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JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Intel Corp on Tuesday unveiled its latest processor that will be its first using artificial intelligence (AI) and is designed for large computing centers. The chip, developed at its development facility in Haifa, Israel, is known as Nervana NNP-I or Springhill and is based on a 10 nanometer Ice Lake processor that will allow it to cope with high workloads using minimal amounts of energy, Intel said. Facebook, it said, already has started using the product. Intel said its first AI product comes after it had invested in Israeli AI startups, including Habana Labs and NeuroBlade. "In order to reach a future situation of'AI everywhere', we have to deal with huge amounts of data generated and make sure organizations are equipped with what they need to make effective use of the data and process them where they are collected," said Naveen Rao, general manager of Intel's artificial intelligence products group.

The UK is "on the cusp of a huge health tech revolution that could transform patient experience", said health minister Matt Hancock when he announced £250 million to fund a new AI Lab for the National Health Service earlier this month. The lab has been set up to bring together academics and technology companies to work on some of the biggest challenges in health and care. But the AI sector has a reputation for overpromising on what it can deliver – as do politicians.

We demonstrate an algorithm for learning a flexible color-magnitude diagram from noisy parallax and photometry measurements using a normalizing flow, a deep neural network capable of learning an arbitrary multi-dimensional probability distribution. We present a catalog of 640M photometric distance posteriors to nearby stars derived from this data-driven model using Gaia DR2 photometry and parallaxes. Dust estimation and dereddening is done iteratively inside the model and without prior distance information, using the Bayestar map. The signal-to-noise (precision) of distance measurements improves on average by more than 48% over the raw Gaia data, and we also demonstrate how the accuracy of distances have improved over other models, especially in the noisy-parallax regime. Applications are discussed, including significantly improved Milky Way disk separation and substructure detection. We conclude with a discussion of future work, which exploits the normalizing flow architecture to allow us to exactly marginalize over missing photometry, enabling the inclusion of many surveys without losing coverage.

--We explore the complex design space of behaviour planning for autonomous driving. Design choices that successfully address one aspect of behaviour planning can critically constrain others. T o aid the design process, in this work we decompose the design space with respect to important choices arising from the current state of the art approaches, and describe the resulting tradeoffs. In doing this, we also identify interesting directions of future work. In this work we consider the design space [1] of behaviour planning--high level decision making--for autonomous driving. To simplify the design process, we decompose the design space into three principal axes of design choices, based on our practical experience [2] and with reference to the current state of the art. Within each axis, we discuss the inevitable qualitative tradeoffs that exist and review the relevant literature. We illustrate our decomposition using feature diagrams [3]. In doing this, we identify potentially interesting areas of research within the behaviour planning design space. The motivation of our decomposition is as follows. Human driver control actions are continuous, yet driving also contains discrete episodes, arising from road connectivity, signs, signals, road-user interactions, etc. The vehicle must nevertheless follow a smooth continuous trajectory on the road.

We propose a novel approach for estimating the difficulty and transferability of supervised classification tasks. Unlike previous work, our approach is solution agnostic and does not require or assume trained models. Instead, we estimate these values using an information theoretic approach: treating training labels as random variables and exploring their statistics. When transferring from a source to a target task, we consider the conditional entropy between two such variables (i.e., label assignments of the two tasks). We show analytically and empirically that this value is related to the loss of the transferred model. We further show how to use this value to estimate task hardness. We test our claims extensively on three large scale data sets -- CelebA (40 tasks), Animals with Attributes 2 (85 tasks), and Caltech-UCSD Birds 200 (312 tasks) -- together representing 437 classification tasks. We provide results showing that our hardness and transferability estimates are strongly correlated with empirical hardness and transferability. As a case study, we transfer a learned face recognition model to CelebA attribute classification tasks, showing state of the art accuracy for tasks estimated to be highly transferable.

