K Raveendran A global survey of companies has revealed a serious shortage of tech talent when it comes to artificial intelligence, which is threatening to slow down the shift towards the new productivity tool. A majority of respondents in the survey, carried out by management consultancy McKinsey, have reported difficulty in hiring for each AI-related role in the past year, and most say it either wasn't any easier or was more difficult to acquire this talent than in years past. AI data scientists remain particularly scarce, with the largest share of respondents rating data scientist as a role that has been difficult to fill, out of the roles we asked about. The findings are particularly relevant to India, which boasts the world's biggest talent pool, and have lessons for the country's education system. India has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the IT boom, triggered by the highly feared Y2K problem at the turn of the new millennium, which ultimately turned out to be a non-issue.

Croatia take on Morocco for the third-place playoff at World Cup 2022. Saturday's game will be the second encounter between the Atlas Lions and 2018 runners-up at this year's World Cup in Qatar. Their opening group match ended in a goalless draw. Kashef, our artificial intelligence (AI) robot, has analysed more than 200 metrics, including the number of wins, goals scored and FIFA rankings, from matches played over the past century to see who is most likely to win on Saturday. Prediction: Morocco's dreams of reaching the World Cup final were dashed after a 2-0 loss to France in the semifinal.

We present the GPry algorithm for fast Bayesian inference of general (non-Gaussian) posteriors with a moderate number of parameters. GPry does not need any pre-training, special hardware such as GPUs, and is intended as a drop-in replacement for traditional Monte Carlo methods for Bayesian inference. Our algorithm is based on generating a Gaussian Process surrogate model of the log-posterior, aided by a Support Vector Machine classifier that excludes extreme or non-finite values. An active learning scheme allows us to reduce the number of required posterior evaluations by two orders of magnitude compared to traditional Monte Carlo inference. Our algorithm allows for parallel evaluations of the posterior at optimal locations, further reducing wall-clock times. We significantly improve performance using properties of the posterior in our active learning scheme and for the definition of the GP prior. In particular we account for the expected dynamical range of the posterior in different dimensionalities. We test our model against a number of synthetic and cosmological examples. GPry outperforms traditional Monte Carlo methods when the evaluation time of the likelihood (or the calculation of theoretical observables) is of the order of seconds; for evaluation times of over a minute it can perform inference in days that would take months using traditional methods. GPry is distributed as an open source Python package (pip install gpry) and can also be found at https://github.com/jonaselgammal/GPry.

Weakly supervised machine learning algorithms are able to learn from ambiguous samples or labels, e.g., multi-instance learning or partial-label learning. However, in some real-world tasks, each training sample is associated with not only multiple instances but also a candidate label set that contains one ground-truth label and some false positive labels. Specifically, at least one instance pertains to the ground-truth label while no instance belongs to the false positive labels. In this paper, we formalize such problems as multi-instance partial-label learning (MIPL). Existing multi-instance learning algorithms and partial-label learning algorithms are suboptimal for solving MIPL problems since the former fail to disambiguate a candidate label set, and the latter cannot handle a multi-instance bag. To address these issues, a tailored algorithm named MIPLGP, i.e., Multi-Instance Partial-Label learning with Gaussian Processes, is proposed. MIPLGP first assigns each instance with a candidate label set in an augmented label space, then transforms the candidate label set into a logarithmic space to yield the disambiguated and continuous labels via an exclusive disambiguation strategy, and last induces a model based on the Gaussian processes. Experimental results on various datasets validate that MIPLGP is superior to well-established multi-instance learning and partial-label learning algorithms for solving MIPL problems. Our code and datasets will be made publicly available.

