PricewaterhouseCoopers, the large accounting and management consulting firm, released a startling report indicating that workers will be highly impacted by the fast-growing rise of artificial intelligence, robots and related technologies. Banking and financial services employees, factory workers and office staff will seemingly face the loss of their jobs--or need to find a way to reinvent themselves in this brave new world. The term "artificial intelligence" is loosely used to describe the ability of a machine to mimic human behavior. AI includes well-known applications, such as Siri, GPS, Spotify, self-driving vehicles and the larger-than-life robots made by Boston Robotics that perform incredible feats. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering, speaks about Siri during an ... [ ] announcement of new products at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Monday, June 4, 2018, in San Jose, Calif.

The paper presents new metrics to quantify and test for (i) the equality of distributions and (ii) the independence between two high-dimensional random vectors. We show that the energy distance based on the usual Euclidean distance cannot completely characterize the homogeneity of two high-dimensional distributions in the sense that it only detects the equality of means and the traces of covariance matrices in the high-dimensional setup. We propose a new class of metrics which inherits the desirable properties of the energy distance and maximum mean discrepancy/(generalized) distance covariance and the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion in the low-dimensional setting and is capable of detecting the homogeneity of/completely characterizing independence between the low-dimensional marginal distributions in the high dimensional setup. We further propose t-tests based on the new metrics to perform high-dimensional two-sample testing/independence testing and study their asymptotic behavior under both high dimension low sample size (HDLSS) and high dimension medium sample size (HDMSS) setups. The computational complexity of the t-tests only grows linearly with the dimension and thus is scalable to very high dimensional data. We demonstrate the superior power behavior of the proposed tests for homogeneity of distributions and independence via both simulated and real datasets.

In this work we introduce a semi-supervised approach to the voice conversion problem, in which speech from a source speaker is converted into speech of a target speaker. The proposed method makes use of both parallel and non-parallel utterances from the source and target simultaneously during training. This approach can be used to extend existing parallel data voice conversion systems such that they can be trained with semi-supervision. We show that incorporating semi-supervision improves the voice conversion performance compared to fully supervised training when the number of parallel utterances is limited as in many practical applications. Additionally, we find that increasing the number non-parallel utterances used in training continues to improve performance when the amount of parallel training data is held constant.

This editorial summarizes selected key contributions of Prof. Stephen Grossberg and describes the papers in this 80th birthday special issue in his honor. His productivity, creativity, and vision would each be enough to mark a scientist of the first caliber. In combination, they have resulted in contributions that have changed the entire discipline of neural networks. Grossberg has been tremendously influential in engineering, dynamical systems, and artificial intelligence as well. Indeed, he has been one of the most important mentors and role models in my career, and has done so with extraordinary generosity and encouragement. All authors in this special issue have taken great pleasure in hereby commemorating his extraordinary career and contributions.

The problem of belief tracking in the presence of stochastic actions and observations is pervasive and yet computationally intractable. In this work we show however that probabilistic beliefs can be maintained in factored form exactly and efficiently across a number of causally closed beams, when the state variables that appear in more than one beam obey a form of backward determinism . Since computing marginals from the factors is still computationally intractable in general, and variables appearing in several beams are not always backward-deterministic, the basic formulation is extended with two approximations: forms of belief propagation for computing marginals from factors, and sampling of non-backward-deterministic variables for making such variables backward-deterministic given their sampled history. Unlike, Rao-Blackwellized particle-filtering, the sampling is not used for making inference tractable but for making the factorization sound . The resulting algorithm involves sampling and belief propagation or just one of them as determined by the structure of the model.

Belief tracking is a basic problem in planning with sensing. While the problem is intractable, it has been recently shown that for both deterministic and non-deterministic systems expressed in compact form, it can be done in time and space that are exponential in the problem width. The width measures the maximum number of state variables that are all relevant to a given precondition or goal. In this work, we extend this result both theoretically and practically. First, we introduce an alternative decomposition scheme and algorithm with the same time complexity but different completeness guarantees, whose space complexity is much smaller: exponential in the causal width of the problem that measures the number of state variables that are causally relevant to a given precondition, goal, or observable. Second, we introduce a fast, meaningful, and powerful approximation that trades completeness by speed, and is both time and space exponential in the problem causal width . It is then shown empirically that the algorithm combined with simple heuristics yields state-of-the-art real-time performance in domains with high widths but low causal widths such as Minesweeper, Battleship, and Wumpus.

