The pandemic is proving to be the ultimate test for Singapore, the tiny city-state that has a reputation for reinventing itself during times of crises. Dismissed in the past as just a "little red dot" on the map, dwarfed by larger neighbors like Malaysia and Indonesia, and with no natural resources to speak of, Singapore has nonetheless transformed itself into one of the richest and most competitive economies in the world. As Singapore's leaders now grapple with what's turning out to be its worst slump since independence in 1965, the ruling party is looking to extend its mandate in Friday's election to help reinvent the economy once again. They're already positioning for a post-COVID-19 world with planned investment in health and biomedical sciences, climate change and artificial intelligence. Crises have been a catalyst for change in the past.

Global AI/Machine Learning market Size, Insights and Forecast 2020 to 2026 Latest Innovations & Application Analysis with the key players -GOOGLE, IBM, BAIDU, SOUNDHOUND, ZEBRA MEDICAL VISION, PRISMA, IRIS AI, PINTEREST, TRADEMARKVISION, DESCARTES LABS and Amazon, including Production, Price, Revenue, Cost, Application, Growth Rate, Import, Export, Capacity, Market Share and Technological Developments.The research report on AI/Machine Learning market provides a granular analysis of this business space and also assesses its various segmentations. Major aspects such as existing market size ad position in terms of volume and revenue estimations are detailed in the study.

This paper explores the important role of critical science, and in particular of post-colonial and decolonial theories, in understanding and shaping the ongoing advances in artificial intelligence. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is viewed as amongst the technological advances that will reshape modern societies and their relations. Whilst the design and deployment of systems that continually adapt holds the promise of far-reaching positive change, they simultaneously pose significant risks, especially to already vulnerable peoples. Values and power are central to this discussion. Decolonial theories use historical hindsight to explain patterns of power that shape our intellectual, political, economic, and social world. By embedding a decolonial critical approach within its technical practice, AI communities can develop foresight and tactics that can better align research and technology development with established ethical principles, centring vulnerable peoples who continue to bear the brunt of negative impacts of innovation and scientific progress. We highlight problematic applications that are instances of coloniality, and using a decolonial lens, submit three tactics that can form a decolonial field of artificial intelligence: creating a critical technical practice of AI, seeking reverse tutelage and reverse pedagogies, and the renewal of affective and political communities. The years ahead will usher in a wave of new scientific breakthroughs and technologies driven by AI research, making it incumbent upon AI communities to strengthen the social contract through ethical foresight and the multiplicity of intellectual perspectives available to us; ultimately supporting future technologies that enable greater well-being, with the goal of beneficence and justice for all.

The COVID-19 pandemic due to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has directly impacted the public health and economy worldwide. To overcome this problem, countries have adopted different policies and non-pharmaceutical interventions for controlling the spread of the virus. This paper proposes the COVID-ABS, a new SEIR (Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered) agent-based model that aims to simulate the pandemic dynamics using a society of agents emulating people, business and government. Seven different scenarios of social distancing interventions were analyzed, with varying epidemiological and economic effects: (1) do nothing, (2) lockdown, (3) conditional lockdown, (4) vertical isolation, (5) partial isolation, (6) use of face masks, and (7) use of face masks together with 50% of adhesion to social isolation. In the impossibility of implementing scenarios with lockdown, which present the lowest number of deaths and highest impact on the economy, scenarios combining the use of face masks and partial isolation can be the more realistic for implementation in terms of social cooperation. The COVID-ABS model was implemented in Python programming language, with source code publicly available. The model can be easily extended to other societies by changing the input parameters, as well as allowing the creation of a multitude of other scenarios. Therefore, it is a useful tool to assist politicians and health authorities to plan their actions against the COVID-19 epidemic.

We introduce online probabilistic label trees (OPLTs), an algorithm that trains a label tree classifier in a fully online manner, without any prior knowledge about the number of training instances, their features and labels. OPLTs are characterized by low time and space complexity as well as strong theoretical guarantees. They can be used for online multi-label and multi-class classification, including the very challenging scenarios of one- or few-shot learning. We demonstrate the attractiveness of OPLTs in a wide empirical study on several instances of the tasks mentioned above.

