Vikram Mahidhar reminds us all that AI is only as good as the humans supervising it and programming it. The biases and artefacts that come out of the processing are reflective of the biases programmed in at the beginning. A program trained to recognise totalled car bodies for insurance purposes, for example, will need close supervision of its decision-making outputs, for regulatory and consumer confidence and acceptance of the decision. There is a call and a growth in a new class of AI--one that is explainable, and that builds trust by providing evidence. Vikram also reminds us that a governance strategy is key to engendering trust in our organisation, processes and people.

In predictive process analytics, current and historical process data in event logs are used to predict future. E.g., to predict the next activity or how long a process will still require to complete. Recurrent neural networks (RNN) and its subclasses have been demonstrated to be well suited for creating prediction models. Thus far, event attributes have not been fully utilized in these models. The biggest challenge in exploiting them in prediction models is the potentially large amount of event attributes and attribute values. We present a novel clustering technique which allows for trade-offs between prediction accuracy and the time needed for model training and prediction. As an additional finding, we also found that this clustering method combined with having raw event attribute values provides even better prediction accuracy at the cost of additional time required for training and prediction. We also built a highly configurable test framework that can be used to efficiently evaluate different prediction approaches and parameterizations.

Recommender systems help users deal with information overload by providing tailored item suggestions to them. The recommendation of news is often considered to be challenging, since the relevance of an article for a user can depend on a variety of factors, including the user's short-term reading interests, the reader's context, or the recency or popularity of an article. Previous work has shown that the use of Recurrent Neural Networks is promising for the next-in-session prediction task, but has certain limitations when only recorded item click sequences are used as input. In this work, we present a hybrid, deep learning based approach for session-based news recommendation that is able to leverage a variety of information types. We evaluated our approach on two public datasets, using a temporal evaluation protocol that simulates the dynamics of a news portal in a realistic way. Our results confirm the benefits of considering additional types of information, including article popularity and recency, in the proposed way, resulting in significantly higher recommendation accuracy and catalog coverage than other session-based algorithms. Additional experiments show that the proposed parameterizable loss function used in our method also allows us to balance two usually conflicting quality factors, accuracy and novelty. Keywords: News Recommender Systems, Session-based Recommendation, Artificial Neural Networks, Context-awareness, Hybridization

We present a deep learning method for singing voice conversion. The proposed network is not conditioned on the text or on the notes, and it directly converts the audio of one singer to the voice of another. Training is performed without any form of supervision: no lyrics or any kind of phonetic features, no notes, and no matching samples between singers. The proposed network employs a single CNN encoder for all singers, a single WaveNet decoder, and a classifier that enforces the latent representation to be singer-agnostic. Each singer is represented by one embedding vector, which the decoder is conditioned on. In order to deal with relatively small datasets, we propose a new data augmentation scheme, as well as new training losses and protocols that are based on backtranslation. Our evaluation presents evidence that the conversion produces natural signing voices that are highly recognizable as the target singer.

In the elegant quiet of the café at the Church of Sweden, a narrow Gothic-style building in Midtown Manhattan, Daniel Cohen is taking a break from explaining genetics. He moves toward the creaky piano positioned near the front door, sits down, and plays a flowing, flawless rendition of "Over the Rainbow." If human biology is the scientific equivalent of a complicated score, Cohen has learned how to navigate it like a virtuoso. Cohen was the driving force behind Généthon, the French laboratory that in December 1993 produced the first-ever "map" of the human genome. He essentially introduced Big Data and automation to the study of genomics, as he and his team demonstrated for the first time that it was possible to use super-fast computing to speed up the processing of DNA samples.

Underwater gas reservoirs are used in many situations. In particular, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) facilities that are currently being developed intend to store greenhouse gases inside geological formations in the deep sea. In these formations, however, the gas might percolate, leaking back to the water and eventually to the atmosphere. The early detection of such leaks is therefore tantamount to any underwater CCS project. In this work, we propose to use Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) and a machine learning approach to design efficient detectors that can signal the presence of a leakage. We use data obtained from simulation experiments off the Brazilian shore, and show that the detection based on classification algorithms achieve good performance. We also propose a smoothing strategy based on Hidden Markov Models in order to incorporate previous knowledge about the probabilities of leakage occurrences.

