South America
Preventing the Generation of Inconsistent Sets of Classification Rules
Miranda, Thiago Zafalon, Sardinha, Diorge Brognara, Cerri, Ricardo
--In recent years, the interest in interpretable classification models has grown. One of the proposed ways to improve the interpretability of a rule-based classification model is to use sets (unordered collections) of rules, instead of lists (ordered collections) of rules. One of the problems associated with sets is that multiple rules may cover a single instance, but predict different classes for it, thus requiring a conflict resolution strategy. In this work, we propose two algorithms capable of finding feature-space regions inside which any created rule would be consistent with the already existing rules, preventing inconsistencies from arising. Our algorithms do not generate classification models, but are instead meant to enhance algorithms that do so, such as Learning Classifier Systems. Both algorithms are described and analyzed exclusively from a theoretical perspective, since we have not modified a model-generating algorithm to incorporate our proposed solutions yet. This work presents the novelty of using conflict avoidance strategies instead of conflict resolution strategies.
Andrew Ng's AI companies expand to Medellin, Colombia โ TechCrunch
After his tenure as chief scientist at Baidu, Andrew Ng, the founder of the Google Brain project and former CEO of Coursera, set up a number of different projects that all focus on making AI more approachable. These include the education startup Deeplearning.ai, Today, Ng announced he has opened a second office for these projects in Medellin, Colombia. At first, Medellin may seem like an odd choice. But today's Medellin is very different from the one you may have seen on Narcos (and a lot safer).
RPA booms around the world, but SA appears to lag
The robotic process automation (RPA) services market is booming around the world, according to a recently published Forrester Research report, titled'The RPA Services Market will Grow to Reach $12 billion by 2023'. In 2018, the market was estimated to be worth only $3.9 billion. Furthermore, Forrester's research indicates that over the past three years, annual revenue growth for the top services vendors has topped 100%, rising from around $0.6 billion in 2017 to an estimated $4.2 billion by 2023. After surveying 25 of the top RPA service providers about their customers, geographic focus, revenue and scale of implementations for the report, which was published last month, the authors โ Leslie Joseph and Craig Le Clair โ concluded that the massive growth in RPA services was a result not only of organisations adopting RPA as a cost mitigation strategy, but because automation was regarded as critical to the implementation of broader digital transformation efforts. However, while RPA adoption in terms of spend appears to be rising around the world, Forrester was unable to provide information about RPA adoption in Africa, or South Africa, as it was unable to source sufficient data.
MTCNET: Multi-task Learning Paradigm for Crowd Count Estimation
Kumar, Abhay, Jain, Nishant, Tripathi, Suraj, Singh, Chirag, Krishna, Kamal
We propose a Multi-Task Learning (MTL) paradigm based deep neural network architecture, called MTCNet (Multi-Task Crowd Network) for crowd density and count estimation. Crowd count estimation is challenging due to the non-uniform scale variations and the arbitrary perspective of an individual image. The proposed model has two related tasks, with Crowd Density Estimation as the main task and Crowd-Count Group Classification as the auxiliary task. The auxiliary task helps in capturing the relevant scale-related information to improve the performance of the main task. The main task model comprises two blocks: VGG-16 front-end for feature extraction and a dilated Convolutional Neural Network for density map generation. The auxiliary task model shares the same front-end as the main task, followed by a CNN classifier. Our proposed network achieves 5.8% and 14.9% lower Mean Absolute Error (MAE) than the state-of-the-art methods on ShanghaiTech dataset without using any data augmentation. Our model also outperforms with 10.5% lower MAE on UCF_CC_50 dataset.
Transfer Learning for Relation Extraction via Relation-Gated Adversarial Learning
Zhang, Ningyu, Deng, Shumin, Sun, Zhanlin, Chen, Jiaoyan, Zhang, Wei, Chen, Huajun
Relation extraction aims to extract relational facts from sentences. Previous models mainly rely on manually labeled datasets, seed instances or human-crafted patterns, and distant supervision. However, the human annotation is expensive, while human-crafted patterns suffer from semantic drift and distant supervision samples are usually noisy. Domain adaptation methods enable leveraging labeled data from a different but related domain. However, different domains usually have various textual relation descriptions and different label space (the source label space is usually a superset of the target label space). To solve these problems, we propose a novel model of relation-gated adversarial learning for relation extraction, which extends the adversarial based domain adaptation. Experimental results have shown that the proposed approach outperforms previous domain adaptation methods regarding partial domain adaptation and can improve the accuracy of distance supervised relation extraction through fine-tuning. 1 Introduction Relation extraction (RE) is devoted to extracting relational facts from sentences, which can be applied to many natural language processing (NLP) applications such as knowledge base construction (Wu and Weld, 2010) and question answering (Dai et al., 2016).
LEAP nets for power grid perturbations
Donnot, Benjamin, Donon, Balthazar, Guyon, Isabelle, Liu, Zhengying, Marot, Antoine, Panciatici, Patrick, Schoenauer, Marc
We propose a novel neural network embedding approach to model power transmission grids, in which high voltage lines are disconnected and reconnected with one-another from time to time, either accidentally or willfully. We call our architecture LEAP net, for Latent Encoding of Atypical Perturbation. Our method implements a form of transfer learning, permitting to train on a few source domains, then generalize to new target domains, without learning on any example of that domain. We evaluate the viability of this technique to rapidly assess curative actions that human operators take in emergency situations, using real historical data, from the French high voltage power grid.Figure 1: Electricity is transported from production nodes (top) to consumption nodes (bottom), through lines (green and red edges) connected at substations (black circles), forming a transmission grid of a given topology ฯ . Injections x ( x 1, x 2, x 3, x 4) (production or consumption) add up to zero.
