Energy disaggregation in a non-intrusive way estimates appliance level electricity consumption from a single meter that measures the whole house electricity demand. Recently, with the ongoing increment of energy data, there are many data-driven deep learning architectures being applied to solve the non-intrusive energy disaggregation problem. However, most proposed methods try to estimate the on-off state or the power consumption of appliance, which need not only large amount of parameters, but also hyper-parameter optimization prior to training and even preprocessing of energy data for a specified appliance. In this paper, instead of estimating on-off state or power consumption, we adapt a neural network to estimate the operational state change of appliance. Our proposed solution is more feasible across various appliances and lower complexity comparing to previous methods. The simulated experiments in the low sample rate dataset REDD show the competitive performance of the designed method, with respect to other two benchmark methods, Hidden Markov Model-based and Graph Signal processing-based approaches.

We study multiplayer stochastic multi-armed bandit problems in which the players cannot communicate,and if two or more players pull the same arm, a collision occurs and the involved players receive zero reward.Moreover, we assume each arm has a different mean for each player. Let $T$ denote the number of rounds.An algorithm with regret $O((\log T)^{2+\kappa})$ for any constant $\kappa$ was recently presented by Bistritz and Leshem (NeurIPS 2018), who left the existence of an algorithm with $O(\log T)$ regret as an open question. In this paper, we provide an affirmative answer to this question in the case when there is a unique optimal assignment of players to arms. For the general case we present an algorithm with expected regret $O((\log T)^{1+\kappa})$, for any $\kappa>0$.

Big data is currently on everybody's lips with stringent regulations the order of the day and security breaches happening on a regular basis. A company called Endor has come up with a blockchain and AI based solution to manage and process data. After years of research at MIT, Endor claims to have invented the "Google for predictive analytics*", providing automated AI predictions for companies. Endor can process Encrypted Data, without ever decrypting it, on and off blockchain and it enables business users to ask predictive questions and get automated accurate predictions. No data science expertise is required.

This work develops robust diffusion recursive least squares algorithms to mitigate the performance degradation often experienced in networks of agents in the presence of impulsive noise. The first algorithm minimizes an exponentially weighted least-squares cost function subject to a time-dependent constraint on the squared norm of the intermediate update at each node. A recursive strategy for computing the constraint is proposed using side information from the neighboring nodes to further improve the robustness. We also analyze the mean-square convergence behavior of the proposed algorithm. The second proposed algorithm is a modification of the first one based on the dichotomous coordinate descent iterations. It has a performance similar to that of the former, however its complexity is significantly lower especially when input regressors of agents have a shift structure and it is well suited to practical implementation. Simulations show the superiority of the proposed algorithms over previously reported techniques in various impulsive noise scenarios.

Dialogue systems have many applications such as customer support or question answering. Typically they have been limited to shallow single turn interactions. However more advanced applications such as career coaching or planning a trip require a much more complex multi-turn dialogue. Current limitations of conversational systems have made it difficult to support applications that require personalization, customization and context dependent interactions. We tackle this challenging problem by using domain-independent AI planning to automatically create dialogue plans, customized to guide a dialogue towards achieving a given goal. The input includes a library of atomic dialogue actions, an initial state of the dialogue, and a goal. Dialogue plans are plugged into a dialogue system capable to orchestrate their execution. Use cases demonstrate the viability of the approach. Our work on dialogue planning has been integrated into a product, and it is in the process of being deployed into another.

We present a deep learning approach for vertex reconstruction of neutrino-nucleus interaction events, a problem in the domain of high energy physics. In this approach, we combine both energy and timing data that are collected in the MINERvA detector to perform classification and regression tasks. We show that the resulting network achieves higher accuracy than previous results while requiring a smaller model size and less training time. In particular, the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art by 4.00% on classification accuracy. For the regression task, our model achieves 0.9919 on the coefficient of determination, higher than the previous work (0.96).

One of the most common and studied problem in machine learning is classification. While conventional algorithms for supervised classification rely on the determination of a function from features to labels, we propose a different approach based on the estimation of a probabilistic transformation from features to labels. Indeed, we determine a conditional probability distribution of the labels given the features and then features are classified as labels following such distribution. In order to compute the conditional distribution, we follow a robust minimax approach, minimizing the worst-case expectation of the 0-1 loss. By doing so, we find the probabilistic transformation which achieves the minimum risk against an uncertainty set consistent with the training data. We show numerical results obtained by an implementation in python of this method and we compare its performance with state of the art techniques.

The estimation of treatment effects is a pervasive problem in medicine. Existing methods for estimating treatment effects from longitudinal observational data assume that there are no hidden confounders. This assumption is not testable in practice and, if it does not hold, leads to biased estimates. In this paper, we develop the Time Series Deconfounder, a method that leverages the assignment of multiple treatments over time to enable the estimation of treatment effects even in the presence of hidden confounders. The Time Series Deconfounder uses a novel recurrent neural network architecture with multitask output to build a factor model over time and infer substitute confounders that render the assigned treatments conditionally independent. Then it performs causal inference using the substitute confounders. We provide a theoretical analysis for obtaining unbiased causal effects of time-varying exposures using the Time Series Deconfounder. Using simulations we show the effectiveness of our method in deconfounding the estimation of treatment responses in longitudinal data.

The instance segmentation problem intends to precisely detect and delineate objects in images. Most of the current solutions rely on deep convolutional neural networks but despite this fact proposed solutions are very diverse. Some solutions approach the problem as a network problem, where they use several networks or specialize a single network to solve several tasks. A different approach tries to solve the problem as an annotation problem, where the instance information is encoded in a mathematical representation. This work proposes a solution based in the DCME technique to solve the instance segmentation with a single segmentation network. Different from others, the segmentation network decoder is not specialized in a multi-task network. Instead, the network encoder is repurposed to classify image objects, reducing the computational cost of the solution.

We consider the problem of designing an artificial agent capable of interacting with humans in collaborative dialogue to produce creative, engaging narratives. In this task, the goal is to establish universe details, and to collaborate on an interesting story in that universe, through a series of natural dialogue exchanges. Our model can augment any probabilistic conversational agent by allowing it to reason about universe information established and what potential next utterances might reveal. Ideally, with each utterance, agents would reveal just enough information to add specificity and reduce ambiguity without limiting the conversation. We empirically show that our model allows control over the rate at which the agent reveals information and that doing so significantly improves accuracy in predicting the next line of dialogues from movies. We close with a case-study with four professional theatre performers, who preferred interactions with our model-augmented agent over an unaugmented agent.