The notion of uncertainty is of major importance in machine learning and constitutes a key element of machine learning methodology. In line with the statistical tradition, uncertainty has long been perceived as almost synonymous with standard probability and probabilistic predictions. Yet, due to the steadily increasing relevance of machine learning for practical applications and related issues such as safety requirements, new problems and challenges have recently been identified by machine learning scholars, and these problems may call for new methodological developments. In particular, this includes the importance of distinguishing between (at least) two different types of uncertainty, often refereed to as aleatoric and epistemic. In this paper, we provide an introduction to the topic of uncertainty in machine learning as well as an overview of hitherto attempts at handling uncertainty in general and formalizing this distinction in particular. 1 Introduction Machine learning is essentially concerned with extracting models from data and using these models to make predictions.

In this work, we develop a novel framework to measure the similarity between dynamic financial networks, i.e., time-varying financial networks. Particularly, we explore whether the proposed similarity measure can be employed to understand the structural evolution of the financial networks with time. For a set of time-varying financial networks with each vertex representing the individual time series of a different stock and each edge between a pair of time series representing the absolute value of their Pearson correlation, our start point is to compute the commute time matrix associated with the weighted adjacency matrix of the network structures, where each element of the matrix can be seen as the enhanced correlation value between pairwise stocks. For each network, we show how the commute time matrix allows us to identify a reliable set of dominant correlated time series as well as an associated dominant probability distribution of the stock belonging to this set. Furthermore, we represent each original network as a discrete dominant Shannon entropy time series computed from the dominant probability distribution. With the dominant entropy time series for each pair of financial networks to hand, we develop a similarity measure based on the classical dynamic time warping framework, for analyzing the financial time-varying networks. We show that the proposed similarity measure is positive definite and thus corresponds to a kernel measure on graphs. The proposed kernel bridges the gap between graph kernels and the classical dynamic time warping framework for multiple financial time series analysis. Experiments on time-varying networks extracted through New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) database demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

We analysed a recently released dataset of scientific manuscripts that were either rejected or accepted from various conferences in artificial intelligence. We used a combination of semantic, lexical and psycholinguistic analyses of the full text of the manuscripts to compare them based on the outcome of the peer review process. We found that accepted manuscripts were written with words that are less frequent, that are acquired at an older age, and that are more abstract than rejected manuscripts. We also found that accepted manuscripts scored lower on two indicators of readability than rejected manuscripts, and that they also used more artificial intelligence jargon. An analysis of the references included in the manuscripts revealed that the subset of accepted submissions were more likely to cite the same publications. This finding was echoed by pairwise comparisons of the word content of the manuscripts (i.e. an indicator or semantic similarity), which was higher in the accepted manuscripts. Finally, we predicted the peer review outcome of manuscripts with their word content, with words related to machine learning and neural networks positively related with acceptance, whereas words related to logic, symbolic processing and knowledge-based systems negatively related with acceptance.

Author Keywords HCI vision; human-augmentation; human-AI integration HUMAN-AUGMENTATION Neo: Can you fly that thing? In the movie "The Matrix," Trinity responds to Neo right before having the helicopter's maneuverability downloaded Will such a future come? The idea that technology enhances humanity has a long history. "There may be found many Mechanical Inventions to improve GUIs were tools to realize that goal. In that regard, J.C.R. Licklider's "Man-Computer Symbiosis" [12] is worth reviewing. Here, symbiosis means "living together in intimate association, or even close union, of two dissimilar organisms.

In the majority of molecular optimization tasks, predictive machine learning (ML) models are limited due to the unavailability and cost of generating big experimental datasets on the specific task. To circumvent this limitation, ML models are trained on big theoretical datasets or experimental indicators of molecular suitability that are either publicly available or inexpensive to acquire. These approaches produce a set of candidate molecules which have to be ranked using limited experimental data or expert knowledge. Under the assumption that structure is related to functionality, here we use a molecular fragment-based graphical autoencoder to generate unique structural fingerprints to efficiently search through the candidate set. We demonstrate that fragment-based graphical autoencoding reduces the error in predicting physical characteristics such as the solubility and partition coefficient in the small data regime compared to other extended circular fingerprints and string based approaches. We further demonstrate that this approach is capable of providing insight into real world molecular optimization problems, such as searching for stabilization additives in organic semiconductors by accurately predicting 92% of test molecules given 69 training examples. This task is a model example of black box molecular optimization as there is minimal theoretical and experimental knowledge to accurately predict the suitability of the additives.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are of vital importance nowadays in commonplace tasks such as speech-to-text processing and language translation. This created the need of an ASR system that can operate in realistic crowded environments. Thus, speech enhancement is now considered as a fundamental building block in newly developed ASR systems. In this paper, a generative adversarial network (GAN) based framework is investigated for the task of speech enhancement of audio tracks. A new architecture based on CasNet generator and additional perceptual loss is incorporated to get realistically denoised speech phonetics. Finally, the proposed framework is shown to quantitatively outperform other GAN-based speech enhancement approaches.

