Distributed machine learning algorithms play a significant role in processing massive data sets over large networks. However, the increasing reliance on machine learning on information and communication technologies (ICTs) makes it inherently vulnerable to cyber threats. This work aims to develop secure distributed algorithms to protect the learning from data poisoning and network attacks. We establish a game-theoretic framework to capture the conflicting goals of a learner who uses distributed support vector machines (SVMs) and an attacker who is capable of modifying training data and labels. We develop a fully distributed and iterative algorithm to capture real-time reactions of the learner at each node to adversarial behaviors. The numerical results show that distributed SVM is prone to fail in different types of attacks, and their impact has a strong dependence on the network structure and attack capabilities.

This paper further extends RIn-Close_CVC, a biclustering algorithm capable of performing an efficient, complete, correct and non-redundant enumeration of maximal biclusters with constant values on columns in numerical datasets. By avoiding a priori partitioning and itemization of the dataset, RIn-Close_CVC implements an online partitioning, which is demonstrated here to guide to more informative biclustering results. The improved algorithm is called RIn-Close_CVC3, keeps those attractive properties of RIn-Close_CVC, as formally proved here, and is characterized by: a drastic reduction in memory usage; a consistent gain in runtime; additional ability to handle datasets with missing values; and additional ability to operate with attributes characterized by distinct distributions or even mixed data types. The experimental results include synthetic and real-world datasets used to perform scalability and sensitivity analyses. As a practical case study, a parsimonious set of relevant and interpretable mixed-attribute-type rules is obtained in the context of supervised descriptive pattern mining.

Increasingly sophisticated mathematical modelling processes from Machine Learning are being used to analyse complex data. However, the performance and explainability of these models within practical critical systems requires a rigorous and continuous verification of their safe utilisation. Working towards addressing this challenge, this paper presents a principled novel safety argument framework for critical systems that utilise deep neural networks. The approach allows various forms of predictions, e.g., future reliability of passing some demands, or confidence on a required reliability level. It is supported by a Bayesian analysis using operational data and the recent verification and validation techniques for deep learning. The prediction is conservative -- it starts with partial prior knowledge obtained from lifecycle activities and then determines the worst-case prediction. Open challenges are also identified.

Last week the daughter of the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, Katerina Tikhonova, was appointed to head the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Institute located at Moscow State University. The university has produced 13 Nobel prizes, six Fields Medals and one Turing award, so in matters of science, putting the AI institute there is a big deal. In Russian, if a husband's last name is, for instance, Komlev, the wife's surname becomes Komleva. Thinking algorithmically, you add an "a" at the end of the husband's or the father's last name to get the wife's or the daughter's last name. So Katerina's surname is Tikhonova, which means that her husband's or one of her paternal ancestor's last name was Tikhonov.

You immigrate to a new country that speaks a different language, and start work with some of the brightest engineers in the world. Now, you're leading teams of people who are 10 or 20 years older than you, working on one of the fastest growing internet companies of the last decade. You have two options: sink or swim. That's the position Simon Eskildsen found himself in early in his career. He left his home in Denmark after high school, and moved to Canada alone to take a pre-college gap year working at Shopify. When he started, Shopify had 150 employees supporting tens of thousands of merchants. Now, it has 5,000 employees and over a million merchants.

Organize songs, albums, and artists in groups with shared similarity could be done with the help of genre labels. In this paper, we present a novel approach for automatic classifying musical genre in Brazilian music using only the song lyrics. This kind of classification remains a challenge in the field of Natural Language Processing. We construct a dataset of 138,368 Brazilian song lyrics distributed in 14 genres. We apply SVM, Random Forest and a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) network combined with different word embeddings techniques to address this classification task. Our experiments show that the BLSTM method outperforms the other models with an F1-score average of $0.48$. Some genres like "gospel", "funk-carioca" and "sertanejo", which obtained 0.89, 0.70 and 0.69 of F1-score, respectively, can be defined as the most distinct and easy to classify in the Brazilian musical genres context.

Computing becomes increasingly mobile and pervasive today; these changes imply that applications and services must be aware of and adapt to their changing contexts in highly dynamic environments. Today, building context-aware systems is a complex task due to lack of an appropriate infrastructure support in intelligent environments. A context-aware infrastructure requires an appropriate context model to represent, manipulate and access context information. In this paper, we propose a formal context model based on ontology using OWL to address issues including semantic context representation, context reasoning and knowledge sharing, context classification, context dependency and quality of context. The main benefit of this model is the ability to reason about various contexts. Based on our context model, we also present a Service-Oriented Context-Aware Middleware (SOCAM) architecture for building of context-aware services.

Scalable real-time assortment optimization has become essential in e-commerce operations due to the need for personalization and the availability of a large variety of items. While this can be done when there are simplistic assortment choices to be made, imposing constraints on the collection of feasible assortments gives more flexibility to incorporate insights of store-managers and historically well-performing assortments. We design fast and flexible algorithms based on variations of binary search that find the revenue of the (approximately) optimal assortment. In particular, we revisit the problem of large-scale assortment optimization under the multinomial logit choice model without any assumptions on the structure of the feasible assortments. We speed up the comparisons steps using novel vector space embeddings, based on advances in the fields of information retrieval and machine learning. For an arbitrary collection of assortments, our algorithms can find a solution in time that is sub-linear in the number of assortments and for the simpler case of cardinality constraints - linear in the number of items (existing methods are quadratic or worse). Empirical validations using the Billion Prices dataset and several retail transaction datasets show that our algorithms are competitive even when the number of items is $\sim 10^5$ ($100$x larger instances than previously studied).

We show that a deep neural network can learn the semantics of linear-time temporal logic (LTL). As a challenging task that requires deep understanding of the LTL semantics, we show that our network can solve the trace generation problem for LTL: given a satisfiable LTL formula, find a trace that satisfies the formula. We frame the trace generation problem for LTL as a translation task, i.e., to translate from formulas to satisfying traces, and train an off-the-shelf implementation of the Transformer, a recently introduced deep learning architecture proposed for solving natural language processing tasks. We provide a detailed analysis of our experimental results, comparing multiple hyperparameter settings and formula representations. After training for several hours on a single GPU the results were surprising: the Transformer returns the syntactically equivalent trace in 89% of the cases on a held-out test set. Most of the "mispredictions", however, (and overall more than 99% of the predicted traces) still satisfy the given LTL formula.

LOS ANGELES – It was an otherwise routine flight until, at an altitude of about 1,100 feet east of this city's downtown, the crew aboard the news chopper heard a loud bang. "The pilot and I just looked at each other. 'What was that?'" reporter Chris Cristi of KABC-TV remembers thinking. Not far from their base, they landed Air 7 HD, as their Eurocopter is known to viewers, and discovered a dent in the horizontal stabilizer and next to it, a gash and one-inch hole. There was no blood or feathers as if they had hit a bird.