High-flying balloons are bringing broadband connectivity to remote nations and post-disaster zones where cell towers have been knocked out. These "super-pressure" helium-filled polyethylene bags float 65,000 feet up in the stratosphere, above commercial planes, hurricanes, and pretty much anything else. But keeping a fleet of tennis-court-sized, internet-blasting balloons hovering over one spot has been a tricky engineering problem, just like keeping a boat floating in one place on a fast-moving river. Now researchers at Google spinoff Loon have figured out how to use a form of artificial intelligence to allow the balloon's onboard controller to predict wind speed and direction at various heights, then use that information to raise and lower the balloon accordingly. The new AI-powered navigation system opens the possibility of using stationary balloons to monitor animal migrations, the effects of climate change, or illegal cross-border wildlife or human trafficking from a relatively inexpensive platform for months at a time.

Because of their ability to detect, track, and follow objects of interest while maintaining safe distances, drones have become an important tool for professional and amateur filmmakers alike. This being the case, quadcopters' camera controls remain difficult to master. Drones might take different paths for the same scenes even if their positions, velocities, and angles are carefully tuned, potentially ruining the consistency of a shot. In search of a solution, Carnegie Mellon, University of Sao Paulo, and Facebook researchers developed a framework that enables users to define drone camera shots working from labels like "exciting," "enjoyable," and "establishing." Using a software simulator, they generated a database of video clips with a diverse set of shot types and then leveraged crowdsourcing and AI to learn the relationship between the labels and certain semantic descriptors.

The most important technologies in 2021 will be AI, 5G, and IoT, according to a newly released global survey of CIOs and CTOs by the technical professional organization IEEE. More specifically, nearly one-third (32%) of respondents cited AI and machine learning, followed by 5G (20%), and IoT (14%). Manufacturing (19%), healthcare (18%), financial services (15%), and education (13%) are the industries that most believe will be impacted by technology in 2021, according to CIOs and CTOS surveyed. It's no surprise that COVID-19 has upended organizations, observed Carmen Fontana, an IEEE member and cloud and emerging technology lead at Centric Consulting. SEE: CompTIA's 10 trends for 2021.

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. Eventually a court sentenced him to six years in prison. This might have been an uneventful case, had it not been for a piece of technology that had aided the judge in making the decision. They used COMPAS, an algorithm that determines the risk of a defendant becoming a recidivist.

One crucial challenge of real-world multilingual speech recognition is the long-tailed distribution problem, where some resource-rich languages like English have abundant training data, but a long tail of low-resource languages have varying amounts of limited training data. To overcome the long-tail problem, in this paper, we propose Adapt-and-Adjust (A2), a transformer-based multi-task learning framework for end-to-end multilingual speech recognition. The A2 framework overcomes the long-tail problem via three techniques: (1) exploiting a pretrained multilingual language model (mBERT) to improve the performance of low-resource languages; (2) proposing dual adapters consisting of both language-specific and language-agnostic adaptation with minimal additional parameters; and (3) overcoming the class imbalance, either by imposing class priors in the loss during training or adjusting the logits of the softmax output during inference. Extensive experiments on the CommonVoice corpus show that A2 significantly outperforms conventional approaches.

Deep neural networks are often not robust to semantically-irrelevant changes in the input. In this work we address the issue of robustness of state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) against commonly occurring distortions in the input such as photometric changes, or the addition of blur and noise. These changes in the input are often accounted for during training in the form of data augmentation. We have two major contributions: First, we propose a new regularization loss called feature-map augmentation (FMA) loss which can be used during finetuning to make a model robust to several distortions in the input. Second, we propose a new combined augmentations (CA) finetuning strategy, that results in a single model that is robust to several augmentation types at the same time in a data-efficient manner. We use the CA strategy to improve an existing state-of-the-art method called stability training (ST). Using CA, on an image classification task with distorted images, we achieve an accuracy improvement of on average 8.94% with FMA and 8.86% with ST absolute on CIFAR-10 and 8.04% with FMA and 8.27% with ST absolute on ImageNet, compared to 1.98% and 2.12%, respectively, with the well known data augmentation method, while keeping the clean baseline performance.

As an enterprise discipline, data science is the antithesis of Artificial Intelligence. The one is an unrestrained field in which creativity, innovation, and efficacy are the only limitations; the other is bound by innumerable restrictions regarding engineering, governance, regulations, and the proverbial bottom line. Nevertheless, the tangible business value praised by enterprise applications of AI is almost always spawned from data science. The ModelOps trend spearheading today's cognitive computing has a vital, distinctive correlation within the realm of data scientists. Whereas ModelOps is centered on solidifying operational consistency for all forms of AI--from its knowledge base to its statistical base--data science is the tacit force underpinning this motion by expanding the sorts of data involved in these undertakings.

In this study, we propose a multicriteria group decision making (MCGDM) algorithm under uncertainty where data is collected as intervals. The proposed MCGDM algorithm aggregates the data, determines the optimal weights for criteria and ranks alternatives with no further input. The intervals give flexibility to experts in assessing alternatives against criteria and provide an opportunity to gain maximum information. We also propose a novel method to aggregate expert judgements using cloud models. We introduce an experimental approach to check the validity of the aggregation method. After that, we use the aggregation method for an MCGDM problem. Here, we find the optimal weights for each criterion by proposing a bilevel optimisation model. Then, we extend the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) for data based on cloud models to prioritise alternatives. As a result, the algorithm can gain information from decision makers with different levels of uncertainty and examine alternatives with no more information from decision-makers. The proposed MCGDM algorithm is implemented on a case study of a cybersecurity problem to illustrate its feasibility and effectiveness. The results verify the robustness and validity of the proposed MCGDM using sensitivity analysis and comparison with other existing algorithms.

Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) will change the modes of road safety and traffic management, especially at intersections without traffic lights, namely unsignalized intersections. Existing researches focus on vehicle control within a small area around an unsignalized intersection. In this paper, we expand the control domain to a large area with multiple intersections. In particular, we propose a Multi-intersection Vehicular Cooperative Control (MiVeCC) to enable cooperation among vehicles in a large area with multiple unsignalized intersections. Firstly, a vehicular end-edge-cloud computing framework is proposed to facilitate end-edge-cloud vertical cooperation and horizontal cooperation among vehicles. Then, the vehicular cooperative control problems in the cloud and edge layers are formulated as Markov Decision Process (MDP) and solved by two-stage reinforcement learning. Furthermore, to deal with high-density traffic, vehicle selection methods are proposed to reduce the state space and accelerate algorithm convergence without performance degradation. A multi-intersection simulation platform is developed to evaluate the proposed scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed MiVeCC can improve travel efficiency at multiple intersections by up to 4.59 times without collision compared with existing methods.

We introduce federated marginal personalization (FMP), a novel method for continuously updating personalized neural network language models (NNLMs) on private devices using federated learning (FL). Instead of fine-tuning the parameters of NNLMs on personal data, FMP regularly estimates global and personalized marginal distributions of words, and adjusts the probabilities from NNLMs by an adaptation factor that is specific to each word. Our presented approach can overcome the limitations of federated fine-tuning and efficiently learn personalized NNLMs on devices. We study the application of FMP on second-pass ASR rescoring tasks. Experiments on two speech evaluation datasets show modest word error rate (WER) reductions. We also demonstrate that FMP could offer reasonable privacy with only a negligible cost in speech recognition accuracy.