Ideally Open-Domain Question Answering models should exhibit a number of competencies, ranging from simply memorizing questions seen at training time, to answering novel question formulations with answers seen during training, to generalizing to completely novel questions with novel answers. However, single aggregated test set scores do not show the full picture of what capabilities models truly have. In this work, we perform a detailed study of the test sets of three popular open-domain benchmark datasets with respect to these competencies. We find that 60-70% of test-time answers are also present somewhere in the training sets. We also find that 30% of test-set questions have a near-duplicate paraphrase in their corresponding training sets. Using these findings, we evaluate a variety of popular open-domain models to obtain greater insight into what extent they can actually generalize, and what drives their overall performance. We find that all models perform dramatically worse on questions that cannot be memorized from training sets, with a mean absolute performance difference of 63% between repeated and non-repeated data. Finally we show that simple nearest-neighbor models out-perform a BART closed-book QA model, further highlighting the role that training set memorization plays in these benchmarks

The creation of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) reflects the growing interest of states in AI technologies. The initiative, which brings together 14 countries and the European Union, will help participants establish practical cooperation and formulate common approaches to the development and implementation of AI. At the same time, it is a symptom of the growing technological rivalry in the world, primarily between the United States and China. Russia's ability to interact with the GPAI may be limited for political reasons, but, from a practical point of view, cooperation would help the country implement its national AI strategy. The Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) was officially launched on June 15, 2020, at the initiative of the G7 countries alongside Australia, India, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore, Slovenia and the European Union. According to the Joint Statement from the Founding Members, the GPAI is an "international and multistakeholder initiative to guide the responsible development and use of AI, grounded in human rights, inclusion, diversity, innovation, and economic growth."

The drug, baricitinib, is currently marketed by Eli Lilly to treat rheumatoid arthritis. Now, thanks to AI, it is being tested against COVID-19 in a major randomised-controlled trial in collaboration with the U.S. National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in combination with remdesivir, an antiviral drug from Gilead Sciences that recently won emergency-use approval for COVID-19. Eli Lilly has now commenced its own independent trial of baricitinib as a therapy for COVID-19 in South America, Europe and Asia.

Radiant Earth Foundation has released "LandCoverNet," a human-labelled global land cover classification training dataset. This release contains data across Africa, which accounts for 1/5 of the global dataset. Available for download on Radiant MLHub, the open geospatial library, LandCoverNet will enable accurate and regular land cover mapping for timely insights into natural and anthropogenic impacts on the Earth. Global land cover maps derived from Earth observations are not new, but the influx of open-access high spatial resolution Earth observations, such as that from the European Space Agency's Sentinel missions, coupled with improved computer power, encouraged the development of advanced algorithms. Machine learning models applied to high resolution remotely sensed imagery can classify land cover classes more accurately and faster, given the availability of high-quality training data.

Scientific studies of consciousness rely on objects whose existence is independent of any consciousness. This theoretical-assumption leads to the "hard problem" of consciousness. We avoid this problem by assuming consciousness to be fundamental, and the main feature of consciousness is characterized as being other-dependent. We set up a framework which naturally subsumes the other-dependent feature by defining a compact closed category where morphisms represent conscious processes. These morphisms are a composition of a set of generators, each being specified by their relations with other generators, and therefore other-dependent. The framework is general enough, i.e. parameters in the morphisms take values in arbitrary commutative semi-rings, from which any finitely dimensional system can be dealt with. Our proposal fits well into a compositional model of consciousness and is an important step forward that addresses both the hard problem of consciousness and the combination problem of (proto)-panpsychism.

