Societies and industries are rapidly changing due to the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and will face deep transformations in upcoming years. In this scenario, it becomes critical for under-represented communities in technology, in particular developing countries like Latin America, to foster initiatives that are committed to developing tools for the local adoption of AI. Latin America, as well as many non-English speaking regions, face several problems for the adoption of AI technology, including the lack of diverse and representative resources for automated learning tasks. A highly problematic area in this regard is natural language processing (NLP), which is strongly dependent on labeled datasets for learning. However, most state-of-the-art NLP resources are allocated to English.

Latin America, with its rich and varied cultural heritage, is a region widely known by its diverse musical rhythms. Indeed, music and dance constitute an important part of Latin American cultural assets and identity.2 Some of these rhythms, although famous worldwide, belong to specific regions; for example, samba is from Brazil, tango is from Argentina, merengue is from the Dominican Republic, corrido is from Mexico and vallenato is from Colombia, among many other examples. Most of them were created by the cultural interaction between people from African, Native American, and European cultures that shared their music and instruments. Those heterogeneous cultural characteristics made these music styles appealing to an international audience.

Forests are the major terrestrial ecosystem responsible for carbon sequestration and storage. The Amazon rainforest is the world's largest tropical rainforest encompassing up to 2,124,000 square miles, covering a large area in South America including nine countries. The majority of that area (69%) lies in Brazil. Thus, Amazonia holds about 20% of the total carbon contained in the world's terrestrial vegetation.1,5,7 But the rampant deforestation due to illegal logging, mining, cattle ranching, and soy plantation are examples of threats to the vast region.

Welcome to the special section on Latin America, covering all the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries from Rio Grande to Cape Horn. Latin America is a striving region, with many countries aiming at a developed status in the near future, while at the same time facing enormous challenges in inequality, education, and government. The region also supports a great wealth of biodiversity. With generally less resources for research and a more difficult path for technology transfer when compared to developed countries, we aimed at highlighting the excellent level of research in computer science that flourishes in the region, both on basic research and on problems that are unique to Latin America. We launched a general call for contributions welcoming research and development initiatives, large and small, aiming to cover as much as possible the diversity in development along the different countries.

Research papers come out far too rapidly for anyone to read them all, especially in the field of machine learning, which now affects (and produces papers in) practically every industry and company. This column aims to collect the most relevant recent discoveries and papers -- particularly in but not limited to artificial intelligence -- and explain why they matter. This week, a startup that's using UAV drones for mapping forests, a look at how machine learning can map social media networks and predict Alzheimer's, improving computer vision for space-based sensors and other news regarding recent technological advances. Machine learning tools are being used to aid diagnosis in many ways, since they're sensitive to patterns that humans find difficult to detect. IBM researchers have potentially found such patterns in speech that are predictive of the speaker developing Alzheimer's disease.

COVID-19 pandemic has an unprecedented impact all over the world since early 2020. During this public health crisis, reliable forecasting of the disease becomes critical for resource allocation and administrative planning. The results from compartmental models such as SIR and SEIR are popularly referred by CDC and news media. With more and more COVID-19 data becoming available, we examine the following question: Can a direct data-driven approach without modeling the disease spreading dynamics outperform the well referred compartmental models and their variants? In this paper, we show the possibility. It is observed that as COVID-19 spreads at different speed and scale in different geographic regions, it is highly likely that similar progression patterns are shared among these regions within different time periods. This intuition lead us to develop a new neural forecasting model, called Attention Crossing Time Series (\textbf{ACTS}), that makes forecasts via comparing patterns across time series obtained from multiple regions. The attention mechanism originally developed for natural language processing can be leveraged and generalized to materialize this idea. Among 13 out of 18 testings including forecasting newly confirmed cases, hospitalizations and deaths, \textbf{ACTS} outperforms all the leading COVID-19 forecasters highlighted by CDC.

This paper presents Abduction and Argumentation as two principled forms for reasoning, and fleshes out the fundamental role that they can play within Machine Learning. It reviews the state-of-the-art work over the past few decades on the link of these two reasoning forms with machine learning work, and from this it elaborates on how the explanation-generating role of Abduction and Argumentation makes them naturally-fitting mechanisms for the development of Explainable Machine Learning and AI systems. Abduction contributes towards this goal by facilitating learning through the transformation, preparation, and homogenization of data. Argumentation, as a conservative extension of classical deductive reasoning, offers a flexible prediction and coverage mechanism for learning -- an associated target language for learned knowledge -- that explicitly acknowledges the need to deal, in the context of learning, with uncertain, incomplete and inconsistent data that are incompatible with any classically-represented logical theory.

In the last few years, there has been a surge of interest in learning representations of entities and relations in knowledge graph (KG). However, the recent availability of temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) that contain time information for each fact created the need for reasoning over time in such TKGs. In this regard, we present a new approach of TKG embedding, TeRo, which defines the temporal evolution of entity embedding as a rotation from the initial time to the current time in the complex vector space. Specially, for facts involving time intervals, each relation is represented as a pair of dual complex embeddings to handle the beginning and the end of the relation, respectively. We show our proposed model overcomes the limitations of the existing KG embedding models and TKG embedding models and has the ability of learning and inferring various relation patterns over time. Experimental results on four different TKGs show that TeRo significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models for link prediction. In addition, we analyze the effect of time granularity on link prediction over TKGs, which as far as we know has not been investigated in previous literature.

The global Deep Learning market is expected to rise with an impressive CAGR and generate the highest revenue by 2026. Zion Market Research in its latest report published this information. The report is titled "Global Deep Learning Market 2020 With Top Countries Data, Revenue, Key Developments, SWOT Study, COVID-19 impact Analysis, Growth and Outlook To 2026". It also offers an exclusive insight into various details such as revenues, market share, strategies, growth rate, product & their pricing by region/country for all major companies. The report provides a 360-degree overview of the market, listing various factors restricting, propelling, and obstructing the market in the forecast duration. The report also provides additional information such as interesting insights, key industry developments, detailed segmentation of the market, list of prominent players operating in the market, and other Deep Learning market trends.

The standard approach to fitting an autoregressive spike train model is to maximize the likelihood for one-step prediction. This maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) often leads to models that perform poorly when generating samples recursively for more than one time step. Moreover, the generated spike trains can fail to capture important features of the data and even show diverging firing rates. To alleviate this, we propose to directly minimize the divergence between neural recorded and model generated spike trains using spike train kernels. We develop a method that stochastically optimizes the maximum mean discrepancy induced by the kernel. Experiments performed on both real and synthetic neural data validate the proposed approach, showing that it leads to well-behaving models. Using different combinations of spike train kernels, we show that we can control the trade-off between different features which is critical for dealing with model-mismatch.