Parallel surrogate optimization algorithms have proven to be efficient methods for solving expensive noisy optimization problems. In this work we develop a new parallel surrogate optimization algorithm (ProSRS), using a novel tree-based "zoom strategy" to improve the efficiency of the algorithm. We prove that if ProSRS is run for sufficiently long, with probability converging to one there will be at least one point among all the evaluations that will be arbitrarily close to the global minimum. We compare our algorithm to several state-of-the-art Bayesian optimization algorithms on a suite of standard benchmark functions and two real machine learning hyperparameter-tuning problems. We find that our algorithm not only achieves significantly faster optimization convergence, but is also 1-4 orders of magnitude cheaper in computational cost.

In this paper, we address the problem of measuring and analysing sensation, the subjective magnitude of one's experience. We do this in the context of the method of triads: the sensation of the stimulus is evaluated via relative judgments of the form: "Is stimulus S_i more similar to stimulus S_j or to stimulus S_k?". We propose to use ordinal embedding methods from machine learning to estimate the scaling function from the relative judgments. We review two relevant and well-known methods in psychophysics which are partially applicable in our setting: non-metric multi-dimensional scaling (NMDS) and the method of maximum likelihood difference scaling (MLDS). We perform an extensive set of simulations, considering various scaling functions, to demonstrate the performance of the ordinal embedding methods. We show that in contrast to existing approaches our ordinal embedding approach allows, first, to obtain reasonable scaling function from comparatively few relative judgments, second, the estimation of non-monotonous scaling functions, and, third, multi-dimensional perceptual scales. In addition to the simulations, we analyse data from two real psychophysics experiments using ordinal embedding methods. Our results show that in the one-dimensional, monotonically increasing perceptual scale our ordinal embedding approach works as well as MLDS, while in higher dimensions, only our ordinal embedding methods can produce a desirable scaling function. To make our methods widely accessible, we provide an R-implementation and general rules of thumb on how to use ordinal embedding in the context of psychophysics.

First-principles models of complex dynamic phenomena often have many degrees of freedom, only a small fraction of which may be scientifically relevant or observable. Reduced models distill such phenomena to their essence by modeling only relevant variables, thus decreasing computational cost and clarifying dynamical mechanisms. Here, we consider data-driven model reduction for nonlinear dynamical systems without sharp scale separation. Motivated by a discrete-time version of the Mori-Zwanzig projection operator formalism and the Wiener filter, we propose a simple and flexible mathematical formulation based on Wiener projection, which decomposes a nonlinear dynamical system into a component predictable by past values of relevant variables and its orthogonal complement. Wiener projection is equally applicable to deterministic chaotic dynamics and randomly-forced systems, and provides a natural starting point for systematic approximations. In particular, we use it to derive NARMAX models from an underlying dynamical system, thereby clarifying the scope of these widely-used tools in time series analysis. We illustrate its versatility on the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky model of spatiotemporal chaos and a stochastic Burgers equation.

The notion of cyber-physical systems (CPS) describes the co mbination of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and software (the "cyber" part) with physical compone nts. A CPS can emerge from embedded systems by internetworking them. The first big research program focusi ng on CPS has been started by the US National Science Foundation in 2006, where the term CPS is defined in as such tha t it "refers to the tight conjoining of and coordination between computational and physical resources," stating "[ w]e envision that the cyber-physical systems of tomorrow will far exceed those of today in terms of adaptability, auto nomy, efficiency, functionality, reliability, safety, and usability" [1]. While the notion of CPS by the U.S. National Science Foundati on, as outlined above, includes ICT, it does not explicitly name Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a necessary component to raise an embedded system to the status of a CPS. Y et, the availability of sensory data together with a co mmunications system and the ability to exert actions upon the physical world that have been planned for the whole compo und of embedded systems components readily suggests that issues of planning, the increase of reflectivity, effici ency, and lowering resource usage is achieved by increasing the "intelligence" of the overall system. As such, research ers in the domain of AI have found numerous application domains. However, the two worlds of CPS and AI usually operate on diffe rent terms: CPS require operation within well-defined boundaries, i.e., as far as possible deterministic behavio r within well-known, strictly enforced margins of error. In contrast, many AI techniques--Artificial Neural Networks (A NNs) foremost--are firmly rooted in the domain of statistics, which is probably very well seen in the ANN train ing process.