TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Walmart said on Tuesday it has acquired Aspectiva, an Israeli start-up whose technology analyses consumers' product reviews to help shoppers make decisions. Financial details were not disclosed. Aspectiva will join Walmart's Store No 8, the incubation arm launched by the U.S. retailer in 2017 to find new commerce-related technologies. Aspectiva has developed machine-learning techniques and natural language processing capabilities, "areas we believe will have profound impact on how customers will shop in the future," Store No 8 principal Lori Flees said. Walmart also has a strategic investment in Team8, an Israeli cybersecurity start-up incubator, and launched a joint venture with Eko, an interactive media and technology company with offices in Tel Aviv and New York.

Diffractive deep neural network is an optical machine learning framework that blends deep learning with optical diffraction and light-matter interaction to engineer diffractive surfaces that collectively perform optical computation at the speed of light. A diffractive neural network is first designed in a computer using deep learning techniques, followed by the physical fabrication of the designed layers of the neural network using e.g., 3-D printing or lithography. Since the connection between the input and output planes of a diffractive neural network is established via diffraction of light through passive layers, the inference process and the associated optical computation does not consume any power except the light used to illuminate the object of interest. Developed by researchers at UCLA, diffractive optical networks provide a low power, low latency and highly-scalable machine learning platform that can find numerous applications in robotics, autonomous vehicles, defense industry, among many others. In addition to providing statistical inference and generalization to classes of data, diffractive neural networks have also been used to design deterministic optical systems such as a thin imaging system.

Here at VTEX Voice Solutions our primary focus is on document creation using speech recognition. There has been a lot off buzz about AI and machine learning in all industries and it applies to what we do as well. Documentation in the medical field is a critical component and the all major medical Speech Recognition products like Dragon Medical Practice Edition from Nuance, SayIt from nVoq and the Fluency Direct from 3M use some sort of machine learning or AI to help improve accuracy. Accuracy is critical in medical documentation and advances in AI and Machine learning are helping to make documentation errors a thing of the past. We may not be at the point where you overhear your surgeon saying, "Hey, Google, pass the scalpel," but artificial intelligence (AI) is gradually making its way into the healthcare industry and, by extension, dermatology and plastic surgery practices, too.

Full Wave Inversion (FWI) imaging scheme has many applications in engineering, geoscience and medical sciences. In this paper, a surrogate deep learning FWI approach is presented to quantify properties of materials using stress waves. Such inverse problems, in general, are ill-posed and nonconvex, especially in cases where the solutions exhibit shocks, heterogeneity, discontinuities, or large gradients. The proposed approach is proven efficient to obtain global minima responses in these cases. This approach is trained based on random sampled set of material properties and sampled trials around local minima, therefore, it requires a forward simulation can handle high heterogeneity, discontinuities and large gradients. High resolution Kurganov-Tadmor (KT) central finite volume method is used as forward wave propagation operator. Using the proposed framework, material properties of 2D media are quantified for several different situations. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method for estimating mechanical properties of materials with high accuracy using deep learning approaches.

Modern machine learning models with very high accuracy have been shown to be vulnerable to small, adversarially chosen perturbations of the input. Given black-box access to a high-accuracy classifier $f$, we show how to construct a new classifier $g$ that has high accuracy and is also robust to adversarial $\ell_2$-bounded perturbations. Our algorithm builds upon the framework of \textit{randomized smoothing} that has been recently shown to outperform all previous defenses against $\ell_2$-bounded adversaries. Using techniques like random partitions and doubling dimension, we are able to bound the adversarial error of $g$ in terms of the optimum error. In this paper we focus on our conceptual contribution, but we do present two examples to illustrate our framework. We will argue that, under some assumptions, our bounds are optimal for these cases.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. Amongst patients with cardiovascular diseases, myocardial infarction is the main cause of death. In order to provide adequate healthcare support to patients who may experience this clinical event, it is essential to gather supportive evidence in a timely manner to help secure a correct diagnosis. In this article, we study the feasibility of using deep learning to identify suggestive electrocardiographic (ECG) changes that may correctly classify heart conditions using the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) database. As part of this study, we systematically quantify the contribution of each ECG lead to correctly tell apart a healthy from an unhealthy heart. For such a study we fine-tune the ConvNetQuake neural network model, which was originally designed to identify earthquakes. Our findings indicate that out of 15 ECG leads, data from the v6 and vz leads are critical to correctly identify myocardial infarction. Based on these findings, we modify ConvNetQuake to simultaneously take in raw ECG data from leads v6 and vz, achieving $99.43\%$ classification accuracy, which represents cardiologist-level performance level for myocardial infarction detection after feeding only 10 seconds of raw ECG data to our neural network model. This approach differs from others in the community in that the ECG data fed into the neural network model does not require any kind of manual feature extraction or pre-processing.