Shallow Art presents, implements, and tests the use of simple single-output classification and regression models for the purpose of art generation. V arious machine learning algorithms are trained on collections of computer generated images, artworks from Vincent van Gogh, and artworks from Rembrandt van Rijn. These models are then provided half of an image and asked to complete the missing side. The resulting images are displayed, and we explore implications for computational creativity.

Resting-state brain networks represent the intrinsic state of the brain during the majority of cognitive and sensorimotor tasks. However, no study has yet presented concise predictors of task-induced vigilance variability from spectrospatial features of the pre-task, resting-state electroencephalograms (EEG). We asked ten healthy volunteers (6 females, 4 males) to participate in 105-minute fixed-sequence-varying-duration sessions of sustained attention to response task (SART). A novel and adaptive vigilance scoring scheme was designed based on the performance and response time in consecutive trials, and demonstrated large inter-participant variability in terms of maintaining consistent tonic performance. Multiple linear regression using feature relevance analysis obtained significant predictors of the mean cumulative vigilance score (CVS), mean response time, and variabilities of these scores from the resting-state, band-power ratios of EEG signals, p<0.05. Single-layer neural networks trained with cross-validation also captured different associations for the beta sub-bands. Increase in the gamma (28-48 Hz) and upper beta ratios from the left central and temporal regions predicted slower reactions and more inconsistent vigilance as explained by the increased activation of default mode network (DMN) and differences between the high- and low-attention networks at temporal regions. Higher ratios of parietal alpha from the Brodmann's areas 18, 19, and 37 during the eyes-open states predicted slower responses but more consistent CVS and reactions associated with the superior ability in vigilance maintenance. The proposed framework and these findings on the most stable and significant attention predictors from the intrinsic EEG power ratios can be used to model attention variations during the calibration sessions of BCI applications and vigilance monitoring systems.

Autoencoders, as a dimensionality reduction technique, have been recently applied to outlier detection. However, neural networks are known to be vulnerable to overfitting, and therefore have limited potential in the unsupervised outlier detection setting. Current approaches to ensemble-based autoencoders do not generate a sufficient level of diversity to avoid the overfitting issue. To overcome the aforementioned limitations we develop a Boosting-based Autoencoder Ensemble approach (in short, BAE). BAE is an unsupervised ensemble method that, similarly to the boosting approach, builds an adaptive cascade of autoencoders to achieve improved and robust results. BAE trains the autoencoder components sequentially by performing a weighted sampling of the data, aimed at reducing the amount of outliers used during training, and at injecting diversity in the ensemble. We perform extensive experiments and show that the proposed methodology outperforms state-of-the-art approaches under a variety of conditions.

It is well known that the problem of vanishing/exploding gradients is a challenge when training deep networks. In this paper, we describe another phenomenon, called vanishing nodes, that also increases the difficulty of training deep neural networks. As the depth of a neural network increases, the network's hidden nodes have more highly correlated behavior. This results in great similarities between these nodes. The redundancy of hidden nodes thus increases as the network becomes deeper. We call this problem vanishing nodes, and we propose the metric vanishing node indicator (VNI) for quantitatively measuring the degree of vanishing nodes. The VNI can be characterized by the network parameters, which is shown analytically to be proportional to the depth of the network and inversely proportional to the network width. The theoretical results show that the effective number of nodes vanishes to one when the VNI increases to one (its maximal value), and that vanishing/exploding gradients and vanishing nodes are two different challenges that increase the difficulty of training deep neural networks. The numerical results from the experiments suggest that the degree of vanishing nodes will become more evident during back-propagation training, and that when the VNI is equal to 1, the network cannot learn simple tasks (e.g. the XOR problem) even when the gradients are neither vanishing nor exploding. We refer to this kind of gradients as the walking dead gradients, which cannot help the network converge when having a relatively large enough scale. Finally, the experiments show that the likelihood of failed training increases as the depth of the network increases. The training will become much more difficult due to the lack of network representation capability.