Six of us are huddled together in Cavendish Square Gardens in central London, fighting a horde of warrior skeletons. To passersby, however, we must look like a bunch of adults pointing our smartphones at nothing while shouting about incoming monsters. What we're doing is playing a beta version of Minecraft Earth, an augmented reality (AR) spinoff from the multimillion-selling block-building game – and very soon, parks all over the world will be filled with people just like us. This month, Minecraft is launching an early-access version of the game in a select few territories around the world, ahead of a global roll-out. Microsoft has yet to reveal exactly when and where, but soon thousands of fans used to playing on their console, PC or tablet, are going to be taking their creations to the streets.

Big changes are happening in the business world and one of these great shifts is directly owing to the contribution of machine learning (ML). The grid of algorithms and statistical models is a revolutionary application of AI. The technology has the ability to learn automatically and bring about changes and improvements from experiences. The self-learning capacity of ML makes it an important ingredient of businesses nowadays. It is used to solve varied problems in an organization and veers it towards the high-paced world of transformation. Machine learning drives the innovative phenomenon of a company to make it excel in an arena of hyper-converged data, mediums, content, and technology.

We present a proxy dataset of vital signs with class labels indicating patient transitions from the ward to intensive care units called Ward2ICU. Patient privacy is protected using a Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network to implicitly learn an approximation of the data distribution, allowing us to sample synthetic data. The quality of data generation is assessed directly on the binary classification task by comparing specificity and sensitivity of an LSTM classifier on proxy and original datasets. We initialize a discussion of unintentionally disclosing commercial sensitive information and propose a solution for a special case through class label balancing

For effectively interacting with humans in collaborative environments, machines need to be able anticipate future events, in order to execute actions in a timely manner. However, the observation of the human limbs movements may not be sufficient to anticipate their actions in an unambiguous manner. In this work we consider two additional sources of information (i.e. context) over time, gaze movements and object information, and study how these additional contextual cues improve the action anticipation performance. We address action anticipation as a classification task, where the model takes the available information as the input, and predicts the most likely action. We propose to use the uncertainty about each prediction as an online decision-making criterion for action anticipation. Uncertainty is modeled as a stochastic process applied to a time-based neural network architecture, which improves the conventional class-likelihood (i.e. deterministic) criterion. The main contributions of this paper are three-fold: (i) we propose a deep architecture that outperforms previous results in the action anticipation task; (ii) we show that contextual information is important do disambiguate the interpretation of similar actions; (iii) we propose the minimization of uncertainty as a more effective criterion for action anticipation, when compared with the maximization of class probability. Our results on the Acticipate dataset showed the importance of contextual information and the uncertainty criterion for action anticipation. We achieve an average accuracy of 98.75% in the anticipation task using only an average of 25% of observations. In addition, considering that a good anticipation model should also perform well in the action recognition task, we achieve an average accuracy of 100% in action recognition on the Acticipate dataset, when the entire observation set is used.

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.