One of the key advantages of Inductive Logic Programming systems is the ability of the domain experts to provide background knowledge as modes that allow for efficient search through the space of hypotheses. However, there is an inherent assumption that this expert should also be an ILP expert to provide effective modes. We relax this assumption by designing a graphical user interface that allows the domain expert to interact with the system using Entity Relationship diagrams. These interactions are used to construct modes for the learning system. We evaluate our algorithm on a probabilistic logic learning system where we demonstrate that the user is able to construct effective background knowledge on par with the expert-encoded knowledge on five data sets.

The aim of measuring inconsistency is to obtain an evaluation of the imperfections in a set of formulas, and this evaluation may then be used to help decide on some course of action (such as rejecting some of the formulas, resolving the inconsistency, seeking better sources of information, etc). A number of proposals have been made to define measures of inconsistency. Each has its rationale. But to date, it is not clear how to delineate the space of options for measures, nor is it clear how we can classify measures systematically. To address these problems, we introduce a general framework for comparing syntactic measures of inconsistency. It is based on the notion of an inconsistency graph for each knowledgebase (a bipartite graph with a set of vertices representing formulas in the knowledgebase, a set of vertices representing minimal inconsistent subsets of the knowledgebase, and edges representing that a formula belongs to a minimal inconsistent subset). We then show that various measures can be computed using the inconsistency graph. Then we introduce abstractions of the inconsistency graph and use them to construct a hierarchy of syntactic inconsistency measures. Furthermore, we extend the inconsistency graph concept with a labeling that extends the hierarchy to include some other types of inconsistency measures.

Purpose: To develop a fast, accurate, and robust convolutional neural network (CNN) based method for segmentation of thalamic nuclei. Methods: A cascaded multi-planar scheme with a modified residual U-Net architecture was used to segment thalamic nuclei on clinical datasets acquired using the white-matter-nulled Magnetization Prepared Rapid Gradient Echo (MPRAGE) sequence. A single network was optimized for healthy controls and disease types (multiple sclerosis, essential tremor) and magnetic field strengths (3T and 7T). Another network was developed to use conventional MPRAGE data. Clinical utility was assessed by comparing a cohort of MS patients to healthy subjects. Results: Segmentation of each thalamus into 12 nuclei was achieved in under 4 minutes. For 7T WMn-MPRAGE, the proposed method outperformed current state-of-the-art with statistically significant improvements in Dice ranging from 1.2% to 5.3% for MS and from 2.6% to 38.8% for ET patients. Comparable accuracy (Dice/VSI) was achieved between 7T and 3T data, attesting to the robustness of the method. For conventional MPRAGE, Dice of > 0.7 was achieved for larger nuclei and > 0.6 for the smaller nuclei. Atrophy of five thalamic nuclei and the whole thalamus was observed for MS patients compared to healthy control subjects, after controlling for intracranial volume and age (p<0.004). Conclusion: The proposed segmentation method is fast, accurate, and generalizes across disease types and field strengths and shows great potential for improving our understanding of thalamic nuclei involvement in neurological diseases and healthy aging. KEYWORDS Deep learning, convolutional neural network, transfer learning, thalamic nuclei segmentation

Storage has become a constrained resource on smartphones. Gaming is a popular activity on mobile devices and the explosive growth in the number of games coupled with their growing size contributes to the storage crunch. Even where storage is plentiful, it takes a long time to download and install a heavy app before it can be launched. This paper presents AppStreamer, a novel technique for reducing the storage requirements or startup delay of mobile games, and heavy mobile apps in general. AppStreamer is based on the intuition that most apps do not need the entirety of its files (images, audio and video clips, etc.) at any one time. AppStreamer can, therefore, keep only a small part of the files on the device, akin to a "cache", and download the remainder from a cloud storage server or a nearby edge server when it predicts that the app will need them in the near future. AppStreamer continuously predicts file blocks for the near future as the user uses the app, and fetches them from the storage server before the user sees a stall due to missing resources. We implement AppStreamer at the Android file system layer. This ensures that the apps require no source code or modification, and the approach generalizes across apps. We evaluate AppStreamer using two popular games: Dead Effect 2, a 3D first-person shooter, and Fire Emblem Heroes, a 2D turn-based strategy role-playing game. Through a user study, 75% and 87% of the users respectively find that AppStreamer provides the same quality of user experience as the baseline where all files are stored on the device. AppStreamer cuts down the storage requirement by 87% for Dead Effect 2 and 86% for Fire Emblem Heroes.