Spatial relations between objects in an image have proved useful for structural object recognition. Structural constraints can act as regularization in neural network training, improving generalization capability with small datasets. Several relations can be modeled as a morphological dilation of a reference object with a structuring element representing the semantics of the relation, from which the degree of satisfaction of the relation between another object and the reference object can be derived. However, dilation is not differentiable, requiring an approximation to be used in the context of gradient-descent training of a network. We propose to approximate dilations using convolutions based on a kernel equal to the structuring element. We show that the proposed approximation, even if slightly less accurate than previous approximations, is definitely faster to compute and therefore more suitable for computationally intensive neural network applications.

When collaborating with an AI system, we need to assess when to trust its recommendations. If we mistakenly trust it in regions where it is likely to err, catastrophic failures may occur, hence the need for Bayesian approaches for probabilistic reasoning in order to determine the confidence (or epistemic uncertainty) in the probabilities in light of the training data. We propose an approach to overcome the independence assumption behind most of the approaches dealing with a large class of probabilistic reasoning that includes Bayesian networks as well as several instances of probabilistic logic. We provide an algorithm for Bayesian learning from sparse, albeit complete, observations, and for deriving inferences and their confidences keeping track of the dependencies between variables when they are manipulated within the unifying computational formalism provided by probabilistic circuits. Each leaf of such circuits is labelled with a beta-distributed random variable that provides us with an elegant framework for representing uncertain probabilities. We achieve better estimation of epistemic uncertainty than state-of-the-art approaches, including highly engineered ones, while being able to handle general circuits and with just a modest increase in the computational effort compared to using point probabilities.

Electroanatomical maps are a key tool in the diagnosis and treatment of atrial fibrillation. Current approaches focus on the activation times recorded. However, more information can be extracted from the available data. The fibers in cardiac tissue conduct the electrical wave faster, and their direction could be inferred from activation times. In this work, we employ a recently developed approach, called physics informed neural networks, to learn the fiber orientations from electroanatomical maps, taking into account the physics of the electrical wave propagation. In particular, we train the neural network to weakly satisfy the anisotropic eikonal equation and to predict the measured activation times. We use a local basis for the anisotropic conductivity tensor, which encodes the fiber orientation. The methodology is tested both in a synthetic example and for patient data. Our approach shows good agreement in both cases and it outperforms a state of the art method in the patient data. The results show a first step towards learning the fiber orientations from electroanatomical maps with physics-informed neural networks.

This paper reports on progress integrating the speech recognition toolkit ESPnet into Elpis, a web front-end originally designed to provide access to the Kaldi automatic speech recognition toolkit. The goal of this work is to make end-to-end speech recognition models available to language workers via a user-friendly graphical interface. Encouraging results are reported on (i) development of an ESPnet recipe for use in Elpis, with preliminary results on data sets previously used for training acoustic models with the Persephone toolkit along with a new data set that had not previously been used in speech recognition, and (ii) incorporating ESPnet into Elpis along with UI enhancements and a CUDA-supported Dockerfile.

In May of 2018, a "center of excellence" for artificial intelligence opened in Medellín, Colombia. According to an article by Jared Wade, the center comes from a partnership between US-based Institute for Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence (IRPA AI) and Medellín-based startup incubator, Ruta-N. The launch was facilitated by the Agency for Cooperation and Investment in Medellín (ACI) with the goal of fostering specialized skills in the local labor force, and is part of a larger plan to promote research, development, entrepreneurship, and innovation. This is good news, but I'm biased. You see, I visited Medellín in September of last year and fell in love.

With the recent advances of the Internet of Things, and the increasing accessibility of ubiquitous computing resources and mobile devices, the prevalence of rich media contents, and the ensuing social, economic, and cultural changes, computing technology and applications have evolved quickly over the past decade. They now go beyond personal computing, facilitating collaboration and social interactions in general, causing a quick proliferation of social relationships among IoT entities. The increasing number of these relationships and their heterogeneous social features have led to computing and communication bottlenecks that prevent the IoT network from taking advantage of these relationships to improve the offered services and customize the delivered content, known as relationship explosion. On the other hand, the quick advances in artificial intelligence applications in social computing have led to the emerging of a promising research field known as Artificial Social Intelligence (ASI) that has the potential to tackle the social relationship explosion problem. This paper discusses the role of IoT in social relationships detection and management, the problem of social relationships explosion in IoT and reviews the proposed solutions using ASI, including social-oriented machine-learning and deep-learning techniques.

Your brain has been altered, neurologically rewired as you acquired a particular skill. This renovation has left you with a specialized area in your left ventral occipital temporal region, shifted facial recognition into your right hemisphere, reduced your inclination toward holistic visual processing, increased your verbal memory, and thickened your corpus callosum, which is the information highway that connects the left and right hemispheres of your brain. You are likely highly literate. As you learned to read, probably as a child, your brain reorganized itself to better accommodate your efforts, which had both functional and inadvertent consequences for your mind. So, to account for these changes to your brain--e.g,

In this paper, we investigate the constraint typology of mixed-integer linear programming MILP formulations. MILP is a commonly used mathematical programming technique for modelling and solving real-life scheduling, routing, planning, resource allocation, timetabling optimization problems, providing optimized business solutions for industry sectors such as: manufacturing, agriculture, defence, healthcare, medicine, energy, finance, and transportation. Despite the numerous real-life Combinatorial Optimization Problems found and solved, and millions yet to be discovered and formulated, the number of types of constraints, the building blocks of a MILP, is relatively much smaller. In the search of a suitable machine readable knowledge representation for MILPs, we propose an optimization modelling tree built based upon an MILP ontology that can be used as a guidance for automated systems to elicit an MILP model from end-users on their combinatorial business optimization problems.

The graph convolutional network (GCN) is a go-to solution for machine learning on graphs, but its training is notoriously difficult to scale in terms of both the size of the graph and the number of model parameters. These limitations are in stark contrast to the increasing scale (in data size and model size) of experiments in deep learning research. In this work, we propose GIST, a novel distributed approach that enables efficient training of wide (overparameterized) GCNs on large graphs. GIST is a hybrid layer and graph sampling method, which disjointly partitions the global model into several, smaller sub-GCNs that are independently trained across multiple GPUs in parallel. This distributed framework improves model performance and significantly decreases wall-clock training time. GIST seeks to enable large-scale GCN experimentation with the goal of bridging the existing gap in scale between graph machine learning and deep learning.

The autonomous automotive industry is one of the largest and most conventional projects worldwide, with many technology companies effectively designing and orienting their products towards automobile safety and accuracy. These products are performing very well over the roads in developed countries. But can fail in the first minute in an underdeveloped country because there is much difference between a developed country environment and an underdeveloped country environment. The following study proposed to train these Artificial intelligence models in environment space in an underdeveloped country like Pakistan. The proposed approach on image classification uses convolutional neural networks for image classification for the model. For model pre-training German traffic signs data set was selected then fine-tuned on Pakistan's dataset. The experimental setup showed the best results and accuracy from the previously conducted experiments. In this work to increase the accuracy, more dataset was collected to increase the size of images in every class in the data set. In the future, a low number of classes are required to be further increased where more images for traffic signs are required to be collected to get more accuracy on the training of the model over traffic signs of Pakistan's most used and popular roads motorway and national highway, whose traffic signs color, size, and shapes are different from common traffic signs.