Camera model identification refers to the problem of linking a picture to the camera model used to shoot it. As this might be an enabling factor in different forensic applications to single out possible suspects (e.g., detecting the author of child abuse or terrorist propaganda material), many accurate camera model attribution methods have been developed in the literature. One of their main drawbacks, however, is the typical closed-set assumption of the problem. This means that an investigated photograph is always assigned to one camera model within a set of known ones present during investigation, i.e., training time, and the fact that the picture can come from a completely unrelated camera model during actual testing is usually ignored. Under realistic conditions, it is not possible to assume that every picture under analysis belongs to one of the available camera models. To deal with this issue, in this paper, we present the first in-depth study on the possibility of solving the camera model identification problem in open-set scenarios. Given a photograph, we aim at detecting whether it comes from one of the known camera models of interest or from an unknown device. We compare different feature extraction algorithms and classifiers specially targeting open-set recognition. We also evaluate possible open-set training protocols that can be applied along with any open-set classifier. More specifically, we evaluate one training protocol targeted for open-set classifiers with deep features. We observe that a simpler version of those training protocols works with similar results to the one that requires extra data, which can be useful in many applications in which deep features are employed. Thorough testing on independent datasets shows that it is possible to leverage a recently proposed convolutional neural network as feature extractor paired with a properly trained open-set classifier...

It is well-known that DoS attacks systemically affects the usage of cloud computing resources. The detection of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks remains Different from traditional approached based on traffic traces, a challenge for the cloud environment, affecting a massive this work proposed the use of the telemetry from the cloud number of services and applications hosted by such virtualized (such as resources usage from physical and virtual hosts) as infrastructures. Typically, in the literature, the detection data source for ML algorithms. of DoS attacks is performed solely by analyzing the traffic Large scale monitoring traffic in conventional networks of packets in the network. This work advocates for the usually involves costly and complex architectures, probe use of telemetry from the cloud to detect DoS attacks using packets and other artifices. In contrast, clouds have native Machine Learning algorithms. Our hypothesis is based on telemetry, i.e., data collection services.

Like millions of women, Diana Diller was a devoted user of the pregnancy-tracking app Ovia, logging in every night to record new details on a screen asking about her bodily functions, sex drive, medications and mood. When she gave birth last spring, she used the app to chart her baby's first online medical data -- including her name, her location and whether there had been any complications -- before leaving the hospital's recovery room. But someone else was regularly checking in, too: her employer, which paid to gain access to the intimate details of its workers' personal lives, from their trying-to-conceive months to early motherhood. Diller's bosses could look up aggregate data on how many workers using Ovia's fertility, pregnancy and parenting apps had faced high-risk pregnancies or gave birth prematurely; the top medical questions they had researched; and how soon the new moms planned to return to work. "Maybe I'm naive, but I thought of it as positive reinforcement: They're trying to help me take care of myself," said Diller, 39, an event planner in Los Angeles for the video game company Activision Blizzard.

Dynamic regressor selection (DRS) systems work by selecting the most competent regressors from an ensemble to estimate the target value of a given test pattern. This competence is usually quantified using the performance of the regressors in local regions of the feature space around the test pattern. However, choosing the best measure to calculate the level of competence correctly is not straightforward. The literature of dynamic classifier selection presents a wide variety of competence measures, which cannot be used or adapted for DRS. In this paper, we review eight measures used with regression problems, and adapt them to test the performance of the DRS algorithms found in the literature. Such measures are extracted from a local region of the feature space around the test pattern, called region of competence, therefore competence measures.To better compare the competence measures, we perform a set of comprehensive experiments of 15 regression datasets. Three DRS systems were compared against individual regressor and static systems that use the Mean and the Median to combine the outputs of the regressors from the ensemble. The DRS systems were assessed varying the competence measures. Our results show that DRS systems outperform individual regressors and static systems but the choice of the competence measure is problem-dependent.