Over the past one hundred years, the classic teaching methodology of "see one, do one, teach one" has governed the surgical education systems worldwide. With the advent of Operation Room 2.0, recording video, kinematic and many other types of data during the surgery became an easy task, thus allowing artificial intelligence systems to be deployed and used in surgical and medical practice. Recently, surgical videos has been shown to provide a structure for peer coaching enabling novice trainees to learn from experienced surgeons by replaying those videos. However, the high inter-operator variability in surgical gesture duration and execution renders learning from comparing novice to expert surgical videos a very difficult task. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to align multiple videos based on the alignment of their corresponding kinematic multivariate time series data. By leveraging the Dynamic Time Warping measure, our algorithm synchronizes a set of videos in order to show the same gesture being performed at different speed. We believe that the proposed approach is a valuable addition to the existing learning tools for surgery.

The Dogs vs Cats problem has become a sort of hello world for deep learning folks. Many courses and blog posts that are aimed at beginners use it as the fundamental building block for an introduction into the exciting world of deep learning. Fastai has not been any different with past versions of the course focusing on building a Dogs vs Cats classifier in the first lesson. So the Dogs vs Cats problem is no longer challenging which means there is no opportunity to try out new ideas. A more challenging problem that Jeremy suggests is fine-grain classification.

In recent years, there has been an exponential growth in the number of complex documents and texts that require a deeper understanding of machine learning methods to be able to accurately classify texts in many applications. Many machine learning approaches have achieved surpassing results in natural language processing. The success of these learning algorithms relies on their capacity to understand complex models and non-linear relationships within data. However, finding suitable structures, architectures, and techniques for text classification is a challenge for researchers. In this paper, a brief overview of text classification algorithms is discussed. This overview covers different text feature extractions, dimensionality reduction methods, existing algorithms and techniques, and evaluations methods. Finally, the limitations of each technique and their application in the real-world problem are discussed.

We study online active learning for classifying streaming instances within the framework of statistical learning theory.. At each time, the decision maker decides whether to query for the label of the current instance and, in the event of no query, self labels the instance. The objective is to minimize the number of queries while constraining the number of classification errors over a horizon of length $T$. We consider a general concept space with a finite VC dimension $d$ and adopt the agnostic setting. We propose a disagreement-based online learning algorithm and establish its $O(d\log^2 T)$ label complexity and $\Theta(1)$ (i.e., bounded) classification errors in excess to the best classifier in the concept space under the Massart bounded noise condition.

Please note that we can get an idea of a possible skew in the data by comparing the mean to the median, i.e. the 50% figure.

Recent models of emotion recognition strongly rely on supervised deep learning solutions for the distinction of general emotion expressions. However, they are not reliable when recognizing online and personalized facial expressions, e.g., for person-specific affective understanding. In this paper, we present a neural model based on a conditional adversarial autoencoder to learn how to represent and edit general emotion expressions. We then propose Grow-When-Required networks as personalized affective memories to learn individualized aspects of emotion expressions. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on emotion recognition when evaluated on \textit{in-the-wild} datasets. Furthermore, our experiments include ablation studies and neural visualizations in order to explain the behavior of our model.

Grade prediction for future courses not yet taken by students is important as it can help them and their advisers during the process of course selection as well as for designing personalized degree plans and modifying them based on their performance. One of the successful approaches for accurately predicting a student's grades in future courses is Cumulative Knowledge-based Regression Models (CKRM). CKRM learns shallow linear models that predict a student's grades as the similarity between his/her knowledge state and the target course. A student's knowledge state is built by linearly accumulating the learned provided knowledge components of the courses he/she has taken in the past, weighted by his/her grades in them. However, not all the prior courses contribute equally to the target course. In this paper, we propose a novel Neural Attentive Knowledge-based model (NAK) that learns the importance of each historical course in predicting the grade of a target course. Compared to CKRM and other competing approaches, our experiments on a large real-world dataset consisting of $\sim$1.5 grades show the effectiveness of the proposed NAK model in accurately predicting the students' grades. Moreover, the attention weights learned by the model can be helpful in better designing their degree plans.

In order to help undergraduate students towards successfully completing their degrees, developing tools that can assist students during the course selection process is a significant task in the education domain. The optimal set of courses for each student should include courses that help him/her graduate in a timely fashion and for which he/she is well-prepared for so as to get a good grade in. To this end, we propose two different grade-aware course recommendation approaches to recommend to each student his/her optimal set of courses. The first approach ranks the courses by using an objective function that differentiates between courses that are expected to increase or decrease a student's GPA. The second approach combines the grades predicted by grade prediction methods with the rankings produced by course recommendation methods to improve the final course rankings. To obtain the course rankings in the first approach, we adapt two widely-used representation learning techniques to learn the optimal temporal ordering between courses. Our experiments on a large dataset obtained from the University of Minnesota that includes students from 23 different majors show that the grade-aware course recommendation methods can do better on recommending more courses in which the students are expected to perform well and recommending fewer courses in which they are expected not to perform well in than grade-unaware course recommendation methods.

AI-powered loan and credit approval processes have been marred by unforeseen bias. Smart speakers have secretly turned on and recorded thousands of minutes of audio of their owners. Unfortunately, there's no industry-standard, best-practices handbook on AI ethics for companies to follow--at least not yet. Some large companies, including Microsoft and Google, are developing their own internal ethical frameworks. A number of think tanks, research organizations, and advocacy groups, meanwhile, have been developing a wide variety of ethical frameworks and guidelines for AI. Below is a brief roundup of some of the more influential models to emerge--from the Asilomar Principles to best-practice recommendations from the AI Now Institute.

With the emergence of batteryless computing platforms, we are now able to execute computer programs on embedded systems that do not require a dedicated energy source. These platforms are typically used in sensing applications [30, 39, 70, 73, 79], and their hardware architecture consists primarily of a sensor-enabled microcontroller that is powered by some form of harvested energy such as solar, RF or piezoelectric [63]. Programs that run on these platforms follow the so-called intermittent computing paradigm [50, 52, 75, 77] where a system pauses and resumes its code execution based on the availability of harvested energy. Over the past decade, the efficiency of batteryless computing platforms has been improved by reducing their energy waste through hardware provisioning, through check-pointing [64] to avoid restarting code execution from the beginning at each power-up [8], and through discarding stale sensor data [34] which are no longer useful. Despite these advancements, the capability of batteryless computing platforms has remained limited to simple sensing applications only. In this paper, we introduce the concept of intermittent learning (Figure 1) which makes energy harvested embedded systems capable of executing lightweight machine learning tasks. Their ability to run machine learning tasks inside energy harvesting microcontrollers pushes the boundary of batteryless computing as these devices are able to sense, learn, infer, and evolve over a prolonged lifetime. The proposed intermittent learning paradigm enables a true lifelong learning experience in mobile and embedded systems and advances sensor systems from being smart to smarter. Once deployed in the field, an intermittent learner classifies sensor data as well as learns from them to update the classifier at run-time--without requiring any help from any external system.