Reinventing the future of work can lead to shared prosperity. An artificial intelligence-driven career adviser, an industrial smart glove, freelance insurance, a tactile laptop for the visually impaired. The 12 European finalists of the global MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge are "improving economic opportunity for workers," according to the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. The challenge is the flagship program of the initiative, and this year the initiative launched a worldwide competition divided into five regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. "If we employ inclusive innovation globally, it could be the best thing that ever happened to humanity," Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the initiative, said in a statement.

BOGOTA, Colombia – The exiled opposition leader accused by Venezuelan authorities of directing a failed plot to assassinate President Nicolas Maduro says the greatest threat to the embattled socialist leader may be his detractors in uniform standing quietly behind him. Julio Borges, who once led Venezuela's opposition-controlled National Assembly, said Tuesday that the arrests of two high-ranking military officers in connection with the attack using drones loaded with plastic explosives is yet another signal that fractures within the nation's armed forces are growing. "The conflict today is within the government -- not just at the political level, but more importantly within the armed forces," Borges said in an interview with The Associated Press in Colombia's capital. His comments came hours after Venezuela's chief prosecutor announced the arrest of Gen. Alejandro Perez and Col. Pedro Zambrano from Venezuela's National Guard as part of the investigation into the Aug. 4 attack. Their alleged roles were not described.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of research that has blossomed tremendously in recent years and has shown remarkable potential for artificial intelligence based opponents in computer games. This success is primarily due to the vast capabilities of convolutional neural networks, that can extract useful features from noisy and complex data. Games are excellent tools to test and push the boundaries of novel RL algorithms because they give valuable insight into how well an algorithm can perform in isolated environments without the real-life consequences. Real-time strategy games (RTS) is a genre that has tremendous complexity and challenges the player in short and long-term planning. There is much research that focuses on applied RL in RTS games, and novel advances are therefore anticipated in the not too distant future. However, there are to date few environments for testing RTS AIs. Environments in the literature are often either overly simplistic, such as microRTS, or complex and without the possibility for accelerated learning on consumer hardware like StarCraft II. This paper introduces the Deep RTS game environment for testing cutting-edge artificial intelligence algorithms for RTS games. Deep RTS is a high-performance RTS game made specifically for artificial intelligence research. It supports accelerated learning, meaning that it can learn at a magnitude of 50 000 times faster compared to existing RTS games. Deep RTS has a flexible configuration, enabling research in several different RTS scenarios, including partially observable state-spaces and map complexity. We show that Deep RTS lives up to our promises by comparing its performance with microRTS, ELF, and StarCraft II on high-end consumer hardware. Using Deep RTS, we show that a Deep Q-Network agent beats random-play agents over 70% of the time. Deep RTS is publicly available at https://github.com/cair/DeepRTS.

Running high-resolution physical models is computationally expensive and essential for many disciplines. Agriculture, transportation, and energy are sectors that depend on high-resolution weather models, which typically consume many hours of large High Performance Computing (HPC) systems to deliver timely results. Many users cannot afford to run the desired resolution and are forced to use low resolution output. One simple solution is to interpolate results for visualization. It is also possible to combine an ensemble of low resolution models to obtain a better prediction. However, these approaches fail to capture the redundant information and patterns in the low-resolution input that could help improve the quality of prediction. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a strategy based on a deep neural network to learn a high-resolution representation from low-resolution predictions using weather forecast as a practical use case. We take a supervised learning approach, since obtaining labeled data can be done automatically. Our results show significant improvement when compared with standard practices and the strategy is still lightweight enough to run on modest computer systems.

In the last decade, a considerable research effort has been devoted to developing adaptive algorithms based on kernel functions. One of the main features of these algorithms is that they form a family of universal approximation techniques, solving problems with nonlinearities elegantly. In this paper, we present data-selective adaptive kernel normalized least-mean square (KNLMS) algorithms that can increase their learning rate and reduce their computational complexity. In fact, these methods deal with kernel expansions, creating a growing structure also known as the dictionary, whose size depends on the number of observations and their innovation. The algorithms described herein use an adaptive step-size to accelerate the learning and can offer an excellent tradeoff between convergence speed and steady state, which allows them to solve nonlinear filtering and estimation problems with a large number of parameters without requiring a large computational cost. The data-selective update scheme also limits the number of operations performed and the size of the dictionary created by the kernel expansion, saving computational resources and dealing with one of the major problems of kernel adaptive algorithms. A statistical analysis is carried out along with a computational complexity analysis of the proposed algorithms. Simulations show that the proposed KNLMS algorithms outperform existing algorithms in examples of nonlinear system identification and prediction of a time series originating from a nonlinear difference equation.