We study the characterization and computation of general policies for families of problems that share a structure characterized by a common reduction into a single abstract problem. Policies $\mu$ that solve the abstract problem P have been shown to solve all problems Q that reduce to P provided that $\mu$ terminates in Q. In this work, we shed light on why this termination condition is needed and how it can be removed. The key observation is that the abstract problem P captures the common structure among the concrete problems Q that is local (Markovian) but misses common structure that is global. We show how such global structure can be captured by means of trajectory constraints that in many cases can be expressed as LTL formulas, thus reducing generalized planning to LTL synthesis. Moreover, for a broad class of problems that involve integer variables that can be increased or decreased, trajectory constraints can be compiled away, reducing generalized planning to fully observable non-deterministic planning.

Abstract--We propose an online method for concept drift detection based on dynamic classifier ensemble selection. T he proposed method generates a pool of ensembles by promoting diversity among classifier members and chooses expert ensem bles according to global prequential accuracy values. Unlike cu rrent dynamic ensemble selection approaches that use only local k nowl-edge to select the most competent ensemble for each instance, our method focuses on selection taking into account the deci sion space. Consequently, it is well adapted to the context of dri ft detection in data stream problems. The results of the experi ments show that the proposed method attained the highest detectio n precision and the lowest number of false alarms, besides compet itive classification accuracy rates, in artificial datasets repre senting different types of drifts. Moreover, it outperformed basel ines in different real-problem datasets in terms of classification accuracy. Practical tasks, such as identification of customer preferences, Internet log analysis, among others, are examples of data stream problems. In this context, the so-called concep t drift phenomenon may occur, since when data are continuousl y generated in streams, data and target concepts may change over time. Algorithms designed to deal with drift may be divided into two main groups: (1) online - when one instance is learned at a time upon arrival; and (2) block-based - when chunks of samples are presented from time to time [1]. Online methods are very useful in data stream environments, especially due to three main reasons: samples arrive sequential ly; data usually must be processed in high volumes at fast paces; and each data instance is read only once. Different categories of online methods are available in the literature. Drift detectors are common solutions.

A BSTRACT Group convolutional neural networks (G-CNNs) can be used to improve classical CNNs by equipping them with the geometric structure of groups. Central in the success of G-CNNs is the lifting of feature maps to higher dimensional disentangled representations, in which data characteristics are effectively learned, geometric data-augmentations are made obsolete, and predictable behavior under geometric transformations (equivariance) is guaranteed via group theory. Currently, however, the practical implementations of G-CNNs are limited to either discrete groups (that leave the grid intact) or continuous compact groups such as rotations (that enable the use of Fourier theory). In this paper we lift these limitations and propose a modular framework for the design and implementation of G-CNNs for arbitrary Lie groups . In our approach the differential structure of Lie groups is used to expand convolution kernels in a generic basis of B-splines that is defined on the Lie algebra. This leads to a flexible framework that enables localized, atrous, and deformable convolutions in G-CNNs by means of respectively localized, sparse and nonuniform B-spline expansions. The impact and potential of our approach is studied on two benchmark datasets: cancer detection in histopathology slides in which rotation equivariance plays a key role and facial landmark localization in which scale equivariance is important. In both cases, G-CNN architectures outperform their classical 2D counterparts and the added value of atrous and localized group convolutions is studied in detail. 1 I NTRODUCTION Group convolutional neural networks (G-CNNs) are as a class of neural networks that are equipped with the geometry of groups. This enables them to profit from the structure and symmetries in signal data such as images (Cohen & Welling, 2016). A key feature of G-CNNs is that they are equivariant with respect to transformations described by the group, i.e., they guarantee predictable behavior under such transformations and are insensitive to both local and global transformations on the input data. Classical CNNs are a special case of G-CNNs that are equivariant to translations and, in contrast to unconstrained NNs, they make advantage of (and preserve) the basic structure of signal data throughout the network (LeCun et al., 1990). Part of the success of G-CNNs can be attributed to the lifting of feature maps to higher dimensional objects that are generated by matching kernels under a range of poses (transformations in the group).

In this work we address the problem of transferring knowledge obtained from a vast annotated source domain to a low labeled or unlabeled target domain. We propose Adversarial Variational Domain Adaptation (AVDA), a semi-supervised domain adaptation method based on deep variational embedded representations. We use approximate inference and adversarial methods to map samples from source and target domains into an aligned semantic embedding. We show that on a semi-supervised few-shot scenario, our approach can be used to obtain a significant speed-up in performance when using an increasing number of labels on the target domain.