Purpose: Traffic volume in empty container depots has been highly volatile due to external factors. Forecasting the expected container truck traffic along with having a dynamic module to foresee the future workload plays a critical role in improving the work efficiency. This paper studies the relevant literature and designs a forecasting model addressing the aforementioned issues. Methodology: The paper develops a forecasting model to predict hourly work and traffic volume of container trucks in an empty container depot using a Bayesian Neural Network based model. Furthermore, the paper experiments with datasets with different characteristics to assess the model's forecasting range for various data sources. Findings: The real data of an empty container depot is utilized to develop a forecasting model and to later verify the capabilities of the model. The findings show the performance validity of the model and provide the groundwork to build an effective traffic and workload planning system for the empty container depot in question. Originality: This paper proposes a Bayesian deep learning-based forecasting model for traffic and workload of an empty container depot using real-world data. This designed and implemented forecasting model offers a solution with which every actor in the container truck transportation benefits from the optimized workload.

Streets networks provide an invaluable source of information about the different temporal and spatial patterns emerging in our cities. These streets are often represented as graphs where intersections are modelled as nodes and streets as links between them. Previous work has shown that raster representations of the original data can be created through a learning algorithm on low-dimensional representations of the street networks. In contrast, models that capture high-level urban network metrics can be trained through convolutional neural networks. However, the detailed topological data is lost through the rasterisation of the street network. The models cannot recover this information from the image alone, failing to capture complex street network features. This paper proposes a model capable of inferring good representations directly from the street network. Specifically, we use a variational autoencoder with graph convolutional layers and a decoder that outputs a probabilistic fully-connected graph to learn latent representations that encode both local network structure and the spatial distribution of nodes. We train the model on thousands of street network segments and use the learnt representations to generate synthetic street configurations. Finally, we proposed a possible application to classify the urban morphology of different network segments by investigating their common characteristics in the learnt space.

A key question in a number of court cases is whether a speaker on an audio recording is a particular known speaker, for example, whether a speaker on a recording of an intercepted telephone call is the defendant. In most English-speaking countries, expert testimony is only admissible in a court of law if it will potentially assist the judge or the jury to make a decision. If the judge or the jury's speaker identification were equally accurate or more accurate than a forensic scientist's forensic voice comparison, then the forensic-voice-comparison testimony would not be admissible. In a research paper published in the journal Forensic Science International, a multidisciplinary international team of researchers has reported the first set of results from a comprehensive study that compares the accuracy of speaker-identification by individual listeners (like judges or jury members) with the accuracy of a forensic-voice-comparison system that is based on state-of-the-art automatic-speaker-recognition technology, and that does so using recordings that reflect the conditions of an actual case. The questioned-speaker recording was of a telephone call with background office noise, and the known-speaker recording was of a police interview conducted in echoey room with background ventilation-system noise.

Peach, the global market leader in video advertising workflow and delivery has announced support of Netflix's new ad-supported service Basic with Ads. To coincide with the launch of the service, Peach has launched new destinations enabling clients to deliver ads to Netflix across multiple territories including UK, Australia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Brazil with more to follow. Peach provides a connected advertising workflow, enabling clients to get their ads delivered to Netflix straight from the edit suite, while ensuring the highest possible quality, formatting and accuracy. Doug Conely, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Peach, said: "This is a pivotal moment for TV advertising. As leaders in global creative ad delivery for over 25 years, we've seen ad spend in Connected TV grow rapidly in the UK* and the rest of the world, and we expect to see further acceleration of growth driven by ad-supported tiers such as Netflix. AI and ML News: An Investment Into Artificial Intelligence as Daktela Buys Coworkers.ai "Netflix's Basic with Ads will bring our clients new audiences in a premium environment, creating opportunities for more addressable and premium content.

The increased importance of mobile photography created a need for fast and performant RAW image processing pipelines capable of producing good visual results in spite of the mobile camera sensor limitations. While deep learning-based approaches can efficiently solve this problem, their computational requirements usually remain too large for high-resolution on-device image processing. To address this limitation, we propose a novel PyNET-V2 Mobile CNN architecture designed specifically for edge devices, being able to process RAW 12MP photos directly on mobile phones under 1.5 second and producing high perceptual photo quality. To train and to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution, we use the real-world Fujifilm UltraISP dataset consisting on thousands of RAW-RGB image pairs captured with a professional medium-format 102MP Fujifilm camera and a popular Sony mobile camera sensor. The results demonstrate that the PyNET-V2 Mobile model can substantially surpass the quality of tradition ISP pipelines, while outperforming the previously introduced neural network-based solutions designed for fast image processing. Furthermore, we show that the proposed architecture is also compatible with the latest mobile AI accelerators such as NPUs or APUs that can be used to further reduce the latency of the model to as little as 0.5 second. The dataset, code and pre-trained models used in this paper are available on the project website: https://github.com/gmalivenko/PyNET-v2

