IBM announced it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Brazilian software provider of robotic process automation (RPA) WDG Soluções Em Sistemas E Automação De Processos LTDA (referred to as "WDG Automation" throughout). The acquisition further advances IBM's comprehensive AI-infused automation capabilities, spanning business processes to IT operations. Financial terms were not disclosed. In today's digital era, companies are looking for new ways to create new business models, deliver new services and lower costs. The need to drive this transformation is even greater now given the uncertainties of COVID-19.

That's according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Underwood International College, and the University of Brasilia, who found in a recent study that progress in deep learning has been "strongly reliant" on increases in compute. It's their assertion that continued progress will require "dramatically" more computationally efficient deep learning methods, either through changes to existing techniques or via new as-yet-undiscovered methods. "We show deep learning is not computationally expensive by accident, but by design. The same flexibility that makes it excellent at modeling diverse phenomena and outperforming expert models also makes it dramatically more computationally expensive," the coauthors wrote. "Despite this, we find that the actual computational burden of deep learning models is scaling more rapidly than (known) lower bounds from theory, suggesting that substantial improvements might be possible."

The analysis of GPS trajectories is a well-studied problem in Urban Computing and has been used to track people. Analyzing people mobility and identifying the transportation mode used by them is essential for cities that want to reduce traffic jams and travel time between their points, thus helping to improve the quality of life of citizens. The trajectory data of a moving object is represented by a discrete collection of points through time, i.e., a time series. Regarding its interdisciplinary and broad scope of real-world applications, it is evident the need of extracting knowledge from time series data. Mining this type of data, however, faces several complexities due to its unique properties. Different representations of data may overcome this. In this work, we propose the use of a feature retained from the Ordinal Pattern Transition Graph, called the probability of self-transition for transportation mode classification. The proposed feature presents better accuracy results than Permutation Entropy and Statistical Complexity, even when these two are combined. This is the first work, to the best of our knowledge, that uses Information Theory quantifiers to transportation mode classification, showing that it is a feasible approach to this kind of problem.

Since the inception of SVMs [1], the interest for this kind of supervised learning method has only grown over the years [2], so that it has become a well established tool both for classification and regression [3]. SVMs are regarded as the most prominent exemplar of kernel methods, which solve complex machine learning problems by using linear estimation methods on a high dimensional feature space [4]. They are intensely employed in a myriad of applications, including object segmentation [5], video surveillance [6], drug discovery [7], and cancer genomics [8]. The SVM framework models a classification problem as a maximum margin optimization problem, where the decision boundary that has the largest distance (margin) to separate the training points of different classes is searched. There is a primal form of the optimization problem, where the weights to be optimized are associated with the input features, i.e., there is one weight per each input feature. There is also a dual form, where the weights are associated with the training samples, i.e., one weight per each training sample. In the dual form, the weights are Lagrange multipliers of a suitable Lagrangian function. The fewer variables to be optimized, the easier the optimization problem, so dual formulations are preferred for classification tasks with many input features [9]. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication.

Although the initial wave of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has abated in many countries, healthcare providers are still looking to identify as many COVID-19 patients as possible and contain the disease. Fast and accurate diagnosis is especially important when unsuspecting patients with a coronavirus infection come to the hospital with health complaints but don't yet show symptoms of COVID-19. Nasal swab samples analyzed by RT-PCR are currently recommended for the diagnosis of COVID-19, however, supply shortages, a wait time of up to two days for results, and a false negative rate as high as 1 in 5 mean alternative, large-scale COVID-19 screening tools are still being sought. SARS-CoV-2 is known to damage lung tissue, and in a distinct way that doctors are now seeking to exploit for new diagnostic approaches. Many COVID-19 patients develop pneumonia, which can progress to respiratory failure and sometimes death.

Major tech stocks drove the markets lower this morning, with Nasdaq NDAQ down by almost 0.5%. In contrast, the Dow was trading higher by 200 points buoyed by banking stocks like JP Morgan and Citigroup C, which have beaten street estimates on earnings this morning. Of course, by mid-morning, the Nasdaq had turned positive. More choppiness should be expected as more companies declare their quarterly results throughout the week. Our deep learning algorithms have gone through the data and used Artificial Intelligence ("AI") to help you spot the Top Buys for today.

Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) and procedural content generators can both be understood as systems of rules for producing content. In this paper, we argue that TTRPG design can usefully be viewed as procedural content generator design. We present several case studies linking key concepts from PCG research -- including possibility spaces, expressive range analysis, and generative pipelines -- to key concepts in TTRPG design. We then discuss the implications of these relationships and suggest directions for future work uniting research in TTRPGs and PCG.

Data Science and Machine Learning have become fundamental assets for companies and research institutions alike. As one of its fields, supervised classification allows for class prediction of new samples, learning from given training data. However, some properties can cause datasets to be problematic to classify. In order to evaluate a dataset a priori, data complexity metrics have been used extensively. They provide information regarding different intrinsic characteristics of the data, which serve to evaluate classifier compatibility and a course of action that improves performance. However, most complexity metrics focus on just one characteristic of the data, which can be insufficient to properly evaluate the dataset towards the classifiers' performance. In fact, class overlap, a very detrimental feature for the classification process (especially when imbalance among class labels is also present) is hard to assess. This research work focuses on revisiting complexity metrics based on data morphology. In accordance to their nature, the premise is that they provide both good estimates for class overlap, and great correlations with the classification performance. For that purpose, a novel family of metrics have been developed. Being based on ball coverage by classes, they are named after Overlap Number of Balls. Finally, some prospects for the adaptation of the former family of metrics to singular (more complex) problems are discussed.

The Machine Learning report provides independent information about the Machine Learning industry supported by extensive research on factors such as industry segments size & trends, inhibitors, dynamics, drivers, opportunities & challenges, environment & policy, cost overview, porter's five force analysis, and key companies profiles including business overview and recent development. The research report on Machine Learning market thoroughly investigates historical data of this business sphere to lay out the future roadmap of the industry. The study attempts to predict a long-term picture of the market scenario with respect to the various growth indicators, hindrances, and opportunities that determine the industry expansion. Moreover, the report provides an exhaustive synopsis of the industry at a global and regional level. In addition, it covers the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the leading industry players and various market segmentations.

As modern neural networks have grown to billions of parameters, meeting tight latency budgets has become increasingly challenging. Approaches like compression, sparsification and network pruning have proven effective to tackle this problem - but they rely on modifications of the underlying network. In this paper, we look at a complimentary approach of optimizing how tensors are mapped to on-chip memory in an inference accelerator while leaving the network parameters untouched. Since different memory components trade off capacity for bandwidth differently, a sub-optimal mapping can result in high latency. We introduce evolutionary graph reinforcement learning (EGRL) - a method combining graph neural networks, reinforcement learning (RL) and evolutionary search - that aims to find the optimal mapping to minimize latency. Furthermore, a set of fast, stateless policies guide the evolutionary search to improve sample-efficiency. We train and validate our approach directly on the Intel NNP-I chip for inference using a batch size of 1. EGRL outperforms policy-gradient, evolutionary search and dynamic programming baselines on BERT, ResNet-101 and ResNet-50. We achieve 28-78% speed-up compared to the native NNP-I compiler on all three workloads.