And a pinnacle of success in the context of technological advancements is the field of artificial intelligence, also called AI. In current times, AI is utilized immensely in a variety of sectors such as health, e-commerce, retail, automotive, defense and security, chemical plants, packaging, construction, and BFSI. This indicates that AI has found immense potential in myriad applications, thus giving rise to the global artificial intelligence and cognitive computing market. Rising disposable incomes and changing lifestyles have primarily caused an increase in the demand for enhanced systems to exist in various walks of life. Such a high demand is propelling the market to experience extensive growth too. A phenomenal progress in the development of computers as well as internet facilities has primarily been responsible for improving different functions of systems, wherein a computer is highly needed.

Identifying current and future informal regions within cities remains a crucial issue for policymakers and governments in developing countries. The delineation process of identifying such regions in cities requires a lot of resources. While there are various studies that identify informal settlements based on satellite image classification, relying on both supervised or unsupervised machine learning approaches, these models either require multiple input data to function or need further development with regards to precision. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for identifying and predicting informal settlements using only street intersections data, regardless of the variation of urban form, number of floors, materials used for construction or street width. With such minimal input data, we attempt to provide planners and policy-makers with a pragmatic tool that can aid in identifying informal zones in cities. The algorithm of the model is based on spatial statistics and a machine learning approach, using Multinomial Logistic Regression (MNL) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). The proposed model relies on defining informal settlements based on two ubiquitous characteristics that these regions tend to be filled in with smaller subdivided lots of housing relative to the formal areas within the local context, and the paucity of services and infrastructure within the boundary of these settlements that require relatively bigger lots. We applied the model in five major cities in Egypt and India that have spatial structures in which informality is present. These cities are Greater Cairo, Alexandria, Hurghada and Minya in Egypt, and Mumbai in India. The predictSLUMS model shows high validity and accuracy for identifying and predicting informality within the same city the model was trained on or in different ones of a similar context.

Designing a reliable natural language (NL) interface for querying tables has been a longtime goal of researchers in both the data management and natural language processing (NLP) communities. Such an interface receives as input an NL question, translates it into a formal query, executes the query and returns the results. Errors in the translation process are not uncommon, and users typically struggle to understand whether their query has been mapped correctly. We address this problem by explaining the obtained formal queries to non-expert users. Two methods for query explanations are presented: the first translates queries into NL, while the second method provides a graphic representation of the query cell-based provenance (in its execution on a given table). Our solution augments a state-of-the-art NL interface over web tables, enhancing it in both its training and deployment phase. Experiments, including a user study conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk, show our solution to improve both the correctness and reliability of an NL interface.

Data visualization should be accessible for all analysts with data, not just the few with technical expertise. Visualization recommender systems aim to lower the barrier to exploring basic visualizations by automatically generating results for analysts to search and select, rather than manually specify. Here, we demonstrate a novel machine learning-based approach to visualization recommendation that learns visualization design choices from a large corpus of datasets and associated visualizations. First, we identify five key design choices made by analysts while creating visualizations, such as selecting a visualization type and choosing to encode a column along the X- or Y-axis. We train models to predict these design choices using one million dataset-visualization pairs collected from a popular online visualization platform. Neural networks predict these design choices with high accuracy compared to baseline models. We report and interpret feature importances from one of these baseline models. To evaluate the generalizability and uncertainty of our approach, we benchmark with a crowdsourced test set, and show that the performance of our model is comparable to human performance when predicting consensus visualization type, and exceeds that of other ML-based systems.

Mexican banks – already keen on digital solutions to optimize their processes and drive customer loyalty – are quickly seeing the benefits of artificial intelligence. Together with Brazil and the UK, Mexico is one of the countries where banks show most enthusiasm for using AI, according to a study published in June by GFT, an IT consultancy, which surveyed banks in eight countries. However, Mexico's banks are choosing the applications carefully. Many have rapidly taken to AI to power advanced chatbots. But for the moment, many prefer not to leave fraud or anti-money laundering detection in the control of such new technology.