Climate change is a burning issue of our time, with the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13 of the United Nations demanding global climate action. Realizing the urgency, in 2015 in Paris, world leaders signed an agreement committing to taking voluntary action to reduce carbon emissions. However, the scale, magnitude, and climate action processes vary globally, especially between developed and developing countries. Therefore, from parliament to social media, the debates and discussions on climate change gather data from wide-ranging sources essential to the policy design and implementation. The downside is that we do not currently have the mechanisms to pool the worldwide dispersed knowledge emerging from the structured and unstructured data sources. The paper thematically discusses how NLP techniques could be employed in climate policy research and contribute to society's good at large. In particular, we exemplify symbiosis of NLP and Climate Policy Research via four methodologies. The first one deals with the major topics related to climate policy using automated content analysis. We investigate the opinions (sentiments) of major actors' narratives towards climate policy in the second methodology. The third technique explores the climate actors' beliefs towards pro or anti-climate orientation. Finally, we discuss developing a Climate Knowledge Graph. The present theme paper further argues that creating a knowledge platform would help in the formulation of a holistic climate policy and effective climate action. Such a knowledge platform would integrate the policy actors' varied opinions from different social sectors like government, business, civil society, and the scientific community. The research outcome will add value to effective climate action because policymakers can make informed decisions by looking at the diverse public opinion on a comprehensive platform.

Deep learning has made a remarkable impact in the field of natural image processing over the past decade. Consequently, there is a great deal of interest in replicating this success across unsolved tasks in related domains, such as medical image analysis. Core to medical image analysis is the task of semantic segmentation which enables various clinical workflows. Due to the challenges inherent in manual segmentation, many decades of research have been devoted to discovering extensible, automated, expert-level segmentation techniques. Given the groundbreaking performance demonstrated by recent neural network-based techniques, deep learning seems poised to achieve what classic methods have historically been unable. This paper will briefly overview some of the state-of-the-art (SoTA) neural network-based segmentation algorithms with a particular emphasis on the most recent architectures, comparing and contrasting the contributions and characteristics of each network topology. Using ultrasonography as a motivating example, it will also demonstrate important clinical implications of effective deep learning-based solutions, articulate challenges unique to the modality, and discuss novel approaches developed in response to those challenges, concluding with the proposal of future directions in the field. Given the generally observed ephemerality of the best deep learning approaches (i.e. the extremely quick succession of the SoTA), the main contributions of the paper are its contextualization of modern deep learning architectures with historical background and the elucidation of the current trajectory of volumetric medical image segmentation research.

It's now a given that countries worldwide are battling for AI supremacy. To date, most of the public discussion surrounding this competition has focused on commercial gains flowing from the technology. But the AI arms race for military applications is racing ahead as well, and concerned scientists, academics, and AI industry leaders have been sounding the alarm. Compared to existing military capabilities, AI-enabled technology can make decisions on the battlefield with mathematical speed and accuracy and never get tired. However, countries and organizations developing this tech are only just beginning to articulate ideas about how ethics will influence the wars of the near future.

In this paper, we propose a Bayesian framework to create two dimensional ionospheric images of high spatio-temporal resolution to monitor ionospheric irregularities as measured by the S4 index. Here, we recast the standard Bayesian recursive filtering for a linear Gaussian state-space model, also referred to as the Kalman filter, first by augmenting the (pierce point) observation model with connectivity information stemming from the insight and assumptions/standard modeling about the spatial distribution of the scintillation activity on the ionospheric shell at 350 km altitude. Thus, we achieve to handle the limited spatio-temporal observations. Then, by introducing a set of Kalman filters running in parallel, we mitigate the uncertainty related to a tuning parameter of the proposed augmented model. The output images are a weighted average of the state estimates of the individual filters. We demonstrate our approach by rendering two dimensional real-time ionospheric images of S4 amplitude scintillation at 350 km over South America with temporal resolution of one minute. Furthermore, we employ extra S4 data that was not used in producing these ionospheric images, to check and verify the ability of our images to predict this extra data in particular ionospheric pierce points. Our results show that in areas with a network of ground receivers with a relatively good coverage (e.g. within a couple of kilometers distance) the produced images can provide reliable real-time results. Our proposed algorithmic framework can be readily used to visualize real-time ionospheric images taking as inputs the available scintillation data provided from freely available web-servers.