Mathematical models have been used to understand the spread patterns of infectious diseases such as Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). The transmission component of the models can be modelled in an age-dependent manner via introducing contact matrix for the population, which describes the contact rates between the age groups. Since social contact patterns vary from country to country, we can compare and group the countries using the corresponding contact matrices. In this paper, we present a framework for clustering countries based on their contact matrices with respect to an underlying epidemic model. Since the pipeline is generic and modular, we demonstrate its application in a COVID-19 model from R\"ost et. al. which gives a hint about which countries can be compared in a pandemic situation, when only non-pharmaceutical interventions are available.

Psychiatric patients' passive activity monitoring is crucial to detect behavioural shifts in real-time, comprising a tool that helps clinicians supervise patients' evolution over time and enhance the associated treatments' outcomes. Frequently, sleep disturbances and mental health deterioration are closely related, as mental health condition worsening regularly entails shifts in the patients' circadian rhythms. Therefore, Sleep Activity Recognition constitutes a behavioural marker to portray patients' activity cycles and to detect behavioural changes among them. Moreover, mobile passively sensed data captured from smartphones, thanks to these devices' ubiquity, constitute an excellent alternative to profile patients' biorhythm. In this work, we aim to identify major sleep episodes based on passively sensed data. To do so, a Heterogeneous Hidden Markov Model is proposed to model a discrete latent variable process associated with the Sleep Activity Recognition task in a self-supervised way. We validate our results against sleep metrics reported by clinically tested wearables, proving the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

While neural networks-based photo processing solutions can provide a better image quality compared to the traditional ISP systems, their application to mobile devices is still very limited due to their very high computational complexity. In this paper, we present a novel MicroISP model designed specifically for edge devices, taking into account their computational and memory limitations. The proposed solution is capable of processing up to 32MP photos on recent smartphones using the standard mobile ML libraries and requiring less than 1 second to perform the inference, while for FullHD images it achieves real-time performance. The architecture of the model is flexible, allowing to adjust its complexity to devices of different computational power. To evaluate the performance of the model, we collected a novel Fujifilm UltraISP dataset consisting of thousands of paired photos captured with a normal mobile camera sensor and a professional 102MP medium-format FujiFilm GFX100 camera. The experiments demonstrated that, despite its compact size, the MicroISP model is able to provide comparable or better visual results than the traditional mobile ISP systems, while outperforming the previously proposed efficient deep learning based solutions. Finally, this model is also compatible with the latest mobile AI accelerators, achieving good runtime and low power consumption on smartphone NPUs and APUs. The code, dataset and pre-trained models are available on the project website: https://people.ee.ethz.ch/~ihnatova/microisp.html

The emergence of variational quantum applications has led to the development of automatic differentiation techniques in quantum computing. Recently, Zhu et al. (PLDI 2020) have formulated differentiable quantum programming with bounded loops, providing a framework for scalable gradient calculation by quantum means for training quantum variational applications. However, promising parameterized quantum applications, e.g., quantum walk and unitary implementation, cannot be trained in the existing framework due to the natural involvement of unbounded loops. To fill in the gap, we provide the first differentiable quantum programming framework with unbounded loops, including a newly designed differentiation rule, code transformation, and their correctness proof. Technically, we introduce a randomized estimator for derivatives to deal with the infinite sum in the differentiation of unbounded loops, whose applicability in classical and probabilistic programming is also discussed. We implement our framework with Python and Q#, and demonstrate a reasonable sample efficiency. Through extensive case studies, we showcase an exciting application of our framework in automatically identifying close-to-optimal parameters for several parameterized quantum applications.

Transformers can learn to perform numerical computations from examples only. I study nine problems of linear algebra, from basic matrix operations to eigenvalue decomposition and inversion, and introduce and discuss four encoding schemes to represent real numbers. On all problems, transformers trained on sets of random matrices achieve high accuracies (over 90%). The models are robust to noise, and can generalize out of their training distribution. In particular, models trained to predict Laplace-distributed eigenvalues generalize to different classes of matrices: Wigner matrices or matrices with positive eigenvalues. The reverse is not true.