evolutionary search to identify the most critical scenarios for a given system, and has a modular architecture that allows for the addition of new systems under test, algorithms, and search operators. Currently, AmbieGen supports test case generation for autonomous robots and autonomous car lane keeping assist systems. In this paper, we provide a high-level overview of the framework's architecture and demonstrate its practical use cases.
A review of Implementation and Challenges of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Spraying Applications and Crop Monitoring in Indonesia
Fikri, Muhamad Rausyan, Candra, Taufiq, Saptaji, Kushendarsyah, Noviarini, Ajeng Nindi, Wardani, Dilla Ayu
Abstract: The rapid development of technology has brought unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to become widely known in the current era. The market of UAVs is also predicted to continue growing with related technologies in the future. UAVs have been used in various sectors, including livestock, forestry, and agriculture. In agricultural applications, UAVs are highly capable of increasing the productivity of the farm and reducing farmers' workload. This study examines the urgency of UAV implementation in the agriculture sector. A short history of UAVs is provided in this paper to portray the development of UAVs from time to time. The classification of UAVs is also discussed to differentiate various types of UAVs. The application of UAVs in spraying and crop monitoring is based on the previous studies that have been done by many scientific groups and researchers who are working closely to propose solutions for agriculture-related issues. Furthermore, the limitations of UAV applications are also identified. The challenges in implementing agricultural UAVs in Indonesia are also presented. Keywords: Unmanned aerial vehicle, agricultural UAV, spraying, crop monitoring. 1. Introduction According to the United Nations (UN), the world population is projected to reach 9.7 billion people in 2050 (UN, 2015). This vast population would potentially double the food demand in the future (Hunter et al., 2017). Consequently, the ever-growing population that would emerge could cause food shortages in the future. This issue has become a severe problem since the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced similar speculation in which the current agricultural production must be increased by 70 percent by 2050 to meet the increasing demand for highquality food (Mundial, 2021). Many people suffering from hunger become a signal of how severe the food shortage is, and it was reported that more than 820 million people in 2018 were considered undernutrition (WHO, 2019). Surprisingly, the earlier data mentioned shows the increasing tendency towards people suffering from hunger since only around 690 million people were considered suffering from hunger in 2015.
Optimizing Readability Using Genetic Algorithms
It corresponds to the level of literacy that is expected from the readers in the target audience. In this way, readability is considered one of the most critical factors that facilitate the user experience when consuming information. It is crucial because it is key to establishing a trusting relationship between information producers and consumers. It must be considered that some factors, such as complexity, legibility, or typography, contribute to making a text readable. However, not all factors are quantifiable and cannot be optimized by automatic techniques. In this paper, we focus solely and exclusively on factors of a quantifiable nature, which always revolve around basic or advanced statistics associated with the text to be optimized. Therefore, text readability refers to how simple it is to read and comprehend a given text, depending on its unique characteristics. These characteristics are usually measurable through metrics like the number of syllables in a sentence.
Optimization of Image Transmission in a Cooperative Semantic Communication Networks
Zhang, Wenjing, Wang, Yining, Chen, Mingzhe, Luo, Tao, Niyato, Dusit
In this paper, a semantic communication framework for image data transmission is developed. In the investigated framework, a set of servers cooperatively transmit image data to a set of users utilizing semantic communication techniques, which enable servers to transmit only the semantic information that accurately captures the meaning of images. To evaluate the performance of studied semantic communication system, a multimodal metric called image-to-graph semantic similarity (ISS) is proposed to measure the correlation between the extracted semantic information and the original image. To meet the ISS requirement of each user, each server must jointly determine the semantic information to be transmitted and the resource blocks (RBs) used for semantic information transmission. Due to the cochannel interference among users associated with different servers, each server must cooperate with other servers to find a globally optimal semantic oriented RB allocation. We formulate this problem as an optimization problem whose goal is to minimize the sum of the average transmission latency of each server while reaching the ISS requirement. To solve this problem, we propose a value decomposition based entropy-maximized multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm. The proposed algorithm enables each server to coordinate with other servers in training stage and execute RB allocation in a distributed manner to approach to a globally optimal performance with less training iterations.
Modeling social resilience: Questions, answers, open problems
Schweitzer, Frank, Andres, Georges, Casiraghi, Giona, Gote, Christoph, Roller, Ramona, Scholtes, Ingo, Vaccario, Giacomo, Zingg, Christian
Resilience denotes the capacity of a system to withstand shocks and its ability to recover from them. We develop a framework to quantify the resilience of highly volatile, non-equilibrium social organizations, such as collectives or collaborating teams. It consists of four steps: (i) \emph{delimitation}, i.e., narrowing down the target systems, (ii) \emph{conceptualization}, .e., identifying how to approach social organizations, (iii) formal \emph{representation} using a combination of agent-based and network models, (iv) \emph{operationalization}, i.e. specifying measures and demonstrating how they enter the calculation of resilience. Our framework quantifies two dimensions of resilience, the \emph{robustness} of social organizations and their \emph{adaptivity}, and combines them in a novel resilience measure. It allows monitoring resilience instantaneously using longitudinal data instead of an ex-post evaluation.
Mapping Knowledge Representations to Concepts: A Review and New Perspectives
Holmberg, Lars, Davidsson, Paul, Linde, Per
The success of neural networks builds to a large extent on their ability to create internal knowledge representations from real-world high-dimensional data, such as images, sound, or text. Approaches to extract and present these representations, in order to explain the neural network's decisions, is an active and multifaceted research field. To gain a deeper understanding of a central aspect of this field, we have performed a targeted review focusing on research that aims to associate internal representations with human understandable concepts. In doing this, we added a perspective on the existing research by using primarily deductive nomological explanations as a proposed taxonomy. We find this taxonomy and theories of causality, useful for understanding what can be expected, and not expected, from neural network explanations. The analysis additionally uncovers an ambiguity in the reviewed literature related to the goal of model explainability; is it understanding the ML model or, is it actionable explanations useful in the deployment domain?
Broad Learning System with Takagi-Sugeno Fuzzy Subsystem for Tobacco Origin Identification based on Near Infrared Spectroscopy
Tobacco origin identification is significantly important in tobacco industry. Modeling analysis for sensor data with near infrared spectroscopy has become a popular method for rapid detection of internal features. However, for sensor data analysis using traditional artificial neural network or deep network models, the training process is extremely time-consuming. In this paper, a novel broad learning system with Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy subsystem is proposed for rapid identification of tobacco origin. Incremental learning is employed in the proposed method, which obtains the weight matrix of the network after a very small amount of computation, resulting in much shorter training time for the model, with only about 3 seconds for the extra step training. The experimental results show that the TS fuzzy subsystem can extract features from the near infrared data and effectively improve the recognition performance. The proposed method can achieve the highest prediction accuracy (95.59 %) in comparison to the traditional classification algorithms, artificial neural network, and deep convolutional neural network, and has a great advantage in the training time with only about 128 seconds.
Machine learning approach detects brain tumor boundaries
Glioblastoma is an aggressive and hard-to-treat type of brain cancer. But because it affects fewer than 10 in 100,000 people each year, it's considered to be a rare disease. Defining the boundaries of glioblastoma tumors is important for treatment. One key region represents the breakdown of the blood-brain barrier inside the tumor. Another, called the tumor core, could be relevant for surgical removal.