The Government Artificial Intelligence (AI) Readiness Index, compiled by Oxford Insights and the International Development Research Centre, ranks the governments of 194 nations according to how prepared they are to utilise AI in the provision of public services. According to global consulting firm PriceWaterhouseCooper, AI technologies are forecast to add an additional $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, with $6.6 trillion to come from an increase in productivity and $9.1 trillion from consumption-side effects. The score that Oxford Insights provides for each country comprises of 11 input metrics grouped under four high-level topics: governance; infrastructure and data; skills and education; and government public services. On a global level, the top ranking countries (and their scores) were: Singapore (9.186), The likes of India (7.515) and China (7.37) were ranked 17th and 20th respectively.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) with a lattice architecture are introduced in this work, combining several desirable properties of SNNs and self-organized maps (SOMs). Networks are trained with biologically motivated, unsupervised learning rules to obtain a self-organized grid of filters via cooperative and competitive excitatory-inhibitory interactions. Several inhibition strategies are developed and tested, such as (i) incrementally increasing inhibition level over the course of network training, and (ii) switching the inhibition level from low to high (two-level) after an initial training segment. During the labeling phase, the spiking activity generated by data with known labels is used to assign neurons to categories of data, which are then used to evaluate the network's classification ability on a held-out set of test data. Several biologically plausible evaluation rules are proposed and compared, including a population-level confidence rating, and an $n$-gram inspired method. The effectiveness of the proposed self-organized learning mechanism is tested using the MNIST benchmark dataset, as well as using images produced by playing the Atari Breakout game.

Many signal processing algorithms break the target signal into overlapping segments (also called windows, or patches), process them separately, and then stitch them back into place to produce a unified output. At the overlaps, the final value of those samples that are estimated more than once needs to be decided in some way. Averaging, the simplest approach, tends to produce blurred results. Significant work has been devoted to this issue in recent years: several works explore the idea of a weighted average of the overlapped patches and/or pixels; a more recent approach is to promote agreement (consensus) between the patches at their intersections. This work investigates the case where consensus is imposed as a hard constraint on the restoration problem. This leads to a general framework applicable to all sorts of signals, problems, decomposition strategies, and featuring a number of theoretical and practical advantages over other similar methods. The framework itself consists of a general optimization problem and a simple and efficient \admm-based algorithm for solving it. We also show that the consensus step of the algorithm, which is the main bottleneck of similar methods, can be solved efficiently and easily for any arbitrary patch decomposition scheme. As an example of the potential of our framework, we propose a method for filling missing samples (inpainting) which can be applied to signals of any dimension, and show its effectiveness on audio, image and video signals.

Autonomous terrestrial vehicles must be capable of perceiving traffic lights and recognizing their current states to share the streets with human drivers. Most of the time, human drivers can easily identify the relevant traffic lights. To deal with this issue, a common solution for autonomous cars is to integrate recognition with prior maps. However, additional solution is required for the detection and recognition of the traffic light. Deep learning techniques have showed great performance and power of generalization including traffic related problems. Motivated by the advances in deep learning, some recent works leveraged some state-of-the-art deep detectors to locate (and further recognize) traffic lights from 2D camera images. However, none of them combine the power of the deep learning-based detectors with prior maps to recognize the state of the relevant traffic lights. Based on that, this work proposes to integrate the power of deep learning-based detection with the prior maps used by our car platform IARA (acronym for Intelligent Autonomous Robotic Automobile) to recognize the relevant traffic lights of predefined routes. The process is divided in two phases: an offline phase for map construction and traffic lights annotation; and an online phase for traffic light recognition and identification of the relevant ones. The proposed system was evaluated on five test cases (routes) in the city of Vit\'oria, each case being composed of a video sequence and a prior map with the relevant traffic lights for the route. Results showed that the proposed technique is able to correctly identify the relevant traffic light along the trajectory.

