Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive officer of SoftBank Group Corp., speaks during the SoftBank World 2019 event in Tokyo, Japan, on Thursday, July 18, 2019. The founders of Southeast Asian ride-hailing giant Grab, indoor farming startup Plenty, Indian hotel chain OYO Rooms and payments service Paytm took the stage at an annual SoftBank conference to explain how artificial intelligence helps them stay on top in their respective fields. Recently SoftBank Group launched its latest fund, called Vision Fund 2, which has $108 billion in assets. No doubt, the fund will have a huge impact on the industry. But of course, VCs are not the only ones ramping up their investments.

Machine learning, which trains computers to accomplish specific tasks without receiving explicit instructions from humans, has become an increasingly valuable tool for a variety of industries. But the rapid incorporation of machine learning into marketing, finance, healthcare, and other fields has raised a range of ethical concerns that must be addressed. That was the message embraced by five artificial intelligence experts from academia and industry who convened at Northeastern on Friday to discuss the challenges of integrating machine learning into the workplace in order to improve processes and productivity. Researchers, they said, need to work to eliminate bias in algorithms, more accurately communicate to the public the limitations of machine learning, and build systems that prioritize the health and wellness of humans. "Machine learning has come to a point now where it is very central to essentially every branch of science and technology," said D. Sculley, a software engineer at Google.

The term "artificial general intelligence," or AGI, doesn't actually refer to anything, at this point, it is merely a placeholder, a kind of Rorschach Test for people to fill the void with whatever notions they have of what it would mean for a machine to "think" like a person. Despite that fact, or perhaps because of it, AGI is an ideal marketing term to attach to a lot of efforts in machine learning. Case in point, a research paper featured on the cover of this week's Nature magazine about a new kind of computer chip developed by researchers at China's Tsinghua University that could "accelerate the development of AGI," they claim. The chip is a strange hybrid of approaches, and is intriguing, but the work leaves unanswered many questions about how it's made, and how it achieves what researchers claim of it. And some longtime chip observers doubt the impact will be as great as suggested.

Some fascinating breakthroughs could make AI technology accessible to many more companies and enterprises. FREMONT, CA: As the influx of structured and unstructured data increases in the conventional ecosystem, the balance between information gathered and information harnessed becomes profoundly dissimilar. However, to reduce the gap between operational and computational knowledge, professionals and experts have started integrating artificial intelligence technology into the functional frameworks. Recently, the industry has seen a considerable effort to fix the "big data issue" of AI. And some exciting breakthroughs have started to arise that could render AI available to many more companies and organizations.

Automated decision-making is one of the core objectives of artificial intelligence. Not surprisingly, over the past few years, entire new research fields have emerged to tackle that task. This blog post is concerned with regret minimization, one of the central tools in online learning. Regret minimization models the problem of repeated online decision making: an agent is called to make a sequence of decisions, under unknown (and potentially adversarial) loss functions. Regret minimization is a versatile mathematical abstraction, that has found a plethora of practical applications: portfolio optimization, computation of Nash equilibria, applications to markets and auctions, submodular function optimization, and more.

In this paper, we discuss the learning of generalised policies for probabilistic and classical planning problems using Action Schema Networks (ASNets). The ASNet is a neural network architecture that exploits the relational structure of (P)PDDL planning problems to learn a common set of weights that can be applied to any problem in a domain. By mimicking the actions chosen by a traditional, non-learning planner on a handful of small problems in a domain, ASNets are able to learn a generalised reactive policy that can quickly solve much larger instances from the domain. This work extends the ASNet architecture to make it more expressive, while still remaining invariant to a range of symmetries that exist in PPDDL problems. We also present a thorough experimental evaluation of ASNets, including a comparison with heuristic search planners on seven probabilistic and deterministic domains, an extended evaluation on over 18,000 Blocksworld instances, and an ablation study. Finally, we show that sparsity-inducing regularisation can produce ASNets that are compact enough for humans to understand, yielding insights into how the structure of ASNets allows them to generalise across a domain.

We describe ChemBO, a Bayesian Optimization framework for generating and optimizing organic molecules for desired molecular properties. This framework is useful in applications such as drug discovery, where an algorithm recommends new candidate molecules; these molecules first need to be synthesized and then tested for drug-like properties. The algorithm uses the results of past tests to recommend new ones so as to find good molecules efficiently. Most existing data-driven methods for this problem do not account for sample efficiency and/or fail to enforce realistic constraints on synthesizability. In this work, we explore existing kernels for molecules in the literature as well as propose a novel kernel which views a molecule as a graph. In ChemBO, we implement these kernels in a Gaussian process model. Then we explore the chemical space by traversing possible paths of molecular synthesis. Consequently, our approach provides a proposal synthesis path every time it recommends a new molecule to test, a crucial advantage when compared to existing methods. In our experiments, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach on several molecular optimization problems.

It is a challenging and complex task to acquire information from different regions of a disaster-affected area in a timely fashion. The extensive spread and reach of social media and networks allow people to share information in real-time. However, the processing of social media data and gathering of valuable information require a series of operations such as (1) processing each specific tweet for a text classification, (2) possible location determination of people needing help based on tweets, and (3) priority calculations of rescue tasks based on the classification of tweets. These are three primary challenges in developing an effective rescue scheduling operation using social media data. In this paper, first, we propose a deep learning model combining attention based Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to classify the tweets under different categories. We use pre-trained crisis word vectors and global vectors for word representation (GLoVe) for capturing semantic meaning from tweets. Next, we perform feature engineering to create an auxiliary feature map which dramatically increases the model accuracy. In our experiments using real data sets from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, it is observed that our proposed approach performs better compared to other classification methods based on Precision, Recall, F1-score, and Accuracy, and is highly effective to determine the correct priority of a tweet. Furthermore, to evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed classification model a merged dataset comprises of 4 different datasets from CrisisNLP and another 15 different disasters data from CrisisLex are used. Finally, we develop an adaptive multitask hybrid scheduling algorithm considering resource constraints to perform an effective rescue scheduling operation considering different rescue priorities.

Single-microphone, speaker-independent speech separation is normally performed through two steps: (i) separating the specific speech sources, and (ii) determining the best output-label assignment to find the separation error. The second step is the main obstacle in training neural networks for speech separation. Recently proposed Permutation Invariant Training (PIT) addresses this problem by determining the output-label assignment which minimizes the separation error. In this study, we show that a major drawback of this technique is the overconfident choice of the output-label assignment, especially in the initial steps of training when the network generates unreliable outputs. To solve this problem, we propose Probabilistic PIT (Prob-PIT) which considers the output-label permutation as a discrete latent random variable with a uniform prior distribution. Prob-PIT defines a log-likelihood function based on the prior distributions and the separation errors of all permutations; it trains the speech separation networks by maximizing the log-likelihood function. Prob-PIT can be easily implemented by replacing the minimum function of PIT with a soft-minimum function. We evaluate our approach for speech separation on both TIMIT and CHiME datasets. The results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms PIT in terms of Signal to Distortion Ratio and Signal to Interference Ratio.

We compare several approaches to learn an Optimal Map, represented as a neural network, between probability distributions. The approaches fall into two categories: ``Heuristics'' and approaches with a more sound mathematical justification, motivated by the dual of the Kantorovitch problem. Among the algorithms we consider a novel approach involving dynamic flows and reductions of Optimal Transport to supervised learning.