A bit later than expected, Loon has finally launched its balloon-powered 4G internet service in Kenya. Through a partnership with Telkom Kenya, the balloons have served 35,000 customers and are covering about 50,000 square kilometres. Loon has been used to make voice and video calls, browse the web, email, text, access WhatsApp and stream YouTube. Loon plans to use a fleet of about 35 balloons in Kenya, and it describes the system as a "carefully choreographed and orchestrated balloon dance." At any given time, a balloon might be actively serving users, operating as a link in the mesh network to beam internet to other vehicles or repositioning itself via machine learning algorithms.

Propositional model counting or #SAT is the problem of computing the number of satisfying assignments of a Boolean formula and many discrete probabilistic inference problems can be translated into a model counting problem to be solved by #SAT solvers. Generic ``exact'' #SAT solvers, however, are often not scalable to industrial-level instances. In this paper, we present Neuro#, an approach for learning branching heuristics for exact #SAT solvers via evolution strategies (ES) to reduce the number of branching steps the solver takes to solve an instance. We experimentally show that our approach not only reduces the step count on similarly distributed held-out instances but it also generalizes to much larger instances from the same problem family. The gap between the learned and the vanilla solver on larger instances is sometimes so wide that the learned solver can even overcome the run time overhead of querying the model and beat the vanilla in wall-clock time by orders of magnitude.

Several machine learning applications involve the optimization of higher-order derivatives (e.g., gradients of gradients) during training, which can be expensive with respect to memory and computation even with automatic differentiation. As a typical example in generative modeling, score matching (SM) involves the optimization of the trace of a Hessian. To improve computing efficiency, we rewrite the SM objective and its variants in terms of directional derivatives, and present a generic strategy to efficiently approximate any-order directional derivative with finite difference (FD). Our approximation only involves function evaluations, which can be executed in parallel, and no gradient computations. Thus, it reduces the total computational cost while also improving numerical stability. We provide two instantiations by reformulating variants of SM objectives into the FD forms. Empirically, we demonstrate that our methods produce results comparable to the gradient-based counterparts while being much more computationally efficient.

Distributed Machine Learning suffers from the bottleneck of synchronization to all-reduce workers' updates. Previous works mainly consider better network topology, gradient compression, or stale updates to speed up communication and relieve the bottleneck. However, all these works ignore the importance of reducing the scale of synchronized elements and inevitable serial executed operators. To address the problem, our work proposes the Divide-and-Shuffle Synchronization(DS-Sync), which divides workers into several parallel groups and shuffles group members. DS-Sync only synchronizes the workers in the same group so that the scale of a group is much smaller. The shuffle of workers maintains the algorithm's convergence speed, which is interpreted in theory. Comprehensive experiments also show the significant improvements in the latest and popular models like Bert, WideResnet, and DeepFM on challenging datasets.

Emerging cross-device artificial intelligence (AI) applications require a transition from conventional centralized learning systems towards large-scale distributed AI systems that can collaboratively perform complex learning tasks. In this regard, democratized learning (Dem-AI) (Minh et al. 2020) lays out a holistic philosophy with underlying principles for building large-scale distributed and democratized machine learning systems. The outlined principles are meant to provide a generalization of distributed learning that goes beyond existing mechanisms such as federated learning. Inspired from this philosophy, a novel distributed learning approach is proposed in this paper. The approach consists of a self-organizing hierarchical structuring mechanism based on agglomerative clustering, hierarchical generalization, and corresponding learning mechanism. Subsequently, a hierarchical generalized learning problem in a recursive form is formulated and shown to be approximately solved using the solutions of distributed personalized learning problems and hierarchical generalized averaging mechanism. To that end, a distributed learning algorithm, namely DemLearn and its variant, DemLearn-P is proposed. Extensive experiments on benchmark MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets show that proposed algorithms demonstrate better results in the generalization performance of learning model at agents compared to the conventional FL algorithms. Detailed analysis provides useful configurations to further tune up both the generalization and specialization performance of the learning models in Dem-AI systems.