The double traveling salesman problem with partial last-in-first-out loading constraints
Chagas, Jonatas B. C., Toffolo, Tรบlio A. M., Souza, Marcone J. F., Iori, Manuel
In this paper, we introduce the Double Traveling Salesman Problem with Partial Last-In-First-Out Loading Constraints (DTSPPL), a pickup-and-delivery single-vehicle routing problem where all pickup operations must be performed before any delivery one because the pickup and delivery areas are geographically separated. The vehicle collects items in the pickup area and loads them into its container, a horizontal stack. After performing all pickup operations, the vehicle begins delivering the items in the delivery area. Loading and unloading operations must obey a partial Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) policy, i.e., a version of the LIFO policy that may be violated within a given reloading depth. The objective of the DTSPPL is to minimize the total cost, which involves the total distance traveled by the vehicle and the number of reloaded items due to violations of the standard LIFO policy. We formally describe the DTSPPL by means of two Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulations, and propose a heuristic algorithm based on the Biased Random-Key Genetic Algorithm (BRKGA) to find high-quality solutions. The performance of the proposed solution approaches is assessed over a broad set of instances. Computational results have shown that both ILP formulations were able to solve only the smaller instances, whereas the BRKGA obtained better solutions for almost all instances, requiring shorter computational time.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stats News: AI Augmentation To Create $2.9 Trillion Of Business Value
The recent surveys, studies, forecasts and other quantitative assessments of the health and progress of AI estimated the impact on productivity of human-machine collaboration, the number of jobs that could be automated in major U.S. cities, and the size of the future AI in retail and healthcare markets; and found AI optimism among the general population, algorithms outperforming (again) pathologists, and that our very limited understanding of how our brains learn may improve machine learning. Do you think securing your devices and personal data will become more or less complicated over the next 12 months? DeepMind has developed a machine learning model that can label most animals at Tanzania's Serengeti National Park at least as well as humans while shortening the process by up to 9 months (it normally takes up to a year for volunteers to return labeled photos) [Engadget] In a simulation, biological learning algorithms outperformed state-of-the-art optimal learning curves in supervised learning of feedforward networks, indicating "the potency of neurobiological mechanisms" and opening "opportunities for developing a superior class of deep learning algorithms" [Scientific Reports] The AI in retail market is estimated to reach $4.3 billion by 2024 [P&S Intelligence] [e.g., Nike acquires Celect, August 6, 2019] The AI in healthcare market is estimated to reach $12.2 billion by 2023 [Market Research Future] [e.g., BlueDot has raised $7 million in Series A funding, August 7, 2019] AI companies funded in the last 3 months: 417 for total funding of $8.7 billion Data is eating the world quote of the week: "Although it is fashionable to say that we are producing more data than ever, the reality is that we always produced data, we just didn't know how to capture it in useful ways"--Subbarao Kambhampati, Arizona State University AI is eating the world quote of the week: "We advocate for a new perspective for designing benchmarks for measuring progress in AI. Unlike past decades where the community constructed a static benchmark dataset to work on for the next decade or two, we propose that future benchmarks should dynamically evolve together with the evolving state-of-the-art"--Keisuke Sakaguchi, Ronan Le Bras, Chandra Bhagavatula, Yejin Choi, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the University of Washington
Facial recognition is now rampant. The implications for our freedom are chilling Stephanie Hare
Last week, all of us who live in the UK, and all who visit us, discovered that our faces were being scanned secretly by private companies and have been for some time. We don't know what these companies are doing with our faces or how long they've been doing it because they refused to share this with the Financial Times, which reported on Monday that facial recognition technology is being used in King's Cross and may be deployed in Canary Wharf, two areas that cover more than 160 acres of London. We are just as ignorant about what has been happening to our faces when they're scanned by the property developers, shopping centres, museums, conference centres and casinos that have also been secretly using facial recognition technology on us, according to the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch. But we can take a good guess. They may be matching us against police watchlists, maintaining their own watchlists or sharing their watchlists with the police, other companies and other governments.
Competitive Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning with Counterfactual Thinking
Wang, Yue, Wan, Yao, Zhang, Chenwei, Cui, Lixin, Bai, Lu, Yu, Philip S.
Counterfactual thinking describes a psychological phenomenon that people re-infer the possible results with different solutions about things that have already happened. It helps people to gain more experience from mistakes and thus to perform better in similar future tasks. This paper investigates the counterfactual thinking for agents to find optimal decision-making strategies in multi-agent reinforcement learning environments. In particular, we propose a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning model with a structure which mimics the human-psychological counterfactual thinking process to improve the competitive abilities for agents. To this end, our model generates several possible actions (intent actions) with a parallel policy structure and estimates the rewards and regrets for these intent actions based on its current understanding of the environment. Our model incorporates a scenario-based framework to link the estimated regrets with its inner policies. During the iterations, our model updates the parallel policies and the corresponding scenario-based regrets for agents simultaneously. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed model, we conduct extensive experiments on two different environments with real-world applications. Experimental results show that counterfactual thinking can actually benefit the agents to obtain more accumulative rewards from the environments with fair information by comparing to their opponents while keeping high performing efficiency.