Apple is continuing its string of AI startup acquisitions, this time to improve Siri's performance. The company has confirmed to Bloomberg that it recently acquired Inductiv, a Waterloo, Ontario, Canada-based company that uses AI to correct data -- which, in turn, improves machine learning. The company didn't elaborate on its plans and relied on its standard response that it "buys smaller technology companies from time to time," but Siri appears to be the focus. The iPhone maker appears to be focused on improving its voice assistant's understanding as of late, most recently acquiring Voysis to boost natural language comprehension. Cleaner data would go a long way toward that goal by reducing the chances that garbage information confuses Siri.

In an ever-increasing interest for Machine Learning (ML) and a favorable data development context, we here propose an original methodology for data-based prediction of two-dimensional physical fields. Polynomial Chaos Expansion (PCE), widely used in the Uncertainty Quantification community (UQ), has recently shown promising prediction characteristics for one-dimensional problems, with advantages that are inherent to the method such as its explicitness and adaptability to small training sets, in addition to the associated probabilistic framework. Simultaneously, Dimensionality Reduction (DR) techniques are increasingly used for pattern recognition and data compression and have gained interest due to improved data quality. In this study, the interest of Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) for the construction of a statistical predictive model is demonstrated. Both POD and PCE have widely proved their worth in their respective frameworks. The goal of the present paper was to combine them for a field-measurement-based forecasting. The described steps are also useful to analyze the data. Some challenging issues encountered when using multidimensional field measurements are addressed, for example when dealing with few data. The POD-PCE coupling methodology is presented, with particular focus on input data characteristics and training-set choice. A simple methodology for evaluating the importance of each physical parameter is proposed for the PCE model and extended to the POD-PCE coupling.

Machine learning is employed at an increasing rate in the research field of quantum chemistry. While the majority of approaches target the investigation of chemical systems in their electronic ground state, the inclusion of light into the processes leads to electronically excited states and gives rise to several new challenges. Here, we survey recent advances for excited-state dynamics based on machine learning. In doing so, we highlight successes, pitfalls, challenges and future avenues for machine learning approaches for light-induced molecular processes. Keywords: machine learning, photodynamics, photochemistry, excited states, quantum chemistry, spin-orbit couplings, nonadiabatic couplings.

Endowed with higher levels of autonomy, robots are required to perform increasingly complex manipulation tasks. Learning from demonstration is arising as a promising paradigm for transferring skills to robots. It allows to implicitly learn task constraints from observing the motion executed by a human teacher, which can enable adaptive behavior. We present a novel Gaussian-Process-based learning from demonstration approach. This probabilistic representation allows to generalize over multiple demonstrations, and encode variability along the different phases of the task. In this paper, we address how Gaussian Processes can be used to effectively learn a policy from trajectories in task space. We also present a method to efficiently adapt the policy to fulfill new requirements, and to modulate the robot behavior as a function of task variability. This approach is illustrated through a real-world application using the TIAGo robot.

Deep learning (DL) has been applied extensively in a wide range of fields. However, it has been shown that DL models are susceptible to a certain kinds of perturbations called \emph{adversarial attacks}. To fully unlock the power of DL in critical fields such as financial trading, it is necessary to address such issues. In this paper, we present a method of constructing perturbed examples and use these examples to boost the robustness of the model. Our algorithm increases the stability of DL models for candlestick classification with respect to perturbations in the input data.

The'unfolding argument' presented in [1] made the case that IIT and other causal structure theories (CSTs) are either already falsified or outside the realm of science. This argument was first extended in [2] and a more generalized version was presented as the'substitution arguments' in [3].The author here will assume that readers are pretty familiar with all 3 papers -[1], [2] and [3]. The focus will be on the last one which we find to be the most general version of the arguments and the most broad in claims. It is very interesting work, accessible and proposes a descriptive mathematical framework that could be very useful moving forward. For the sake of brevity, we will borrow the symbols and terminologies from [3] as much as possible to point out the errors in that model and make suitable corrections. With these corrections incorporated, we should be able see that the substitutions argument does not apply for functionalist theories (or at best have not been proven to do so) in [3]. In this short note, we will start by introducing some relevant concepts and definitions from [3] in section 2. The main contribution of this note is section 3, where we present arguments as to why the results of the substitution argument does not apply for functionalist theories of consciousness by pointing what the formalism missed. The note will conclude in section 4 summarizing the ideas presented here.