Currently, path planning algorithms are used in many daily tasks. They are relevant to find the best route in traffic and make autonomous robots able to navigate. The use of path planning presents some issues in large and dynamic environments. Large environments make these algorithms spend much time finding the shortest path. On the other hand, dynamic environments request a new execution of the algorithm each time a change occurs in the environment, and it increases the execution time. The dimensionality reduction appears as a solution to this problem, which in this context means removing useless paths present in those environments. Most of the algorithms that reduce dimensionality are limited to the linear correlation of the input data. Recently, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) Encoder was used to overcome this situation since it can use both linear and non-linear information to data reduction. This paper analyzes in-depth the performance to eliminate the useless paths using this CNN Encoder model. To measure the mentioned model efficiency, we combined it with different path planning algorithms. Next, the final algorithms (combined and not combined) are checked in a database that is composed of five scenarios. Each scenario contains fixed and dynamic obstacles. Their proposed model, the CNN Encoder, associated to other existent path planning algorithms in the literature, was able to obtain a time decrease to find the shortest path in comparison to all path planning algorithms analyzed. the average decreased time was 54.43 %.

CAMBRIDGE – COVID-19 has become a severe stress test for countries around the world. From supply-chain management and health-care capacity to regulatory reform and economic stimulus, the pandemic has mercilessly punished governments that did not – or could not – adapt quickly. From Latin America's lost decade in the 1980s to the more recent Greek crisis, there are plenty of painful reminders of what happens when countries cannot service their debts. A global debt crisis today would likely push millions of people into unemployment and fuel instability and violence around the world. The virus has also pulled back the curtain on one of this century's most important contests: the rivalry between the United States and China for supremacy in artificial intelligence (AI).

The coronavirus pandemic has emerged as a major threat globally. While the number of cases are mounting gradually, the pandemic cannot be controlled by governments alone. The transmission can only be reduced with the complete cooperation of people. Physical distancing, frequent hand washing, and wearing face masks have proved to be effective to control the transmission of the virus, but not everyone is following rules. In this scenario, technological solutions that allow for contactless functioning are gaining prominence.

Psychological semantics is the study of how people represent the meanings of words and then build sentence meaning out of those representations. People use language dozens of time a day--to have conversations and give instructions, to read and write, to label objects and teach. A theory of psychological semantics must provide the basis for how people do all those things, choosing which words to use and understanding the words they read or hear. In this article we focus on the mental representation of word meaning. Human language is still the gold standard for a communication system, but artificial intelligence (AI) systems have made important progress in language use. Research on Natural Language Processing (NLP) develops systems that understand language to the degree that computers can carry out useful tasks. As described below, such systems use vast text corpora to learn about words, using neural networks and other statistical models. The recent explosion of research in NLP, driven largely by advances in neural networks (also called deep learning), has resulted in continuously improving performance on various benchmarks that require interpreting words and sentences. Systems are now used in interfaces with customers to make sales or solve problems.

Events are occurrences in specific locations, time, and semantics that nontrivially impact either our society or the nature, such as civil unrest, system failures, and epidemics. It is highly desirable to be able to anticipate the occurrence of such events in advance in order to reduce the potential social upheaval and damage caused. Event prediction, which has traditionally been prohibitively challenging, is now becoming a viable option in the big data era and is thus experiencing rapid growth. There is a large amount of existing work that focuses on addressing the challenges involved, including heterogeneous multi-faceted outputs, complex dependencies, and streaming data feeds. Most existing event prediction methods were initially designed to deal with specific application domains, though the techniques and evaluation procedures utilized are usually generalizable across different domains. However, it is imperative yet difficult to cross-reference the techniques across different domains, given the absence of a comprehensive literature survey for event prediction. This paper aims to provide a systematic and comprehensive survey of the technologies, applications, and evaluations of event prediction in the big data era. First, systematic categorization and summary of existing techniques are presented, which facilitate domain experts' searches for suitable techniques and help model developers consolidate their research at the frontiers. Then, comprehensive categorization and summary of major application domains are provided. Evaluation metrics and procedures are summarized and standardized to unify the understanding of model performance among stakeholders, model developers, and domain experts in various application domains. Finally, open problems and future directions for this promising and important domain are elucidated and discussed.