A sign of Google is seen at Google's stand during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum ... [ ] (WEF) in Davos, on January 21, 2020. In an article titled Amazon's Impending Invasion Of Banking, I wrote: "Amazon has no incentive to cut banks out of the lending or deposit business. Amazon can make more money by providing technology services to help financial institutions underwrite, process, and service loans. Banks will gladly pay for this, because Amazon will do it for a lower cost that what banks incur to do it today." My argument then, as it is now, is that Amazon is poised to be a vendor--not a competitor--to financial institutions.

This week HBO makes its assault on streaming with the new HBO Max service. At launch it will include tons of archival content like the back catalog of Friends, Rick & Morty and 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as a fleet of new original shows, movies and specials hoping to get your attention on Wednesday. I'm looking forward to the new Looney Tunes Cartoons, as well as the comedy/drama series Love Life with Anna Kendrick, but there's a lot more to choose from. Of course, Netflix is the current giant in streaming and it's not laying down for the newcomer. This week it already added Uncut Gems for viewers in the US, and later this week it will premiere a Jeffrey Epstein documentary series and the new show Space Force starring Steve Carell.

Researchers have developed an algorithm that can detect and identify different types of brain injuries. The team, from the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London and CONICET, have clinically validated and tested their method on large sets of CT scans and found that it was successfully able to detect, segment, quantify and differentiate different types of brain lesions. Their results, reported in The Lancet Digital Health, could be useful in large-scale research studies, for developing more personalised treatments for head injuries and, with further validation, could be useful in certain clinical scenarios, such as those where radiological expertise is at a premium. Head injury is a huge public health burden around the world and affects up to 60 million people each year. It is the leading cause of mortality in young adults.

This paper studies the problem of globally optimizing a variable of interest that is part of a causal model in which a sequence of interventions can be performed. This problem arises in biology, operational research, communications and, more generally, in all fields where the goal is to optimize an output metric of a system of interconnected nodes. Our approach combines ideas from causal inference, uncertainty quantification and sequential decision making. In particular, it generalizes Bayesian optimization, which treats the input variables of the objective function as independent, to scenarios where causal information is available. We show how knowing the causal graph significantly improves the ability to reason about optimal decision making strategies decreasing the optimization cost while avoiding suboptimal solutions. We propose a new algorithm called Causal Bayesian Optimization (CBO). CBO automatically balances two trade-offs: the classical exploration-exploitation and the new observation-intervention, which emerges when combining real interventional data with the estimated intervention effects computed via do-calculus. We demonstrate the practical benefits of this method in a synthetic setting and in two real-world applications.

Signed distance map (SDM) is a common representation of surfaces in medical image analysis and machine learning. The computational complexity of SDM for 3D parametric shapes is often a bottleneck in many applications, thus limiting their interest. In this paper, we propose a learning based SDM generation neural network which is demonstrated on a tridimensional cochlea shape model parameterized by 4 shape parameters. The proposed SDM Neural Network generates a cochlea signed distance map depending on four input parameters and we show that the deep learning approach leads to a 60 fold improvement in the time of computation compared to more classical SDM generation methods. Therefore, the proposed approach achieves a good trade-off between accuracy and efficiency.

We propose a deep supervised learning algorithm based on low-discrepancy sequences as the training set. By a combination of theoretical arguments and extensive numerical experiments we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms standard deep learning algorithms that are based on randomly chosen training data, for problems in moderately high dimensions. The proposed algorithm provides an efficient method for building inexpensive surrogates for many underlying maps in the context of scientific computing.

Safe autonomous navigation is an essential and challenging problem for robots operating in highly unstructured or completely unknown environments. Under these conditions, not only robotic systems must deal with limited localisation information, but also their manoeuvrability is constrained by their dynamics and often suffer from uncertainty. In order to cope with these constraints, this manuscript proposes an uncertainty-based framework for mapping and planning feasible motions online with probabilistic safety-guarantees. The proposed approach deals with the motion, probabilistic safety, and online computation constraints by: (i) incrementally mapping the surroundings to build an uncertainty-aware representation of the environment, and (ii) iteratively (re)planning trajectories to goal that are kinodynamically feasible and probabilistically safe through a multi-layered sampling-based planner in the belief space. In-depth empirical analyses illustrate some important properties of this approach, namely, (a) the multi-layered planning strategy enables rapid exploration of the high-dimensional belief space while preserving asymptotic optimality and completeness guarantees, and (b) the proposed routine for probabilistic collision checking results in tighter probability bounds in comparison to other uncertainty-aware planners in the literature. Furthermore, real-world in-water experimental evaluation on a non-holonomic torpedo-shaped autonomous underwater vehicle and simulated trials in the Stairwell scenario of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge 2019 on a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle demonstrate the efficacy of the method as well as its suitability for systems with limited on-board computational power.

We propose in this paper Periodic Interaction Primitives - a probabilistic framework that can be used to learn compact models of periodic behavior. Our approach extends existing formulations of Interaction Primitives to periodic movement regimes, i.e., walking. We show that this model is particularly well-suited for learning data-driven, customized models of human walking, which can then be used for generating predictions over future states or for inferring latent, biomechanical variables. We also demonstrate how the same framework can be used to learn controllers for a robotic prosthesis using an imitation learning approach. Results in experiments with human participants indicate that Periodic Interaction Primitives efficiently generate predictions and ankle angle control signals for a robotic prosthetic ankle, with MAE of 2.21 degrees in 0.0008s per inference. Performance degrades gracefully in the presence of noise or sensor fall outs. Compared to alternatives, this algorithm functions 20 times faster and performed 4.5 times more accurately on test subjects.

LWF chain graphs combine directed acyclic graphs and undirected graphs. We present a PC-like algorithm that finds the structure of chain graphs under the faithfulness assumption to resolve the problem of scalability of the proposed algorithm by Studeny (1997). We prove that our PC-like algorithm is order dependent, in the sense that the output can depend on the order in which the variables are given. This order dependence can be very pronounced in high-dimensional settings. We propose two modifications of the PC-like algorithm that remove part or all of this order dependence. Simulation results under a variety of settings demonstrate the competitive performance of the PC-like algorithms in comparison with the decomposition-based method, called LCD algorithm, proposed by Ma et al. (2008) in low-dimensional settings and improved performance in high-dimensional settings.

The DeepWalk algorithm is used to assign embedding vectors to nodes in the Atomspace weighted, labeled hypergraph that is used to represent knowledge in the OpenCog AGI system, in the context of an application to probabilistic inference regarding the causes of longevity based on data from biological ontologies and genomic analyses. It is shown that vector difference operations between embedding vectors are, in appropriate conditions, approximately alignable with "intensional difference" operations between the hypergraph nodes corresponding to the embedding vectors. This relationship hints at a broader functorial mapping between uncertain intensional logic and vector arithmetic, and opens the door for using embedding vector algebra to guide intensional inference control.