Nowadays, the field of Artificial Intelligence in Computer Games (AI in Games) is going to be more alluring since computer games challenge many aspects of AI with a wide range of problems, particularly general problems. One of these kinds of problems is Exploration, which states that an unknown environment must be explored by one or several agents. In this work, we have first introduced the Maze Dash puzzle as an exploration problem where the agent must find a Hamiltonian Path visiting all the cells. Then, we have investigated to find suitable methods by a focus on Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and SAT to solve this puzzle quickly and accurately. An optimization has been applied to the proposed MCTS algorithm to obtain a promising result. Also, since the prefabricated test cases of this puzzle are not large enough to assay the proposed method, we have proposed and employed a technique to generate solvable test cases to evaluate the approaches. Eventually, the MCTS-based method has been assessed by the auto-generated test cases and compared with our implemented SAT approach that is considered a good rival. Our comparison indicates that the MCTS-based approach is an up-and-coming method that could cope with the test cases with small and medium sizes with faster run-time compared to SAT. However, for certain discussed reasons, including the features of the problem, tree search organization, and also the approach of MCTS in the Simulation step, MCTS takes more time to execute in Large size scenarios. Consequently, we have found the bottleneck for the MCTS-based method in significant test cases that could be improved in two real-world problems.

This paper studies the problem of image-goal navigation which involves navigating to the location indicated by a goal image in a novel previously unseen environment. To tackle this problem, we design topological representations for space that effectively leverage semantics and afford approximate geometric reasoning. At the heart of our representations are nodes with associated semantic features, that are interconnected using coarse geometric information. We describe supervised learning-based algorithms that can build, maintain and use such representations under noisy actuation. Experimental study in visually and physically realistic simulation suggests that our method builds effective representations that capture structural regularities and efficiently solve long-horizon navigation problems. We observe a relative improvement of more than 50% over existing methods that study this task.

The rising demand for electricity and its essential nature in today's world calls for intelligent home energy management (HEM) systems that can reduce energy usage. This involves scheduling of loads from peak hours of the day when energy consumption is at its highest to leaner off-peak periods of the day when energy consumption is relatively lower thereby reducing the system's peak load demand, which would consequently result in lesser energy bills, and improved load demand profile. This work introduces a novel way to develop a learning system that can learn from experience to shift loads from one time instance to another and achieve the goal of minimizing the aggregate peak load. This paper proposes a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) model for demand response where the virtual agent learns the task like humans do. The agent gets feedback for every action it takes in the environment; these feedbacks will drive the agent to learn about the environment and take much smarter steps later in its learning stages. Our method outperformed the state of the art mixed integer linear programming (MILP) for load peak reduction. The authors have also designed an agent to learn to minimize both consumers' electricity bills and utilities' system peak load demand simultaneously. The proposed model was analyzed with loads from five different residential consumers; the proposed method increases the monthly savings of each consumer by reducing their electricity bill drastically along with minimizing the peak load on the system when time shiftable loads are handled by the proposed method.

New crisis response and management approaches that incorporate the latest information technologies are essential in all phases of emergency preparedness and response, including the planning, response, recovery, and assessment phases. Accurate and timely information is as crucial as is rapid and coherent coordination among the responding organizations. We are working towards a multi-pronged emergency response tool that provide stakeholders timely access to comprehensive, relevant, and reliable information. The faster emergency personnel are able to analyze, disseminate and act on key information, the more effective and timelier their response will be and the greater the benefit to affected populations. Our tool consists of encoding multiple layers of open source geospatial data including flood risk location, road network strength, inundation maps that proxy inland flooding and computer vision semantic segmentation for estimating flooded areas and damaged infrastructure. These data layers are combined and used as input data for machine learning algorithms such as finding the best evacuation routes before, during and after an emergency or providing a list of available lodging for first responders in an impacted area for first. Even though our system could be used in a number of use cases where people are forced from one location to another, we demonstrate the feasibility of our system for the use case of Hurricane Florence in Lumberton, a town of 21,000 inhabitants that is 79 miles northwest of Wilmington, North Carolina.