We introduce a framework for reaching a consensus amongst several agents communicating via a trust network on conflicting information about their environment. We formalise our approach and provide an empirical and theoretical analysis of its properties.

Open relation extraction is the task of extracting open-domain relation facts from natural language sentences. Existing works either utilize heuristics or distant-supervised annotations to train a supervised classifier over pre-defined relations, or adopt unsupervised methods with additional assumptions that have less discriminative power. In this work, we proposed a self-supervised framework named SelfORE, which exploits weak, self-supervised signals by leveraging large pretrained language model for adaptive clustering on contextualized relational features, and bootstraps the self-supervised signals by improving contextualized features in relation classification. Experimental results on three datasets show the effectiveness and robustness of SelfORE on open-domain Relation Extraction when comparing with competitive baselines. Source code is available at https://github.com/THU-BPM/SelfORE.

Predictive auxiliary tasks have been shown to improve performance in numerous reinforcement learning works, however, this effect is still not well understood. The primary purpose of the work presented here is to investigate the impact that an auxiliary task's prediction timescale has on the agent's policy performance. We consider auxiliary tasks which learn to make on-policy predictions using temporal difference learning. We test the impact of prediction timescale using a specific form of auxiliary task in which the input image is used as the prediction target, which we refer to as temporal difference autoencoders (TD-AE). We empirically evaluate the effect of TD-AE on the A2C algorithm in the VizDoom environment using different prediction timescales. While we do not observe a clear relationship between the prediction timescale on performance, we make the following observations: 1) using auxiliary tasks allows us to reduce the trajectory length of the A2C algorithm, 2) in some cases temporally extended TD-AE performs better than a straight autoencoder, 3) performance with auxiliary tasks is sensitive to the weight placed on the auxiliary loss, 4) despite this sensitivity, auxiliary tasks improved performance without extensive hyper-parameter tuning. Our overall conclusions are that TD-AE increases the robustness of the A2C algorithm to the trajectory length and while promising, further study is required to fully understand the relationship between auxiliary task prediction timescale and the agent's performance.

UNESCO has appointed Moroccan artificial intelligence expert, Mrs. Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni, to the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST). The Moroccan researcher joins the commission for a four-year term, from 2020 to 2023. "It is an honor for me to serve ethics within this beautiful institution that is UNESCO," Seghrouchni shared on Twitter. The researcher holds a doctorate in artificial intelligence from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris. She is professor at the School of Science and Engineering of Sorbonne University.

One of the main reasons to integrate AI in the current school curriculum is to make the upcoming generation familiar with technology. The Government of India and the educational board have been pushing for more artificial intelligence to be integrated into the education system, not from the perspective of enhancing it, but also with the intention of making young minds more aware and skilled when it comes to artificial intelligence. Today, children are curious about the smart conversational devices and AI used in applications like Siri and Alexa; some of them even wonder how Netflix gives them precise recommendations. Gradually, they will grow curious and try to learn what algorithms are, what a neural network is, and how they work. The Government of India and the educational board have been taking measures to make the existing school curriculum more AI-centric with a firm belief that the students will learn about AI, have fun and also take India forward.

As technologies like single-cell genomic sequencing, enhanced biomedical imaging, and medical "internet of things" devices proliferate, key discoveries about human health are increasingly found within vast troves of complex life science and health data. But drawing meaningful conclusions from that data is a difficult problem that can involve piecing together different data types and manipulating huge data sets in response to varying scientific inquiries. The problem is as much about computer science as it is about other areas of science. That's where Paradigm4 comes in. The company, founded by Marilyn Matz SM '80 and Turing Award winner and MIT Professor Michael Stonebraker, helps pharmaceutical companies, research institutes, and biotech companies turn data into insights.

Working at Royal Dutch Shell's Deepwater division in New Orleans gives Barbara Waelde a front-row seat to how the right data can unlock crucial information for the oil giant. So when her supervisor asked her last year if she was interested in a program that could sharpen her digital and data science capabilities, Waelde, 55, jumped at the chance. Since she began her online coursework, the seven-year Shell veteran has learned Python programming, supervised learning algorithms and data modeling, among other skills. Shell began making these online courses available to U.S. employees long before COVID-19 upended daily life. And according to the oil giant, there are no plans to halt or cancel any of them, despite the fact that on March 23 it announced plans to slash operating costs by $9 billion.

The new decade of 2020 or the next stage of "digital evolution" welcomes the world with a promise of hyper intuitive cognitive capabilities and emotionally intelligent interfaces that will rebuild businesses in numerous unpredictable ways. As the tech community (for invested implementation) prepares itself for the new age of disruptive changes to arrive at it's matured stage, it becomes wise and necessary to have a look at these digital transformation trends. Conversational Artificial Intelligence- Siri and Google Assistant are always at swords for their accuracy in answers, but still they both lack in understanding the right intent. Applied conversational AI, fixes this disconnects as it understands the relevance and personalization within humans for successful computer interaction. Conversational AI has an automated speech recognition program that understands natural language and forms a response that exhibits a customized dialogue.

Intrinsic motivation enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to explore when rewards are very sparse, where traditional exploration heuristics such as Boltzmann or ɛ-greedy would typically fail. However, intrinsic exploration is generally handled in an ad-hoc manner, where exploration is not treated as a core objective of the learning process; this weak formulation leads to sub-optimal exploration performance. To overcome this problem, we propose a framework based on multi-objective RL where both exploration and exploitation are being optimized as separate objectives. This formulation brings the balance between exploration and exploitation at a policy level, resulting in advantages over traditional methods. This also allows for controlling exploration while learning, at no extra cost. Such strategies achieve a degree of control over agent exploration that was previously unattainable with classic or intrinsic rewards. We demonstrate scalability to continuous state-action spaces by presenting a method (EMU-Q) based on our framework, guiding exploration towards regions of higher value-function uncertainty. EMU-Q is experimentally shown to outperform classic exploration techniques and other intrinsic RL methods on a continuous control benchmark and on a robotic manipulator.

The sensitivity of heterogeneous energetic (HE) materials (propellants, explosives, and pyrotechnics) is critically dependent on their microstructure. Initiation of chemical reactions occurs at hot spots due to energy localization at sites of porosities and other defects. Emerging multi-scale predictive models of HE response to loads account for the physics at the meso-scale, i.e. at the scale of statistically representative clusters of particles and other features in the microstructure. Meso-scale physics is infused in machine-learned closure models informed by resolved meso-scale simulations. Since microstructures are stochastic, ensembles of meso-scale simulations are required to quantify hot spot ignition and growth and to develop models for microstructure-dependent energy deposition rates. We propose utilizing generative adversarial networks (GAN) to spawn ensembles of synthetic heterogeneous energetic material microstructures. The method generates qualitatively and quantitatively realistic microstructures by learning from images of HE microstructures. We show that the proposed GAN method also permits the generation of new morphologies, where the porosity distribution can be controlled and spatially manipulated. Such control paves the way for the design of novel microstructures to engineer HE materials for targeted performance in a materials-by-design framework.