Early recognition of clinical deterioration (CD) has vital importance in patients' survival from exacerbation or death. Electronic health records (EHRs) data have been widely employed in Early Warning Scores (EWS) to measure CD risk in hospitalized patients. Recently, EHRs data have been utilized in Machine Learning (ML) models to predict mortality and CD. The ML models have shown superior performance in CD prediction compared to EWS. Since EHRs data are structured and tabular, conventional ML models are generally applied to them, and less effort is put into evaluating the artificial neural network's performance on EHRs data. Thus, in this article, an extremely boosted neural network (XBNet) is used to predict CD, and its performance is compared to eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and random forest (RF) models. For this purpose, 103,105 samples from thirteen Brazilian hospitals are used to generate the models. Moreover, the principal component analysis (PCA) is employed to verify whether it can improve the adopted models' performance. The performance of ML models and Modified Early Warning Score (MEWS), an EWS candidate, are evaluated in CD prediction regarding the accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and geometric mean (G-mean) metrics in a 10-fold cross-validation approach. According to the experiments, the XGBoost model obtained the best results in predicting CD among Brazilian hospitals' data.

The career path of Colombian physicist Luisa Fernanda Chaparro Sierra took her from studying the Higgs Boson at CERN, to using similar machine learning techniques to gauge perceptions of crime in the Colombian capital of Bogota. Chaparro, currently a Research Professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Monterrey, México, says that after finishing her Phd, she had the opportunity to be part of the DataLab (Laboratorio de Datos) of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia where she used the techniques of handling large databases to help understand the problem of the perception of security in Bogota via machine learning methods. "At CERN, we handled large amounts of data and to differentiate between signal and background; we used supervised machine learning techniques, so I used similar methods and adapted others for the case of perception of security," she says, adding that DataLab was composed of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers with knowledge in programming and statistics. "We used Twitter as our data source and reviewed tweets that talked about security in the city for a year," Chaparro says, "The goal was to design a model that would allow us to quantify something as subjective as perception." The researchers were also hoping to find a relationship between it and real crimes by comparing the results with the databases provided by the National Police.

… studying the Higgs Boson at CERN, to using similar machine learning techniques to gauge perceptions of crime in the Colombian capital of Bogota.

On Sunday, December 18, on the pitch of Lusail Stadium in Qatar, Argentina will take on 2018 defending champions France for football's most coveted trophy. The FIFA World Cup, now in its 22nd edition, has been held every four years since 1930, except in 1942 and 1946 because of World War II. Over its 92-year history, 79 nations have battled it out for the top prize. Of these, 13 countries have made it to the finals, with eight being crowned champions. Only European and South American teams have ever reached the finals.

Student success models might be prone to develop weak spots, i.e., examples hard to accurately classify due to insufficient representation during model creation. This weakness is one of the main factors undermining users' trust, since model predictions could for instance lead an instructor to not intervene on a student in need. In this paper, we unveil the need of detecting and characterizing unknown unknowns in student success prediction in order to better understand when models may fail. Unknown unknowns include the students for which the model is highly confident in its predictions, but is actually wrong. Therefore, we cannot solely rely on the model's confidence when evaluating the predictions quality. We first introduce a framework for the identification and characterization of unknown unknowns. We then assess its informativeness on log data collected from flipped courses and online courses using quantitative analyses and interviews with instructors. Our results show that unknown unknowns are a critical issue in this domain and that our framework can be applied to support their detection. The source code is available at https://github.com/epfl-ml4ed/unknown-unknowns.

End-to-End speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) is generally evaluated with text-based metrics. This means that generated speech has to be automatically transcribed, making the evaluation dependent on the availability and quality of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. In this paper, we propose a text-free evaluation metric for end-to-end S2ST, named BLASER, to avoid the dependency on ASR systems. BLASER leverages a multilingual multimodal encoder to directly encode the speech segments for source input, translation output and reference into a shared embedding space and computes a score of the translation quality that can be used as a proxy to human evaluation. To evaluate our approach, we construct training and evaluation sets from more than 40k human annotations covering seven language directions. The best results of BLASER are achieved by training with supervision from human rating scores. We show that when evaluated at the sentence level, BLASER correlates significantly better with human judgment compared to ASR-dependent metrics including ASR-SENTBLEU in all translation directions and ASR-COMET in five of them. Our analysis shows combining speech and text as inputs to BLASER does not increase the correlation with human scores, but best correlations are achieved when using speech, which motivates the goal of our research. Moreover, we show that using ASR for references is detrimental for text-based metrics.