The Cannon-Delivered Area Effects Munitions (C-DAEM) is a new 155-millimeter artillery round in development for the Army's M777 howitzer, M109A6 Paladin self-propelled howitzer and new XM1299 self-propelled howitzer. The high-tech shell will be able to guide itself toward its intended target, even in areas where GPS is jammed by enemy forces. The munition, which has a 43-mile range, will take more than a minute to reach its target, and can slow down and guide itself on the way. By doing so, it makes it easier for the Army to hit targets that move around, like vehicles and infantry - although it can't hit a moving target yet. Popular Mechanics notes that C-DAEM will replace the dual purpose improved conventional munition (DPICM), a type of cluster munition that made up for a lack of precision accuracy by scattering bomblets above the battlefield, ensuring it would at least do some damage to its target even if it didn't hit it directly.

China, writes Amy Webb in Inc., has been "building a global artificial intelligence empire, and seeding the tech ecosystem of the future." It has been particularly successful, Webb, the founder of the Future Today Institute, believes. "China is poised to become its undisputed global leader, and that will affect every business," she notes. Not everyone shares Webb's assessment that Chinese researchers are in the lead. America, after all, is home to most leading AI tech.

Rather than relying on exit interviews and their comparisons to occasional employee surveys to determine engagement, organizations can turn instead to big data and advanced analytics to identify those workers at greatest risk of quitting. A new Harvard Business Review article outlines how applying machine learning algorithms to turnover data and employee information can provide a much more accurate picture of workplace satisfaction. This measure of "turnover propensity" comprised two main indicators: turnover shocks, which are organizational and personal events that cause workers to reconsider their jobs, and job embeddedness, which describes an employee's social ties in their workplace and interest in the work they do. Though achieving this kind of "proactive anticipation" will require a sizable investment of time and effort to develop the necessary data and algorithms, the payoff will likely be worth it: "Leaders can proactively engage valued employees at risk of leaving through interviews, to better understand how the firm can increase the odds that they stay," per HBR. More articles on leadership and management: Can your anesthesia department handle NORA?

The performance of the state-of-the-art image segmentation methods heavily relies on the high-quality annotations, which are not easily affordable, particularly for medical data. To alleviate this limitation, in this study, we propose a weakly supervised image segmentation method based on a deep geodesic prior. We hypothesize that integration of this prior information can reduce the adverse effects of weak labels in segmentation accuracy. Our proposed algorithm is based on a prior information, extracted from an auto-encoder, trained to map objects geodesic maps to their corresponding binary maps. The obtained information is then used as an extra term in the loss function of the segmentor. In order to show efficacy of the proposed strategy, we have experimented segmentation of cardiac substructures with clean and two levels of noisy labels (L1, L2). Our experiments showed that the proposed algorithm boosted the performance of baseline deep learning-based segmentation for both clean and noisy labels by 4.4%, 4.6%(L1), and 6.3%(L2) in dice score, respectively. We also showed that the proposed method was more robust in the presence of high-level noise due to the existence of shape priors.

With a view towards molecular communication systems and molecular multi-agent systems, we propose the Chemical Baum-Welch Algorithm, a novel reaction network scheme that learns parameters for Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). Each reaction in our scheme changes only one molecule of one species to one molecule of another. The reverse change is also accessible but via a different set of enzymes, in a design reminiscent of futile cycles in biochemical pathways. We show that every fixed point of the Baum-Welch algorithm for HMMs is a fixed point of our reaction network scheme, and every positive fixed point of our scheme is a fixed point of the Baum-Welch algorithm. We prove that the "Expectation" step and the "Maximization" step of our reaction network separately converge exponentially fast. We simulate mass-action kinetics for our network on an example sequence, and show that it learns the same parameters for the HMM as the Baum-Welch algorithm.

