The Atlanta Botanical Garden will be using a robotic sloth to save some of the world's most endangered species. The sloth robot, called Slothbot, hangs in trees to monitor animals, plants, and the environment. It was built by the robotics engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and uses solar panels to power itself. In larger environments, Salothbot will be able to switch between cables to cover more ground. "SlothBot embraces slowness as a design principle," the Georgia Tech "That's not how robots are typically designed today, but being slow and hyper-energy efficient will allow SlothBot to linger in the environment to observe things we can only see by being present continuously for months, or even years."

Explainable AI, in the context of autonomous systems, like self driving cars, has drawn broad interests from researchers. Recent studies have found that providing explanations for an autonomous vehicle actions has many benefits, e.g., increase trust and acceptance, but put little emphasis on when an explanation is needed and how the content of explanation changes with context. In this work, we investigate which scenarios people need explanations and how the critical degree of explanation shifts with situations and driver types. Through a user experiment, we ask participants to evaluate how necessary an explanation is and measure the impact on their trust in the self driving cars in different contexts. We also present a self driving explanation dataset with first person explanations and associated measure of the necessity for 1103 video clips, augmenting the Berkeley Deep Drive Attention dataset. Additionally, we propose a learning based model that predicts how necessary an explanation for a given situation in real time, using camera data inputs. Our research reveals that driver types and context dictates whether or not an explanation is necessary and what is helpful for improved interaction and understanding.

This paper introduces two metrics (cycle-based and memory-based metrics), grounded on a dynamical game-theoretic solution concept called sink equilibrium, for the evaluation, ranking, and computation of policies in multi-agent learning. We adopt strict best response dynamics (SBRD) to model selfish behaviors at a meta-level for multi-agent reinforcement learning. Our approach can deal with dynamical cyclical behaviors (unlike approaches based on Nash equilibria and Elo ratings), and is more compatible with single-agent reinforcement learning than alpha-rank which relies on weakly better responses. We first consider settings where the difference between largest and second largest underlying metric has a known lower bound. With this knowledge we propose a class of perturbed SBRD with the following property: only policies with maximum metric are observed with nonzero probability for a broad class of stochastic games with finite memory. We then consider settings where the lower bound for the difference is unknown. For this setting, we propose a class of perturbed SBRD such that the metrics of the policies observed with nonzero probability differ from the optimal by any given tolerance. The proposed perturbed SBRD addresses the opponent-induced non-stationarity by fixing the strategies of others for the learning agent, and uses empirical game-theoretic analysis to estimate payoffs for each strategy profile obtained due to the perturbation.

Iterative neural networks (INN) are rapidly gaining attention for solving inverse problems in imaging, image processing, and computer vision. INNs combine regression NNs and an iterative model-based image reconstruction (MBIR) algorithm, often leading to both good generalization capability and outperforming reconstruction quality over existing MBIR optimization models. This paper proposes the first fast and convergent INN architecture, Momentum-Net, by generalizing a block-wise MBIR algorithm that uses momentum and majorizers with regression NNs. For fast MBIR, Momentum-Net uses momentum terms in extrapolation modules, and noniterative MBIR modules at each iteration by using majorizers, where each iteration of Momentum-Net consists of three core modules: image refining, extrapolation, and MBIR. Momentum-Net guarantees convergence to a fixed-point for general differentiable (non)convex MBIR functions (or data-fit terms) and convex feasible sets, under two asymptomatic conditions. To consider data-fit variations across training and testing samples, we also propose a regularization parameter selection scheme based on the "spectral spread" of majorization matrices. Numerical experiments for light-field photography using a focal stack and sparse-view computational tomography demonstrate that, given identical regression NN architectures, Momentum-Net significantly improves MBIR speed and accuracy over several existing INNs; it significantly improves reconstruction quality compared to a state-of-the-art MBIR method in each application.

The central goal of this paper is to establish two commonly available dimensionality reduction (DR) methods i.e. t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) and Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) in Matlab and to observe their application in several datasets. These DR techniques are applied to nine different datasets namely CNAE9, Segmentation, Seeds, Pima Indians diabetes, Parkinsons, Movement Libras, Mammographic Masses, Knowledge, and Ionosphere acquired from UCI machine learning repository. By applying t-SNE and MDS algorithms, each dataset is transformed to the half of its original dimension by eliminating unnecessary features from the datasets. Subsequently, these datasets with reduced dimensions are fed into three supervised classification algorithms for classification. These classification algorithms are K Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Extended Nearest Neighbors (ENN), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Again, all these algorithms are implemented in Matlab. The training and test data ratios are maintained as ninety percent: ten percent for each dataset. Upon accuracy observation, the efficiency for every dimensionality technique with availed classification algorithms is analyzed and the performance of each classifier is evaluated.

