South America
Dating app takes a swipe at pandemic burnout by giving staff a paid week off
The past year has been a busy one for Bumble, which grew to more than 700 employees worldwide and launched its initial public offering in February. The nearly seven-year-old dating app in which women must initiate the first message remained busy during the pandemic, reporting that "virtual dating" through video chats increased 70 percent on the app since shutdowns began in March 2020.
'Tech for Good': Using technology to smooth disruption and improve well-being
The development and adoption of advanced technologies including smart automation and artificial intelligence has the potential not only to raise productivity and GDP growth but also to improve well-being more broadly, including through healthier life and longevity and more leisure. Alongside such benefits, these technologies also have the potential to reduce disruption and the potentially destabilizing effects on society arising from their adoption. Tech for Good: Smoothing disruption, improving well-being (PDF–1MB) examines the factors that can help society achieve such benefits and makes a first attempt to calculate the impact of technology adoption on welfare growth beyond GDP. Our modeling suggests that good outcomes for the economy overall and for individual well-being come about when technology adoption is focused on innovation-led growth rather than purely on labor reduction and cost savings through automation. This needs to be accompanied by proactive transition management that increases labor market fluidity and equips workers with new skills. Technology for centuries has both excited the human imagination and prompted fears about its effects. Today's technology cycle is no different, provoking a broad spectrum of hopes and fears.
MegazordNet: combining statistical and machine learning standpoints for time series forecasting
Menezes, Angelo Garangau, Mastelini, Saulo Martiello
Forecasting financial time series is considered to be a difficult task due to the chaotic feature of the series. Statistical approaches have shown solid results in some specific problems such as predicting market direction and single-price of stocks; however, with the recent advances in deep learning and big data techniques, new promising options have arises to tackle financial time series forecasting. Moreover, recent literature has shown that employing a combination of statistics and machine learning may improve accuracy in the forecasts in comparison to single solutions. Taking into consideration the mentioned aspects, in this work, we proposed the MegazordNet, a framework that explores statistical features within a financial series combined with a structured deep learning model for time series forecasting. We evaluated our approach predicting the closing price of stocks in the S&P 500 using different metrics, and we were able to beat single statistical and machine learning methods.
Weisfeiler and Lehman Go Cellular: CW Networks
Bodnar, Cristian, Frasca, Fabrizio, Otter, Nina, Wang, Yu Guang, Liò, Pietro, Montúfar, Guido, Bronstein, Michael
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are limited in their expressive power, struggle with long-range interactions and lack a principled way to model higher-order structures. These problems can be attributed to the strong coupling between the computational graph and the input graph structure. The recently proposed Message Passing Simplicial Networks naturally decouple these elements by performing message passing on the clique complex of the graph. Nevertheless, these models are severely constrained by the rigid combinatorial structure of Simplicial Complexes (SCs). In this work, we extend recent theoretical results on SCs to regular Cell Complexes, topological objects that flexibly subsume SCs and graphs. We show that this generalisation provides a powerful set of graph ``lifting'' transformations, each leading to a unique hierarchical message passing procedure. The resulting methods, which we collectively call CW Networks (CWNs), are strictly more powerful than the WL test and, in certain cases, not less powerful than the 3-WL test. In particular, we demonstrate the effectiveness of one such scheme, based on rings, when applied to molecular graph problems. The proposed architecture benefits from provably larger expressivity than commonly used GNNs, principled modelling of higher-order signals and from compressing the distances between nodes. We demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on a variety of molecular datasets.
Multi-Class Classification of Blood Cells -- End to End Computer Vision based diagnosis case study
The diagnosis of blood-based diseases often involves identifying and characterizing patient blood samples. Automated methods to detect and classify blood cell subtypes have important medical applications. Automated medical image processing and analysis offers a powerful tool for medical diagnosis. In this work we tackle the problem of white blood cell classification based on the morphological characteristics of their outer contour, color. The work we would explore a set of preprocessing and segmentation (Color-based segmentation, Morphological processing, contouring) algorithms along with a set of features extraction methods (Corner detection algorithms and Histogram of Gradients (HOG)), dimentionality reduction algorithms (Principal Component Analysis (PCA)) that are able to recognize and classify through various Unsupervised (k-nearest neighbors) and Supervised (Support Vector Machine, Decision Trees, Linear Discriminant Analysis, Quadratic Discriminant Analysis, Naïve Bayes) algorithms different categories of white blood cells to Eosinophil, Lymphocyte, Monocyte, and Neutrophil. We even take a step forwards to explore various Deep Convolutional Neural network architecture (Sqeezent, MobilenetV1, MobilenetV2, InceptionNet etc.) without preprocessing/segmentation and with preprocessing. We would like to explore many algorithms to identify the robust algorithm with least time complexity and low resource requirement. The outcome of this work can be a cue to selection of algorithms as per requirement for automated blood cell classification.
Online Handbook of Argumentation for AI: Volume 2
OHAAI Collaboration, null, Brannstrom, Andreas, Castagna, Federico, Duchatelle, Theo, Foulis, Matt, Kampik, Timotheus, Kuhlmann, Isabelle, Malmqvist, Lars, Morveli-Espinoza, Mariela, Mumford, Jack, Pandzic, Stipe, Schaefer, Robin, Thorburn, Luke, Xydis, Andreas, Yuste-Ginel, Antonio, Zheng, Heng
This volume contains revised versions of the papers selected for the second volume of the Online Handbook of Argumentation for AI (OHAAI). Previously, formal theories of argument and argument interaction have been proposed and studied, and this has led to the more recent study of computational models of argument. Argumentation, as a field within artificial intelligence (AI), is highly relevant for researchers interested in symbolic representations of knowledge and defeasible reasoning. The purpose of this handbook is to provide an open access and curated anthology for the argumentation research community. OHAAI is designed to serve as a research hub to keep track of the latest and upcoming PhD-driven research on the theory and application of argumentation in all areas related to AI.
The Future of Search Is Now! - Expert.ai
Every day, billions of internet users type questions into search engines via smartphones, desktop computers or IoT devices, 90 percent of whom are using Google. As a result, each time the company releases a new algorithm into cyberspace, top-ranked SEO marketers and webpage owners become fearful of losing their page-one rankings. However, the company's latest iteration is notably different from those previously released. Now, the tech giant has decided to take the next step and marry its latest algorithm with natural language processing (NLP). Many believe that this dynamic pairing could prove to be a game changer for search. As the primary tool for people to access information, the importance of search engines can't be overestimated.
How Chatbots Can Improve Access to Education in Emerging Markets
The business use cases for chatbots are nearly endless, but there are also interesting and impactful ways that chatbots can be used for social good around the world. In particular, our favourite technology is a fantastic medium for improving access to much-needed education in emerging international markets. In many emerging markets access to a smartphone is much more common than access to a laptop or desktop computer. And while there are still gaps in ownership between the women and men of some emerging markets, many people will share a smartphone in order to access the apps and information they require. In order to improve access to education and support services, the smartphone will play a crucial role.
Introducing the newest AWS Heroes – June, 2021
We at AWS continue to be impressed by the passion AWS enthusiasts have for knowledge sharing and supporting peer-to-peer learning in tech communities. A select few of the most influential and active community leaders in the world, who truly go above and beyond to create content and help others build better & faster on AWS, are recognized as AWS Heroes. Data Hero Anahit Pogosova is a Lead Cloud Software Engineer at Solita. She has been architecting and building software solutions with various customers for over a decade. Anahit started working with monolithic on-prem software, but has since moved all the way to the cloud, nowadays focusing mostly on AWS Data and Serverless services.