We consider a class of linear-programming based estimators in reconstructing a sparse signal from linear measurements. Specific formulations of the reconstruction problem considered here include Dantzig selector, basis pursuit (for the case in which the measurements contain no errors), and the fused Dantzig selector (for the case in which the underlying signal is piecewise constant). In spite of being estimators central to sparse signal processing and machine learning, solving these linear programming problems for large scale instances remains a challenging task, thereby limiting their usage in practice. We show that classic constraint- and column-generation techniques from large scale linear programming, when used in conjunction with a commercial implementation of the simplex method, and initialized with the solution from a closely-related Lasso formulation, yields solutions with high efficiency in many settings.

Email messages have been an important mode of communication, not only for work, but also for social interactions and marketing. When messages have time sensitive information, it becomes relevant for the sender to know what is the expected time within which the email will be read by the recipient. In this paper we use a survival analysis framework to predict the time to open an email once it has been received. We use the Cox Proportional Hazards (CoxPH) model that offers a way to combine various features that might affect the event of opening an email. As an extension, we also apply a mixture model (MM) approach to CoxPH that distinguishes between recipients, based on a latent state of how prone to opening the messages each individual is. We compare our approach with standard classification and regression models. While the classification model provides predictions on the likelihood of an email being opened, the regression model provides prediction of the real-valued time to open. The use of survival analysis based methods allows us to jointly model both the open event as well as the time-to-open. We experimented on a large real-world dataset of marketing emails sent in a 3-month time duration. The mixture model achieves the best accuracy on our data where a high proportion of email messages go unopened.

J. W atson Research, Y orktown Heights, NY, USA Abstract --Learning Rate (LR) is an important hyper-parameter to tune for effective training of deep neural networks (DNNs). Even for the baseline of a constant learning rate, it is nontrivial to choose a good constant value for training a DNN. Dynamic learning rates involve multi-step tuning of LR values at various stages of the training process and offer high accuracy and fast convergence. However, they are much harder to tune. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of 13 learning rate functions and their associated LR policies by examining their range parameters, step parameters, and value update parameters. We propose a set of metrics for evaluating and selecting LR policies, including the classification confidence, variance, cost, and robustness, and implement them in LRBench, an LR benchmarking system. LRBench can assist end-users and DNN developers to select good LR policies and avoid bad LR policies for training their DNNs. We tested LRBench on Caffe, an open source deep learning framework, to showcase the tuning optimization of LR policies. Evaluated through extensive experiments, we attempt to demystify the tuning of LR policies by identifying good LR policies with effective LR value ranges and step sizes for LR update schedules. I NTRODUCTION Deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely employed to mine Big Data and gain deep insight on Big Data, ranging from image classification, voice recognition, text mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP). One of the most important performance optimization for DNNs is to train a deep learning model capable of achieving high test accuracy.

When several predictors have been trained to solve the same classification task, a second level of algorithmic procedure is necessary to reconcile the classifier predictions and deliver a single one. Such a procedure is known as classifier combination, fusion or aggregation. When each individual classifier is trained using the same training algorithm (but under different circumstances) the aggregation procedure is referred to as an ensemble method. When each classifier may be generated by different training algorithms, the aggregation procedure is referred to as a multiple classifier system. In both cases, the set of individual classifiers is called a classifier ensemble. Classifier combination comes either from a choice of the programmer or is imposed by context. In the first case, combination is meant to increase classification performances by either increasing the learning capacity or mitigating 1 arXiv:1908.06475v1

In many applications of network analysis, it is important to distinguish between observed and unobserved factors affecting network structure. To this end, we develop spectral estimators for both unobserved blocks and the effect of covariates in stochastic blockmodels. Our main strategy is to reformulate the stochastic blockmodel estimation problem as recovery of latent positions in a generalized random dot product graph. On the theoretical side, we establish asymptotic normality of our estimators for the subsequent purpose of performing inference. On the applied side, we show that computing our estimator is much faster than standard variational expectation--maximization algorithms and scales well for large networks. The results in this paper provide a foundation to estimate the effect of observed covariates as well as unobserved latent community structure on the probability of link formation in networks.