Diego Caicedo is the Co-Founder and CEO of OmniBnk, a neobank that provides financial services to small businesses in Latin America. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are said to revolutionize the financial world, changing the banking experience for the better. The implications of the technology are vast, though most banks are still in the early stages of adopting AI technologies. A survey by Narrative Science and the National Business Research Institute found that 32% of financial services executives confirmed that they are already using AI technologies such as predictive analytics, recommendation engines, and voice recognition. One major hindrance to AI adoption is legacy systems.

We introduce and analyze two parameter-free linear-memory tree search algorithms. Under mild assumptions we prove our algorithms are guaranteed to perform only a logarithmic factor more node expansions than A* when the search space is a tree. Previously, the best guarantee for a linear-memory algorithm under similar assumptions was achieved by IDA*, which in the worst case expands quadratically more nodes than in its last iteration. Empirical results support the theory and demonstrate the practicality and robustness of our algorithms. Furthermore, they are fast and easy to implement.

Assessing how individuals perform different activities is key information for modeling health states of individuals and populations. Descriptions of activity performance in clinical free text are complex, including syntactic negation and similarities to textual entailment tasks. We explore a variety of methods for the novel task of classifying four types of assertions about activity performance: Able, Unable, Unclear, and None (no information). We find that ensembling an SVM trained with lexical features and a CNN achieves 77.9% macro F1 score on our task, and yields nearly 80% recall on the rare Unclear and Unable samples. Finally, we highlight several challenges in classifying performance assertions, including capturing information about sources of assistance, incorporating syntactic structure and negation scope, and handling new modalities at test time. Our findings establish a strong baseline for this novel task, and identify intriguing areas for further research.

In this paper, we introduce a novel semantic description approach inspired on Prototype Theory foundations. We propose a Computational Prototype Model (CPM) that encodes and stores the central semantic meaning of objects category: the semantic prototype. Also, we introduce a Prototype-based Description Model that encodes the semantic meaning of an object while describing its features using our CPM model. Our description method uses semantic prototypes computed by CNN-classifications models to create discriminative signatures that describe an object highlighting its most distinctive features within the category. Our experiments show that: i) our CPM model (semantic prototype + distance metric) is able to describe the internal semantic structure of objects categories; ii) our semantic distance metric can be understood as the object visual typicality score within a category; iii) our descriptor encoding is semantically interpretable and significantly outperforms other image global encodings in clustering and classification tasks.

NASCAR will use the breadth and depth of AWS technologies to build cloud-based services and automate processes, including a new video series on NASCAR.com The video series will debut heading into the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race at Michigan International Speedway, sharing the greatest historical moments in NASCAR racing with viewers. NASCAR is migrating its 18-petabyte video archive to AWS, and will leverage Amazon Rekognition--an AWS service that adds intelligent image and video analysis to applications--to automatically tag specific video frames with metadata, such as driver, car, race, lap, time, and sponsors so they can easily search those tags to surface the most iconic moments from past races. By using AWS's services, NASCAR expects to save thousands of hours of manual search time each year, and will be able to easily surface flashbacks like Dale Earnhardt Sr.'s 1987 "Pass in the Grass" or Denny Hamlin's 2016 Daytona 500 photo finish, and quickly deliver these to fans via video clips on NASCAR.com and social media channels. NASCAR will leverage AWS services to enhance its full range of media assets including websites, mobile applications, and social properties for its 80 million fans worldwide.

The OECD Principles on Artificial Intelligence promote artificial intelligence (AI) that is innovative and trustworthy and that respects human rights and democratic values. They were adopted on 22 May 2019 by OECD member countries when they approved the OECD Council Recommendation on Artificial Intelligence. The OECD AI Principles are the first such principles signed up to by governments. Beyond OECD members, other countries including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru and Romania have already adhered to the AI Principles, with further adherents welcomed. The OECD AI Principles set standards for AI that are practical and flexible enough to stand the test of time in a rapidly evolving field.

Variational autoencoders provide a principled framework for learning deep latent-variable models and corresponding inference models. In this work, we provide an introduction to variational autoencoders and some important extensions.

Nonparametric extensions of topic models such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation, including Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP), are often studied in natural language processing. Training these models generally requires use of serial algorithms, which limits scalability to large data sets and complicates acceleration via use of parallel and distributed systems. Most current approaches to scalable training of such models either don't converge to the correct target, or are not data-parallel. Moreover, these approaches generally do not utilize all available sources of sparsity found in natural language - an important way to make computation efficient. Based upon a representation of certain conditional distributions within an HDP, we propose a doubly sparse data-parallel sampler for the HDP topic model that addresses these issues.

Optimal biomarker combinations for treatment-selection can be derived by minimizing total burden to the population caused by the targeted disease and its treatment. However, when multiple biomarkers are present, including all in the model can be expensive and hurt model performance. To remedy this, we consider feature selection in optimization by minimizing an extended total burden that additionally incorporates biomarker measurement costs. Formulating it as a 0-norm penalized weighted classification, we develop various procedures for estimating linear and nonlinear combinations. Through simulations and a real data example, we demonstrate the importance of incorporating feature-selection and marker cost when deriving treatment-selection rules.

Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have proved to be suitable in tasks on unstructured data. Particularly in tasks as community detection, node classification, and link prediction. However, most GNN models still operate with static relationships. We propose the Graph Learning Network (GLN), a simple yet effective process to learn node embeddings and structure prediction functions. Our model uses graph convolutions to propose expected node features, and predict the best structure based on them. We repeat these steps recursively to enhance the prediction and the embeddings.