Large width limits have been a recent focus of deep learning research: modulo computational practicalities, do wider networks outperform narrower ones?

Overall, federal records revealed that over 2.7 million background checks are conducted every month for various reasons, including job applications. This also means air travel will likely suffer this month because the FAA Pilot Record Database is delayed and new pilots cannot start flights. FBI criminal checks, as well as civil court record searches, are needed for nurses, aides, and therapists, to slow hospital onboarding. 'Shutdowns cause delays in court record updates and verification gaps, slowing credentialing and risking non-compliance with HIPAA or state mandates,' the cyber expert explained. Trucking and shipping companies will also feel the impact of the shutdown because commercial drivers must undergo mandated checks by the Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse and Pre-Employment Screening Program (PSP), which depend on federal IT updates and audits.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Scientists have a lot of questions about our planet's most important carbon sink--and a new project could help answer them. NEW YORK, NEW YORK - APRIL 16: Eric Schmidt, former chairman and CEO at GOOGLE visits Fox Business Network Studios on April 16, 2019 in New York City. A foundation created by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, will fund a project to send drone boats out into the rough ocean around Antarctica to collect data that could help solve a crucial climate puzzle. The project is part of a suite of funding announced today from Schmidt Sciences, which Schmidt and his wife Wendy created to focus on projects tackling research into the global carbon cycle. It will spend $45 million over the next five years to fund these projects, which includes the Antarctic research.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

This paper studies theoretically and empirically a method of turning machine-learning algorithms into probabilistic predictors that automatically enjoys a property of validity (perfect calibration) and is computationally efficient. The price to pay for perfect calibration is that these probabilistic predictors produce imprecise (in practice, almost precise for large data sets) probabilities. When these imprecise probabilities are merged into precise probabilities, the resulting predictors, while losing the theoretical property of perfect calibration, are consistently more accurate than the existing methods in empirical studies.

Multidimensional recurrent neural networks (MDRNNs) have shown a remarkable performance in the area of speech and handwriting recognition. The performance of an MDRNN is improved by further increasing its depth, and the difficulty of learning the deeper network is overcome by using Hessian-free (HF) optimization. Given that connectionist temporal classification (CTC) is utilized as an objective of learning an MDRNN for sequence labeling, the non-convexity of CTC poses a problem when applying HF to the network. As a solution, a convex approximation of CTC is formulated and its relationship with the EM algorithm and the Fisher information matrix is discussed. An MDRNN up to a depth of 15 layers is successfully trained using HF, resulting in an improved performance for sequence labeling.

Fans have reacted angrily after Microsoft announced price increases to its Xbox Game Pass subscription service. The company announced that the most popular tier of its Netflix-style video games system - available to PC and Xbox players - would rise by more than 50% from £14.99 to £22.99 per month. Reacting on social media, loads of fans said they had cancelled their Game Pass subscriptions, with some reporting the service's cancellation page had crashed due to demand. BBC Newsbeat has asked Microsoft if the outage was linked to a surge in visits. In a blog post detailing the changes to Game Pass, Microsoft said it would offer three tiers - Essential (£10 per month), Premium (£14.99) and Ultimate (£22.99).