South America
An Evolutionary Hierarchical Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Knowledge Representation System (EHIT2FKRS) for Travel Route Assignment
Zouari, Mariam, Baklouti, Nesrine, Medina, Javier Sanchez, Ayed, Mounir Ben, Alimi, Adel M.
Urban Traffic Networks are characterized by high dynamics of traffic flow and increased travel time, including waiting times. This leads to more complex road traffic management. The present research paper suggests an innovative advanced traffic management system based on Hierarchical Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Logic model optimized by the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method. The aim of designing this system is to perform dynamic route assignment to relieve traffic congestion and limit the unexpected fluctuation effects on traffic flow. The suggested system is executed and simulated using SUMO, a well-known microscopic traffic simulator. For the present study, we have tested four large and heterogeneous metropolitan areas located in the cities of Sfax, Luxembourg, Bologna and Cologne. The experimental results proved the effectiveness of learning the Hierarchical Interval type-2 Fuzzy logic using real time particle swarm optimization technique PSO to accomplish multiobjective optimality regarding two criteria: number of vehicles that reach their destination and average travel time. The obtained results are encouraging, confirming the efficiency of the proposed system.
Two Years, Four Nanodegree Programs, and a New Career! Udacity
Ricardo Diaz is a machine learning engineer. He works for a great company in Peru, and he's a graduate of no less than four Nanodegree programs! But just two years ago, it was a different story. He was still in Venezuela, struggling to learn new skills. He was short of money, and his prospects for making a full-time salary weren't great.
Artificial Intelligence For Studying Ancient Human Populations Of Patagonia
Argentine and Spanish researchers have used statistical techniques of automatic learning to analyze mobility patterns and technology of the hunter-gatherer groups that inhabited the Southern Cone of America, from the time they arrived about 12,000 years ago until the end of the 19th century. Big data from archaeological sites located in the extreme south of Patagonia have been used for this study. The presence of humans on the American continent dates back to at least 14,500 years ago, according to datings made at archaeological sites such as Monte Verde, in Chile's Los Lagos Region. But the first settlers continued moving towards the southernmost confines of America. Now, researchers from Argentina's National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and two Spanish institutions (the Spanish National Research Council and the University of Burgos) have analyzed the relationships between mobility and technology developed by those societies that originated in the far south of Patagonia.
Facial gestures can move this AI-motorized wheelchair
A new wheelchair may give people with severe mobility challenges another reason to smile about artificial intelligence--that grin might literally help them control their wheelchair. Sao Paulo, Brazil-based Hoobox Robotics has teamed up with Intel on the Wheelie 7, a kit that leverages AI to let a disabled person drive a motorized wheelchair through any of 10 facial expressions, from raising an eyebrow to sticking out one's tongue. Motorized wheelchairs these days are typically controlled with a user's hands, a joystick or via sensors attached to the body. The Wheelie learns the user's smile and other gestures automatically--there is no special training that is required. Through an app, a caregiver or family member can assign which facial expressions would be tied to which way the wheelchair moves or stops: left, right, forward, backwards.
Utilizing Imbalanced Data and Classification Cost Matrix to Predict Movie Preferences
In this paper, we propose a movie genre recommendation system based on imbalanced survey data and unequal classification costs for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) who need a data-based and analytical approach to stock favored movies and target marketing to young people. The dataset maintains a detailed personal profile as predictors including demographic, behavioral and preferences information for each user as well as imbalanced genre preferences. These predictors do not include movies' information such as actors or directors. The paper applies Gentle boost, Adaboost and Bagged tree ensembles as well as SVM machine learning algorithms to learn classification from one thousand observations and predict movie genre preferences with adjusted classification costs. The proposed recommendation system also selects important predictors to avoid overfitting and to shorten training time. This paper compares the test error among the above-mentioned algorithms that are used to recommend different movie genres. The prediction power is also indicated in a comparison of precision and recall with other state-of-the-art recommendation systems. The proposed movie genre recommendation system solves problems such as small dataset, imbalanced response, and unequal classification costs.
Node Embedding with Adaptive Similarities for Scalable Learning over Graphs
Berberidis, Dimitris, Giannakis, Georgios B.
