Load forecasting is crucial for multiple energy management tasks such as scheduling generation capacity, planning supply and demand, and minimizing energy trade costs. Such relevance has increased even more in recent years due to the integration of renewable energies, electric cars, and microgrids. Conventional load forecasting techniques obtain single-value load forecasts by exploiting consumption patterns of past load demand. However, such techniques cannot assess intrinsic uncertainties in load demand, and cannot capture dynamic changes in consumption patterns. To address these problems, this paper presents a method for probabilistic load forecasting based on the adaptive online learning of hidden Markov models. We propose learning and forecasting techniques with theoretical guarantees, and experimentally assess their performance in multiple scenarios. In particular, we develop adaptive online learning techniques that update model parameters recursively, and sequential prediction techniques that obtain probabilistic forecasts using the most recent parameters. The performance of the method is evaluated using multiple datasets corresponding with regions that have different sizes and display assorted time-varying consumption patterns. The results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the performance of existing techniques for a wide range of scenarios.

The latest Drug Developing Platforms by Artificial Intelligence (AI) market report offers a detailed analysis of growth driving factors, challenges, and opportunities that will govern the industry expansion in the ensuing years. Besides, it delivers a complete assessment of several industry segments to provide a clear picture of the top revenue prospects of this industry vertical. According to industry analysts, the market is projected to accrue notable gains while recording a CAGR of XX% over the forecast period 2020-2025. Considering the impact of Covid-19, except from healthcare industries, the global health crisis has turned out to be a nightmare for majority of businesses. While some have successfully made changes to their business model or pivoted the entire organization's mission, others continue to face an onslaught of challenges.

The latest Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Insurance market report offers a detailed analysis of growth driving factors, challenges, and opportunities that will govern the industry expansion in the ensuing years. Besides, it delivers a complete assessment of several industry segments to provide a clear picture of the top revenue prospects of this industry vertical. According to industry analysts, the market is projected to accrue notable gains while recording a CAGR of XX% over the forecast period 2020-2025. Considering the impact of Covid-19, except from healthcare industries, the global health crisis has turned out to be a nightmare for majority of businesses. While some have successfully made changes to their business model or pivoted the entire organization's mission, others continue to face an onslaught of challenges.

Ocado's warehouse in Erith, 15 miles east of London on the Thames estuary, is staffed by 1,050 "personal shoppers". Outnumbering them are 1,800 robots the size of small washing machines. You see them by climbing to the top level of the vast warehouse – at 564,000 sq ft, it is more than three times the size of St Peter's in Rome – where a sign tells you that photography is strictly prohibited. The online supermarket is paranoid that rivals will glimpse the technology it believes to be revolutionary. From the viewing platform you can watch these metal cubes endlessly whiz around, moving thousands of plastic crates as if they were playing an enormous game of chess. You occasionally sight bottles of bleach or rosé, packets of noodles and dog biscuits, before they are sent down to a lower level. "I find it quite mesmerising, like robotic ballet," says Mel Smith, CEO of Ocado Retail, the UK arm of the business. "The day I decided I wanted this job was when I went to [the warehouse] and thought, this is absolutely the future."

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are commonly used for their versatility in sampling from complicated probability distributions. However, as the dimension of the distribution gets larger, the computational costs for a satisfactory exploration of the sampling space become challenging. Adaptive MCMC methods employing a choice of proposal distribution can address this issue speeding up the convergence. In this paper we show an alternative way of performing adaptive MCMC, by using the outcome of Bayesian Neural Networks as the initial proposal for the Markov Chain. This combined approach increases the acceptance rate in the Metropolis-Hasting algorithm and accelerate the convergence of the MCMC while reaching the same final accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate the main advantages of this approach by constraining the cosmological parameters directly from Cosmic Microwave Background maps.

Police and border guards must combat racial profiling and ensure that their use of "big data" collected via artificial intelligence does not reinforce biases against minorities, United Nations experts said on Thursday. Companies that sell algorithmic profiling systems to public entities and private companies, often used in screening job applicants, must be regulated to prevent misuse of personal data that perpetuates prejudices, they said. "It's a rapidly developing technological means used by law enforcement to determine, using big data, who is likely to do what. And that's the danger of it," Verene Shepherd, a member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, told Reuters. "We've heard about companies using these algorithmic methods to discriminate on the basis of skin colour," she added, speaking from Jamaica.