Time-series analyses has become a key instrument for the evaluation of continuously collected data in several domains such as Medicine, Physics and Statistics [Firmino et al., 2014, Box and Jenkins, 2015]. Such analysis generally involves the creation of a model (a regression function or a classifier, for instance) that usually leads to inconsistent results when built over raw data, specially if it contains chaotic behavior [Brock et al., 1992]. In order to reach more reliable results, an alternative is to study time-series trajectories in the phase space, as proposed by the area of Dynamical Systems [Ott, 2002, Alligood et al., 1996]. Besides leading to more robust models, the phase space also allows the inference of other important measures, such as the correlation dimension [Grassberger and Procaccia, 1983, Mandelbrot, 1977, Theiler, 1990, Clark, 1990, Ding et al., 1993] and the Lyapunov exponent [Sano and Sawada, 1985, Kantz and Schreiber, 2004], which support further analyses in modeling. In this context, Takens' embedding theorem [Takens, 1981] is one of the most used methods in the literature to reconstruct phase spaces from time series [Ravindra and Hagedorn, 1998]. Such method relies on two parameters known as embedding dimension m and time delay τ (see Figure 1) that, although Takens proved an arbitrary τ can be used given m is sufficiently large, the minimum-but-sufficient (from now on denoted as optimal) set of embedding parameters is desirable either to optimize phase-space computations as to better understand the analyzed phenomenon. In this context, several methods based on entropy [Han et al., 2012], fractal dimensions [Theiler, 1990] and/or nearest neighbors [Kennel et al., 1992] were proposed to guide the estimation of optimal embeddings.

Matrix square roots and their inverses arise frequently in machine learning, e.g., when sampling from high-dimensional Gaussians $\mathcal{N}(\mathbf 0, \mathbf K)$ or whitening a vector $\mathbf b$ against covariance matrix $\mathbf K$. While existing methods typically require $O(N^3)$ computation, we introduce a highly-efficient quadratic-time algorithm for computing $\mathbf K^{1/2} \mathbf b$, $\mathbf K^{-1/2} \mathbf b$, and their derivatives through matrix-vector multiplication (MVMs). Our method combines Krylov subspace methods with a rational approximation and typically achieves $4$ decimal places of accuracy with fewer than $100$ MVMs. Moreover, the backward pass requires little additional computation. We demonstrate our method's applicability on matrices as large as $50,\!000 \times 50,\!000$ - well beyond traditional methods - with little approximation error. Applying this increased scalability to variational Gaussian processes, Bayesian optimization, and Gibbs sampling results in more powerful models with higher accuracy.

Precise and reliable estimation of reference evapotranspiration (ET o ) is an essential for the irrigation and water resources management. ET o is difficult to predict due to its complex processes. This complexity can be solved using machine learning methods. This study investigates the performance of artificial neural network (ANN) and deep neural network (DNN) models for estimating daily ET o . Previously proposed ANN and DNN methods have been realized, and their performances have been compared. Six input data including maximum air temperature (T max ), minimum air temperature (T min ), solar radiation (R n ), maximum relative humidity (RH max ), minimum relative humidity (RH min ) and wind speed (U 2 ) are used from 4 meteorological stations (Adana, Aksaray, Isparta and Ni\u{g}de) during 1999-2018 in Turkey. The results have shown that our proposed DNN models achieves satisfactory accuracy for daily ET o estimation compared to previous ANN and DNN models. The best performance has been observed with the proposed model of DNN with SeLU activation function (P-DNN-SeLU) in Aksaray with coefficient of determination (R 2 ) of 0.9934, root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.2073 and mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.1590, respectively. Therefore, the P-DNN-SeLU model could be recommended for estimation of ET o in other climate zones of the world.

The adoption of artificial intelligence is growing fast in Latin America, with businesses of all sizes deploying the technology to tackle critical issues despite the challenges faced by the regional ecosystem, according to a new report. According to the study by MIT Technology Review produced in partnership with Genesys on trends in AI adoption and the current state and the future of data sharing in Latin America, "there are many opportunities for the region, if it moves quickly." Latin firms are using AI to tackle critical regional issues, including food security, smart cities, natural resources, and unemployment, according to the study, with the level of sophistication of AI projects at almost the same level as other regions. About 80% of large businesses in the region reported having projects underway, with early benefits including increased operational efficiency and management decision-making. This compares with 87% in North America and 95% in Asia-Pacific. The researchers predict that by 2022, AI projects are expected to accelerate, with almost two-thirds of respondents in Latin countries saying they expect 21%-40% of their processes to use AI three years from now, with the areas of fastest growth being logistics and supply chain management, as well as sales and marketing.

Covid-19 patients in the UK are being treated with dexamethasone today after a UK trial of the drug found it could save lives. "The treatment is immediately available and already in use on the NHS," said health minister Matt Hancock. "It is not by any means a cure but it is the best news we have had," Hancock told parliament today. The UK's chief medical officers say it should be used immediately, according to the BBC. A preliminary study found that the steroid, which is already widely prescribed for treating allergies and asthma, reduces the risk of dying from covid-19 by a third for patients on ventilators, and by a fifth for those receiving oxygen. Dexamethasone should only be taken if prescribed by a doctor. Officials in Beijing, China confirmed 31 new coronavirus cases today, bringing the total to 137 in the last six days. The city is again restricting all non-essential travel. Schools, swimming pools and gyms are all closed from today.