The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated machine learning (ML) adoption in many areas, resulting in firms increasing their ML investment and implementation efforts. How can emerging markets like Latin America take the opportunity to embrace and adopt artificial intelligence (AI) and ML models more quickly? For more data-driven insights in your Inbox, subscribe to the Refinitiv Perspectives weekly newsletter. The 2020 Refinitiv machine learning survey confirms that ML adoption continues to grow globally, with North America leading adoption rates. Seventy-two percent of firms now say ML is a core component of their business strategy. In many areas, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated ML adoption.

Current neural networks-based object detection approaches processing LiDAR point clouds are generally trained from one kind of LiDAR sensors. However, their performances decrease when they are tested with data coming from a different LiDAR sensor than the one used for training, i.e., with a different point cloud resolution. In this paper, R-AGNO-RPN, a region proposal network built on fusion of 3D point clouds and RGB images is proposed for 3D object detection regardless of point cloud resolution. As our approach is designed to be also applied on low point cloud resolutions, the proposed method focuses on object localization instead of estimating refined boxes on reduced data. The resilience to low-resolution point cloud is obtained through image features accurately mapped to Bird's Eye View and a specific data augmentation procedure that improves the contribution of the RGB images. To show the proposed network's ability to deal with different point clouds resolutions, experiments are conducted on both data coming from the KITTI 3D Object Detection and the nuScenes datasets. In addition, to assess its performances, our method is compared to PointPillars, a well-known 3D detection network. Experimental results show that even on point cloud data reduced by $80\%$ of its original points, our method is still able to deliver relevant proposals localization.

Although spatiotemporal graph neural networks have achieved great empirical success in handling multiple correlated time series, they may be impractical in some real-world scenarios due to a lack of sufficient high-quality training data. Furthermore, spatiotemporal graph neural networks lack theoretical interpretation. To address these issues, we put forth a novel mathematically designed framework to analyze spatiotemporal data. Our proposed spatiotemporal graph scattering transform (ST-GST) extends traditional scattering transforms to the spatiotemporal domain. It performs iterative applications of spatiotemporal graph wavelets and nonlinear activation functions, which can be viewed as a forward pass of spatiotemporal graph convolutional networks without training. Since all the filter coefficients in ST-GST are mathematically designed, it is promising for the real-world scenarios with limited training data, and also allows for a theoretical analysis, which shows that the proposed ST-GST is stable to small perturbations of input signals and structures. Finally, our experiments show that i) ST-GST outperforms spatiotemporal graph convolutional networks by an increase of 35% in accuracy for MSR Action3D dataset; ii) it is better and computationally more efficient to design the transform based on separable spatiotemporal graphs than the joint ones; and iii) the nonlinearity in ST-GST is critical to empirical performance. Processing and learning from spatiotemporal data have received increasing attention recently. Examples include: i) skeleton-based human action recognition based on a sequence of human poses (Liu et al. (2019)), which is critical to human behavior understanding (Borges et al. (2013)), and ii) multi-agent trajectory prediction (Hu et al. (2020)), which is critical to robotics and autonomous driving (Shalev-Shwartz et al. (2016)). A common pattern across these applications is that data evolves in both spatial and temporal domains.

Deep learning-based models have recently outperformed state-of-the-art seasonal forecasting models, such as for predicting El Ni\~no-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). However, current deep learning models are based on convolutional neural networks which are difficult to interpret and can fail to model large-scale atmospheric patterns called teleconnections. Hence, we propose the application of spatiotemporal Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to forecast ENSO at long lead times, finer granularity and improved predictive skill than current state-of-the-art methods. The explicit modeling of information flow via edges may also allow for more interpretable forecasts. Preliminary results are promising and outperform state-of-the art systems for projections 1 and 3 months ahead.

Artificial intelligence is growing ever more powerful and entering people's daily lives, yet often we don't know what goes on inside these systems. Their non-transparency could fuel practical problems, or even racism, which is why researchers increasingly want to open this'black box' and make AI explainable. When decisions are made by artificial intelligence, it can be difficult for the end user to understand the reasoning behind them. In February of 2013, Eric Loomis was driving around in the small town of La Crosse in Wisconsin, US, when he was stopped by the police. The car he was driving turned out to have been involved in a shooting, and he was arrested.