As e-commerce volumes soar and labor shortages continue in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, more enterprises are seeking automated robotics solutions to meet client demand and increase efficiency. Mech-Mind Robotics' intelligent industrial robots address key challenges facing industry players today with next-gen solutions that are accurate, precise, and cost-effective. Mech-Mind Robotics ("Mech-Mind") is a fast-growing Chinese startup backed by leading venture capital including SEQUOIA Capital China and Intel Capital with its core massive applied technologies in high-performance 3D cameras, motion planning AI algorithms and software. During the trade fair, Mech-Mind presented its core technologies and solutions in four exhibition zones: high-efficiency assorting of common goods, mixed-carton depalletizing with AI 3D vision, parcel loading with AI 3D vision, and high-precision smart camera image and recognition technology. "At Mech-Mind, we harness advanced technologies such as 3D vision and deep learning to power next-generation industrial robots. CeMAT ASIA 2020 is the ideal stage for us to demonstrate our far-reaching solutions to logistics and manufacturing customers seeking to increase efficiency, improve effectiveness, and reduce time and labor costs affordably. Smart robotics are no longer limited to labs. We are very excited to be part of this," said Tianlan Shao, CEO and Founder of Mech-Mind Robotics.

In recent years, large amounts of data have been generated, and computer power has kept growing. This scenario has led to a resurgence in the interest in artificial neural networks. One of the main challenges in training effective neural network models is finding the right combination of hyperparameters to be used. Indeed, the choice of an adequate approach to search the hyperparameter space directly influences the accuracy of the resulting neural network model. Common approaches for hyperparameter optimization are Grid Search, Random Search, and Bayesian Optimization. There are also population-based methods such as CMA-ES. In this paper, we present HBRKGA, a new population-based approach for hyperparameter optimization. HBRKGA is a hybrid approach that combines the Biased Random Key Genetic Algorithm with a Random Walk technique to search the hyperparameter space efficiently. Several computational experiments on eight different datasets were performed to assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Results showed that HBRKGA could find hyperparameter configurations that outperformed (in terms of predictive quality) the baseline methods in six out of eight datasets while showing a reasonable execution time.

Recurrent neural networks are the basis of the state-of-the-art models in natural language processing, including language modeling (Mikolov et al., 2011), machine translation (Cho et al., 2014) and named entity recognition (Lample et al., 2016). It is needless to say that complex learning tasks require relatively large networks with millions of parameters to be accomplished. However, large neural networks need more data and/or strong regularization techniques to be trained successfully and avoid overfitting. Without the means to collect more data, which is the case in the majority of real-world problems, data augmentation and regularization methods are standard alternative practices to overcome this barrier. Data augmentation in natural language processing is limited, and often task-specific (Kobayashi, 2018; Kafle et al., 2017). On the other hand, adopting the same regularization methods that are originally proposed for feed-forward (non-recurrent) networks needs to be done with extra care to avoid hurting the network's information flow between consecutive time-steps. To overcome such limitations, we present Sequence Mixup: a set of training methods, regularization techniques, and data augmentation procedures for RNNs. Sequence Mixup can be considered as the RNN-generalization of input mixup (Zhang et al., 2017) and manifold mixup (Verma et al., 2018), which are already introduced for feed-forward neural

Linking clinical narratives to standardized vocabularies and coding systems is a key component of unlocking the information in medical text for analysis. However, many domains of medical concepts lack well-developed terminologies that can support effective coding of medical text. We present a framework for developing natural language processing (NLP) technologies for automated coding of under-studied types of medical information, and demonstrate its applicability via a case study on physical mobility function. Mobility is a component of many health measures, from post-acute care and surgical outcomes to chronic frailty and disability, and is coded in the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF). However, mobility and other types of functional activity remain under-studied in medical informatics, and neither the ICF nor commonly-used medical terminologies capture functional status terminology in practice. We investigated two data-driven paradigms, classification and candidate selection, to link narrative observations of mobility to standardized ICF codes, using a dataset of clinical narratives from physical therapy encounters. Recent advances in language modeling and word embedding were used as features for established machine learning models and a novel deep learning approach, achieving a macro F-1 score of 84% on linking mobility activity reports to ICF codes. Both classification and candidate selection approaches present distinct strengths for automated coding in under-studied domains, and we highlight that the combination of (i) a small annotated data set; (ii) expert definitions of codes of interest; and (iii) a representative text corpus is sufficient to produce high-performing automated coding systems. This study has implications for the ongoing growth of NLP tools for a variety of specialized applications in clinical care and research.