In this work, we combine two different ranking methods together with several other predictors in a joint random forest approach for the scores of soccer matches. The first ranking method is based on the bookmaker consensus, the second ranking method estimates adequate ability parameters that reflect the current strength of the teams best. The proposed combined approach is then applied to the data from the two previous FIFA Women's World Cups 2011 and 2015. Finally, based on the resulting estimates, the FIFA Women's World Cup 2019 is simulated repeatedly and winning probabilities are obtained for all teams. The model clearly favors the defending champion USA before the host France.

In this paper, the robust stability and convergence to the true state of moving horizon estimator based on an adaptive arrival cost are established for nonlinear detectable systems. Robust global asymptotic stability is shown for the case of non-vanishing bounded disturbances whereas the convergence to the true state is proved for the case of vanishing disturbances. Several simulations were made in order to show the estimator behaviour under different operational conditions and to compare it with the state of the art estimation methods.

Depression is one of the most common mental health disorders, and a large number of depression people commit suicide each year. Potential depression sufferers do not consult psychological doctors because they feel ashamed or are unaware of any depression, which may result in severe delay of diagnosis and treatment. In the meantime, evidence shows that social media data provides valuable clues about physical and mental health conditions. In this paper, we argue that it is feasible to identify depression at an early stage by mining online social behaviours. Our approach, which is innovative to the practice of depression detection, does not rely on the extraction of numerous or complicated features to achieve accurate depression detection. Instead, we propose a novel classifier, namely, Inverse Boosting Pruning Trees (IBPT), which demonstrates a strong classification ability on a publicly accessible dataset with 7862 Twitter users. To comprehensively evaluate the classification capability of the IBPT, we use three real datasets from the UCI machine learning repository and the IBPT still obtains the best classification results against several state of the arts techniques. The results manifest that our proposed framework is promising for identifying social networks' users with depression.

Last year Kate Crawford, a New York University professor who runs an artificial intelligence research centre, set out to study the "black box" of processes that exist around the hugely popular Amazon Echo device. Crawford did not do what you might expect when approaching AI – namely, study algorithms, computing systems and suchlike. Instead, she teamed up with Vladan Joler, a Serbian academic, to map the supply chains, raw materials, data and labour that underpin Alexa, the AI agent that Echo's users talk to. It was a daunting process – so much so that Joler and Crawford admit that their map, Anatomy of an AI System, is just a first step. The results are both chilling and challenging.

Until one and a half years ago, Devidas Lonkar from Chakan town of Pune district had to depend on local fertiliser and pesticide sellers to resolve diseases and fungal issues in his crops. Hailing from an agrarian background, the 26-year-old farmer grows sugarcane, cabbage, cauliflower as well as beetroot and groundnuts across a 7-acre plot. "I would describe the symptoms of fungus or disease to the shopkeeper, to which he would then suggest various pesticides and add-ons. It took me a while before realising that these shopkeepers only suggested chemicals with short-lived efficiency that would inevitably bring farmers back to them within a couple of months," he says. "This app ended up saving me a lot of money as well as time. Sitting at home, I can now diagnose plant diseases and have already saved about Rs 1-1.5 lakh in a year that I would otherwise spend on fertilisers," he mentions.

The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling algorithm exploits Hamiltonian dynamics to construct efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), which has become increasingly popular in machine learning and statistics. Since HMC uses the gradient information of the target distribution, it can explore the state space much more efficiently than the random-walk proposals. However, probabilistic inference involving multi-modal distributions is very difficult for standard HMC method, especially when the modes are far away from each other. Sampling algorithms are then often incapable of traveling across the places of low probability. In this paper, we propose a novel MCMC algorithm which aims to sample from multi-modal distributions effectively. The method improves Hamiltonian dynamics to reduce the autocorrelation of the samples and uses a variational distribution to explore the phase space and find new modes. A formal proof is provided which shows that the proposed method can converge to target distributions. Both synthetic and real datasets are used to evaluate its properties and performance. The experimental results verify the theory and show superior performance in multi-modal sampling.