Marginal-likelihood based model-selection, even though promising, is rarely used in deep learning due to estimation difficulties. Instead, most approaches rely on validation data, which may not be readily available. In this work, we present a scalable marginal-likelihood estimation method to select both the hyperparameters and network architecture based on the training data alone. Some hyperparameters can be estimated online during training, simplifying the procedure. Our marginal-likelihood estimate is based on Laplace's method and Gauss-Newton approximations to the Hessian, and it outperforms cross-validation and manual-tuning on standard regression and image classification datasets, especially in terms of calibration and out-of-distribution detection. Our work shows that marginal likelihoods can improve generalization and be useful when validation data is unavailable (e.g., in nonstationary settings).

Humour detection from sentences has been an interesting and challenging task in the last few years. In attempts to highlight humour detection, most research was conducted using traditional approaches of embedding, e.g., Word2Vec or Glove. Recently BERT sentence embedding has also been used for this task. In this paper, we propose a framework for humour detection in short texts taken from news headlines. Our proposed framework (IBEN) attempts to extract information from written text via the use of different layers of BERT. After several trials, weights were assigned to different layers of the BERT model. The extracted information was then sent to a Bi-GRU neural network as an embedding matrix. We utilized the properties of some external embedding models. A multi-kernel convolution in our neural network was also employed to extract higher-level sentence representations. This framework performed very well on the task of humour detection.

According to Vidyard, 94 percent of marketers consider video marketing to be an important part of their overall marketing plan. As a result, video is now more important than ever to make your brand recognizable, reach out to viewers, and stay ahead of the competition. In this post, we look at the future of video marketing to help you create videos that have an impact. "Since over 85% of teenagers believe they can do something if there is a YouTube how-to for it, advertisers must completely exploit the video format. Marketers should keep in mind that video sites like YouTube are massive search engines, and not having a presence there is virtually the same as not showing up on Google "Inmar Intelligence's VP of Media Products, Leah Logan, said.

An approach is presented treating decision theory as a probabilistic theory based on quantum techniques. Accurate definitions are given and thorough analysis is accomplished for the quantum probabilities describing the choice between separate alternatives, sequential alternatives characterizing conditional quantum probabilities, and behavioral quantum probabilities taking into account rational-irrational duality of decision making. The comparison between quantum and classical probabilities is explained. The analysis demonstrates that quantum probabilities serve as an essentially more powerful tool of characterizing various decision-making situations including the influence of psychological behavioral effects.

Multi-agent consensus problems can often be seen as a sequence of autonomous and independent local choices between a finite set of decision options, with each local choice undertaken simultaneously, and with a shared goal of achieving a global consensus state. Being able to estimate probabilities for the different outcomes and to predict how long it takes for a consensus to be formed, if ever, are core issues for such protocols. Little attention has been given to protocols in which agents can remember past or outdated states. In this paper, we propose a framework to study what we call \emph{memory consensus protocol}. We show that the employment of memory allows such processes to always converge, as well as, in some scenarios, such as cycles, converge faster. We provide a theoretical analysis of the probability of each option eventually winning such processes based on the initial opinions expressed by agents. Further, we perform experiments to investigate network topologies in which agents benefit from memory on the expected time needed for consensus.

Forms are a common type of document in real life and carry rich information through textual contents and the organizational structure. To realize automatic processing of forms, word grouping and relation extraction are two fundamental and crucial steps after preliminary processing of optical character reader (OCR). Word grouping is to aggregate words that belong to the same semantic entity, and relation extraction is to predict the links between semantic entities. Existing works treat them as two individual tasks, but these two tasks are correlated and can reinforce each other. The grouping process will refine the integrated representation of the corresponding entity, and the linking process will give feedback to the grouping performance. For this purpose, we acquire multimodal features from both textual data and layout information and build an end-to-end model through multitask training to combine word grouping and relation extraction to enhance performance on each task. We validate our proposed method on a real-world, fully-annotated, noisy-scanned benchmark, FUNSD, and extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.