São Paulo – The technology has evolved so fast that in 2012, whoever did a search on Google used all the computational power that made it possible for NASA astronauts to go to the Moon in 1969. More technologies like this can change the world in coming years, according to Totvs, one of the largest providers of management software solutions and productivity platforms. In the view of Vicente Goetten, director of Totvs Labs, the research laboratory of Totvs, technology still evolves following the concepts of Moore's law, that is, exponentially. For this reason, its advance causes some phenomena, such as an initial disillusionment of the public with news in the embryonic phase; the digitization of processes; disruption (when a technology replaces an old method); dematerialization (for example, the exchange of MP3 players for cell phones); demonetization, such as that caused by WhatsApp in relation to SMS; and, finally, democratization. Totvs Labs released a list of eight technologies that can change the world by 2021.

Beyond that, almost every data set is further scaled prior to (data)processing to meet the requirements of the employed data analysis method, such as the introduction of artificial metrics, the numerical representation of nominal features, etc. This scaling is usually accompanied by a grade of detail, which in turn is becoming more and more of a problem for data science tasks as the availability of features increases and their human explainability decreases. Often used methods to deal with this problem from the field of machine learning, such as principal component analysis, do enforce particular, possible inapt, levels of measurement, e.g., food tastes represented by real numbers, and amplify the problem for explainability. Therefore, understanding the set of possible scaling maps, identifying its (algebraic) properties, and deriving to some extent human explainable control over it, is a pressing problem. This is especially important since found patterns and dependencies may be artifacts of some scaling map and may therefore corrupt any subsequent task,e.g., classification tasks.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms and evolution strategies (ES) have been applied to various tasks, showing excellent performances. These have the opposite properties, with DRL having good sample efficiency and poor stability, while ES being vice versa. Recently, there have been attempts to combine these algorithms, but these methods fully rely on synchronous update scheme, making it not ideal to maximize the benefits of the parallelism in ES. To solve this challenge, asynchronous update scheme was introduced, which is capable of good time-efficiency and diverse policy exploration. In this paper, we introduce an Asynchronous Evolution Strategy-Reinforcement Learning (AES-RL) that maximizes the parallel efficiency of ES and integrates it with policy gradient methods. Specifically, we propose 1) a novel framework to merge ES and DRL asynchronously and 2) various asynchronous update methods that can take all advantages of asynchronism, ES, and DRL, which are exploration and time efficiency, stability, and sample efficiency, respectively. The proposed framework and update methods are evaluated in continuous control benchmark work, showing superior performance as well as time efficiency compared to the previous methods.

Contemporary neural networks still fall short of human-level generalization, which extends far beyond our direct experiences. In this paper, we argue that the underlying cause for this shortcoming is their inability to dynamically and flexibly bind information that is distributed throughout the network. This binding problem affects their capacity to acquire a compositional understanding of the world in terms of symbol-like entities (like objects), which is crucial for generalizing in predictable and systematic ways. To address this issue, we propose a unifying framework that revolves around forming meaningful entities from unstructured sensory inputs (segregation), maintaining this separation of information at a representational level (representation), and using these entities to construct new inferences, predictions, and behaviors (composition). Our analysis draws inspiration from a wealth of research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, and surveys relevant mechanisms from the machine learning literature, to help identify a combination of inductive biases that allow symbolic information processing to emerge naturally in neural networks. We believe that a compositional approach to AI, in terms of grounded symbol-like representations, is of fundamental importance for realizing human-level generalization, and we hope that this paper may contribute towards that goal as a reference and inspiration.

In this era of active development of autonomous vehicles, it becomes crucial to provide driving systems with the capacity to explain their decisions. In this work, we focus on generating high-level driving explanations as the vehicle drives. We present BEEF, for BEhavior Explanation with Fusion, a deep architecture which explains the behavior of a trajectory prediction model. Supervised by annotations of human driving decisions justifications, BEEF learns to fuse features from multiple levels. Leveraging recent advances in the multi-modal fusion literature, BEEF is carefully designed to model the correlations between high-level decisions features and mid-level perceptual features. The flexibility and efficiency of our approach are validated with extensive experiments on the HDD and BDD-X datasets.