Node embedding is the task of extracting informative and descriptive features over the nodes of a graph. The importance of node embeddings for graph analytics, as well as learning tasks such as node classification, link prediction and community detection, has led to increased interest on the problem leading to a number of recent advances. Much like PCA in the feature domain, node embedding is an inherently \emph{unsupervised} task; in lack of metadata used for validation, practical methods may require standardization and limiting the use of tunable hyperparameters. Finally, node embedding methods are faced with maintaining scalability in the face of large-scale real-world graphs of ever-increasing sizes. In the present work, we propose an adaptive node embedding framework that adjusts the embedding process to a given underlying graph, in a fully unsupervised manner. To achieve this, we adopt the notion of a tunable node similarity matrix that assigns weights on paths of different length. The design of the multilength similarities ensures that the resulting embeddings also inherit interpretable spectral properties. The proposed model is carefully studied, interpreted, and numerically evaluated using stochastic block models. Moreover, an algorithmic scheme is proposed for training the model parameters effieciently and in an unsupervised manner. We perform extensive node classification, link prediction, and clustering experiments on many real world graphs from various domains, and compare with state-of-the-art scalable and unsupervised node embedding alternatives. The proposed method enjoys superior performance in many cases, while also yielding interpretable information on the underlying structure of the graph.
AI in digital commerce is generally considered a success, says Gartner - AI News
A survey by research firm Gartner found that the use of AI in digital commerce companies is usually considered a success, with 70% of the organisations claiming very, or extremely successful, implementation of the technology. A total of 307 digital commerce organisations were surveyed for the study. These companies are currently using or piloting the technology to understand the adoption, value, success and challenges of AI in digital commerce. Organisations participated in this study were from the US, Canada, Brazil, France, Germany, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India and China. Among the respondents, three-quarters said that they are seeing double-digit improvements in the outcomes they measure.
At G-20, Can Donald Trump Stop Being the Wrecking Ball of the Postwar Global Order?
Donald Trump has become the wrecking ball of the postwar global order--and he clearly revels in its destruction. So far, he has little to show on big-ticket challenges, including Russia, China, North Korea, Middle East peace and Iran, international trade and tariffs, or arms deals. His next big test is this weekend, in Buenos Aires, at the G-20 summit, convening the world's largest economies and weightiest powers. All of those issues will be on his agenda in one venue. On Thanksgiving, Trump--who recently gave his Presidency an A-plus--said he is confident about his prospects at the G-20 summit, including negotiations with China's President, Xi Jinping, to avoid a trade war.
Evolutionary framework for two-stage stochastic resource allocation problems
Hokama, Pedro H. D. B., Felice, Mário C. San, Bracht, Evandro C., Usberti, Fábio L.
Resource allocation problems are a family of problems in which resources must be selected to satisfy given demands. This paper focuses on the two-stage stochastic generalization of resource allocation problems where future demands are expressed in a finite number of possible scenarios. The goal is to select cost effective resources to be acquired in the present time (first stage), and to implement a complete solution for each scenario (second stage), while minimizing the total expected cost of the choices in both stages. We propose an evolutionary framework for solving general two-stage stochastic resource allocation problems. In each iteration of our framework, a local search algorithm selects resources to be acquired in the first stage. A genetic metaheuristic then completes the solutions for each scenario and relevant information is passed onto the next iteration, thereby supporting the acquisition of promising resources in the following first stage. Experimentation on numerous instances of the two-stage stochastic Steiner tree problem suggests that our evolutionary framework is powerful enough to address large instances of a wide variety of two-stage stochastic resource allocation problems.
Correspondence Analysis of Government Expenditure Patterns
Hsu, Hsiang, Calmon, Flavio P., Filho, José Cândido Silveira Santos, Calmon, Andre P., Salamatian, Salman
We analyze expenditure patterns of discretionary funds by Brazilian congress members. This analysis is based on a large dataset containing over $7$ million expenses made publicly available by the Brazilian government. This dataset has, up to now, remained widely untouched by machine learning methods. Our main contributions are two-fold: (i) we provide a novel dataset benchmark for machine learning-based efforts for government transparency to the broader research community, and (ii) introduce a neural network-based approach for analyzing and visualizing outlying expense patterns. Our hope is that the approach presented here can inspire new machine learning methodologies for government transparency applicable to other developing nations.