As seasonal allergy sufferers will attest, the concentration of allergens in the air varies every few paces. A nearby blossoming tree or sudden gust of pollen-tinged wind can easily set off sneezing and watery eyes. But concentrations of airborne allergens are reported city by city, at best. A network of deep learning-powered devices could change that, enabling scientists to track pollen density block by block. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have developed a portable AI device that identifies levels of five common allergens from pollen and mold spores with 94 percent accuracy, according to the team's recent paper.

Two years ago, researchers at IBM claimed state-of-the-art transcription performance with a machine learning system trained on two public speech recognition data sets, which was more impressive than it might seem. The AI system had to contend not only with distortions in the training corpora's audio snippets, but with a range of speaking styles, overlapping speech, interruptions, restarts, and exchanges among participants. In pursuit of an even more capable system, researchers at the Armonk, New York-based company recently devised an architecture detailed in a paper ("English Broadcast News Speech Recognition by Humans and Machines") that will be presented at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing in Brighton this week. They say that in preliminary experiments it achieved industry-leading results on broadcast news captioning tasks. The system came with its own set of challenges, like audio signals with lots of background noise and presenters speaking on a wide variety of news topics.

Jordan French is a multi-media journalist on the editorial staff at TheStreet.com He is also the Founder and Executive Editor at Grit Daily News. Formerly an engineer and attorney he represented the "People of the United States" in energy market manipulation cases as an enforcement attorney at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. As an engineer he worked on the Mars Gravity Biosatellite Program and later co-founded BeeHex, Inc., the personalized nutrition and robotics company that popularized 3D-printed pizza. The author of forthcoming book, The Gritty Entrepreneur, he is a frequent public speaker, technology evangelist and media moderator.

Artificial intelligence simplifies the lives of patients, doctors and hospital administrators by performing tasks that are typically done by humans, but in less time and at a fraction of the cost. One of the world's highest-growth industries, the AI sector was valued at about $600 million in 2014 and is projected to reach a $150 billion by 2026. Whether it's used to find new links between genetic codes or to drive surgery-assisting robots, artificial intelligence is reinventing -- and reinvigorating -- modern healthcare through machines that can predict, comprehend, learn and act. Check out these 32 examples of AI in healthcare. In 2015, misdiagnosing illness and medical error accounted for 10% of all US deaths. In light of that, the promise of improving the diagnostic process is one of AI's most exciting healthcare applications.

One of the two task forces announced to be formed by the US House Committee on financial services will be investigating the use of artificial intelligence technologies (AI) for FinTech. The focus of the task force will be to examine digital identification technologies using AI to reduce fraud. It will also look into issues such as regulating ML in the financial services industry, risks associated with algorithms & big data, and the impact of automation on jobs and the economy in the US. AI has been one of the hottest technologies used by emerging FinTech players. It is used in automation, social media analytics & intelligence tools, cybersecurity, fraud prevention, and other areas.

Reinforcement learning is a promising approach to learning control policies for complex robotics tasks. A key challenge is ensuring safety of the learned control policy---e.g., that a walking robot does not fall over, or a quadcopter does not run into a wall. We focus on the setting where the dynamics are known, and the goal is to prove that a policy learned in simulation satisfies a given safety constraint. Existing approaches for ensuring safety suffer from a number of limitations---e.g., they do not scale to high-dimensional state spaces, or they only ensure safety for a fixed environment. We propose an approach based on shielding, which uses a backup controller to override the learned controller as necessary to ensure that safety holds. Rather than compute when to use the backup controller ahead-of-time, we perform this computation online. By doing so, we ensure that our approach is computationally efficient, and furthermore, can be used to ensure safety even in novel environments. We empirically demonstrate that our approach can ensure safety in experiments on cart-pole and on a bicycle with random obstacles.

Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) infers the long term dependency through a cell state maintained by the input and the forget gate structures, which models a gate output as a value in [0,1] through a sigmoid function. However, due to the graduality of the sigmoid function, the sigmoid gate is not flexible in representing multi-modality or skewness. Besides, the previous models lack correlation modeling between the gates, which would be a new method to adopt domain knowledge. This paper proposes a new gate structure with the bivariate Beta distribution. The proposed gate structure enables hierarchical probabilistic modeling on the gates within the LSTM cell, so the modelers can customize the cell state flow. Also, we observed that our structured flexible gate modeling is enabled by the probability density estimation. Moreover, we theoretically show and empirically experiment that the bivariate Beta distribution gate structure alleviates the gradient vanishing problem. We demonstrate the effectiveness of bivariate Beta gate structure on the sentence classification, image classification, polyphonic music modeling, and image caption generation.

The least square Monte Carlo (LSM) algorithm proposed by Longstaff and Schwartz [2001] is widely used for pricing American options. The LSM estimator contains undesirable look-ahead bias, and the conventional technique of removing it necessitates doubling simulations. We present the leave-one-out LSM (LOOLSM) algorithm for efficiently eliminating look-ahead bias. We validate the method with several option examples, including the multi-asset cases that the LSM algorithm significantly overvalues. We also obtain the convergence rates of look-ahead bias by measuring it using the LOOLSM method. The analysis and computational evidence support our findings.

We present SemEval-2019 Task 8 on Fact Checking in Community Question Answering Forums, which features two subtasks. Subtask A is about deciding whether a question asks for factual information vs. an opinion/advice vs. just socializing. Subtask B asks to predict whether an answer to a factual question is true, false or not a proper answer. We received 17 official submissions for subtask A and 11 official submissions for Subtask B. For subtask A, all systems improved over the majority class baseline. For Subtask B, all systems were below a majority class baseline, but several systems were very close to it. The leaderboard and the data from the competition can be found at http://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/20022