This holiday season, more than 59 percent of retailers will introduce new methods of presenting their products. Among those, 23 percent plan to fundamentally transform the way they present their products. What's the one tool those retailers will use to determine how to measure their new presentation methods? AI has the power to analyze billions of data points in the blink of an eye and translate them into actionable insights. For a human, this would take an entire lifetime.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) are increasingly transforming the healthcare sector. From spotting malignant tumours to reading CT scans and mammograms, AI/ML-based technology is faster and more accurate than traditional devices - or even the best doctors. But along with the benefits come new risks and regulatory challenges. In their latest article Algorithms on regulatory lockdown in medicine recently published in Science, Boris Babic, INSEAD Assistant Professor of Decision Sciences; Theodoros Evgeniou, INSEAD Professor of Decision Sciences and Technology Management; Sara Gerke, Research Fellow at Harvard Law School's Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics; and I. Glenn Cohen, Professor at Harvard Law School and Faculty Director at the Petrie-Flom Center look at the new challenges facing regulators as they navigate the unfamiliar pathways of AI/ML. They consider the questions: What new risks do we face as AI/ML devices are developed and implemented?

When allied with domain knowledge, analytics can be key in finding the sources of uptime losses and margin leakage. However, results can prove sensitive to the context of the data, and sometimes data analysis can produce faulty outcomes. I would like to be able to tell you, (as a CTO of a startup machine learning company once told me), "just give me the data and I will sort out the problems." Unfortunately, it does not work like that. Data analysis techniques including machine learning are portable across industries, domain knowledge is not – and you need both to succeed.

AI for Longevity has more potential to increase healthy Longevity in the short term than any other sector. The application of AI for Longevity will bring the greatest real-world benefits and will be the main driver of progress in the widespread extension of healthy Longevity. The global spending power of people aged 60 and over is anticipated to reach $15 trillion annually by 2020. The Longevity industry will dwarf all other industries in both size and market capitalization, reshape the global financial system, and disrupt the business models of pension funds, insurance companies, investment banks, and entire national economies. Longevity has become a recurring topic in analytical reports from leading financial institutions such as CitiBank, UBS Group, Julius Baer, and Barclays.

SnapChat will soon be adding a feature that basically allows you deepfake yourself into a video or GIF for fun. The feature was first spotted by Snapchat users in France who received a test version of the tool over the weekend. The latest addition to the app is called Cameo, Snapchat confirmed to TechCrunch on Sunday. "Cameos aren't ready to take the stage yet, but stay tuned for their global debut soon!" the social networking app told TechCrunch. Based on screen captures posted by people on Twitter, Cameo uses your selfie to plaster your face on a digitized body.

This paper proposes an Adaptive Stochastic Model Predictive Control (MPC) strategy for stable linear time-invariant systems in the presence of bounded disturbances. We consider multi-input, multi-output systems that can be expressed by a Finite Impulse Response (FIR) model. The parameters of the FIR model corresponding to each output are unknown but assumed sparse. We estimate these parameters using the Recursive Least Squares algorithm. The estimates are then improved using set-based bounds obtained by solving the Basis Pursuit Denoising [1] problem. Our approach is able to handle hard input constraints and probabilistic output constraints. Using tools from distributionally robust optimization, we reformulate the probabilistic output constraints as tractable convex second-order cone constraints, which enables us to pose our MPC design task as a convex optimization problem. The efficacy of the developed algorithm is highlighted with a thorough numerical example, where we demonstrate performance gain over the counterpart algorithm of [2], which does not utilize the sparsity information of the system impulse response parameters during control design.

The last decades have not only been characterized by an explosive growth of data, but also an increasing appreciation of data as a valuable resource. It's value comes with the ability to extract meaningful patterns that are of economic, societal or scientific relevance. A particular challenge is to identify patterns across time, including patterns that might only become apparent when the temporal dimension is taken into account. Here, we present a novel method that aims to achieve this by detecting dynamic clusters, i.e. structural elements that can be present over prolonged durations. It is based on an adaptive identification of majority overlaps between groups at different time points and allows the accommodation of transient decompositions in otherwise persistent dynamic clusters. As such, our method enables the detection of persistent structural elements with internal dynamics and can be applied to any classifiable data, ranging from social contact networks to arbitrary sets of time stamped feature vectors. It provides a unique tool to study systems with non-trivial temporal dynamics with a broad applicability to scientific, societal and economic data.

A large fraction of computational science involves simulating the dynamics of particles that interact via pairwise or many-body interactions. These simulations, called Molecular Dynamics (MD), span a vast range of subjects from physics and materials science to biochemistry and drug discovery. Most MD software involves significant use of handwritten derivatives and code reuse across C++, FORTRAN, and CUDA. This is reminiscent of the state of machine learning before automatic differentiation became popular. In this work we bring the substantial advances in software that have taken place in machine learning to MD with JAX, M.D. (JAX MD). JAX MD is an end-to-end differentiable MD package written entirely in Python that can be just-in-time compiled to CPU, GPU, or TPU. JAX MD allows researchers to iterate extremely quickly and lets researchers easily incorporate machine learning models into their workflows. Finally, since all of the simulation code is written in Python, researchers can have unprecedented flexibility in setting up experiments without having to edit any low-level C++ or CUDA code. In addition to making existing workloads easier, JAX MD allows researchers to take derivatives through whole-simulations as well as seamlessly incorporate neural networks into simulations. This paper explores the architecture of JAX MD and its capabilities through several vignettes. Code is available at www.github.com/google/jax-md. We also provide an interactive Colab notebook that goes through all of the experiments discussed in the paper.

Providing meaningful privacy to users of location based services is particularly challenging when multiple locations are revealed in a short period of time. This is primarily due to the tremendous degree of dependence that can be anticipated between points. We propose a R\'enyi differentially private framework for bounding expected privacy loss for conditionally dependent data. Additionally, we demonstrate an algorithm for achieving this privacy under Gaussian process conditional priors. This framework both exemplifies why conditionally dependent data is so challenging to protect and offers a strategy for preserving privacy to within a fixed radius for every user location in a trace.

Tropical Geometry and Mathematical Morphology share the same max-plus and min-plus semiring arithmetic and matrix algebra. In this chapter we summarize some of their main ideas and common (geometric and algebraic) structure, generalize and extend both of them using weighted lattices and a max-$\star$ algebra with an arbitrary binary operation $\star$ that distributes over max, and outline applications to geometry, machine learning, and optimization. Further, we generalize tropical geometrical objects using weighted lattices. Finally, we provide the optimal solution of max-$\star$ equations using morphological adjunctions that are projections on weighted lattices, and apply it to optimal piecewise-linear regression for fitting max-$\star$ tropical curves and surfaces to arbitrary data that constitute polygonal or polyhedral shape approximations. This also includes an efficient algorithm for solving the convex regression problem of data fitting with max-affine functions.