A Shared Nearest Neighbor (SNN) graph is a type of graph construction using shared nearest neighbor information, which is a secondary similarity measure based on the rankings induced by a primary $k$-nearest neighbor ($k$-NN) measure. SNN measures have been touted as being less prone to the curse of dimensionality than conventional distance measures, and thus methods using SNN graphs have been widely used in applications, particularly in clustering high-dimensional data sets and in finding outliers in subspaces of high dimensional data. Despite this, the theoretical study of SNN graphs and graph Laplacians remains unexplored. In this pioneering work, we make the first contribution in this direction. We show that large scale asymptotics of an SNN graph Laplacian reach a consistent continuum limit; this limit is the same as that of a $k$-NN graph Laplacian. Moreover, we show that the pointwise convergence rate of the graph Laplacian is linear with respect to $(k/n)^{1/m}$ with high probability.

This paper provides a comprehensive tutorial for Bayesian practitioners in pharmacometrics using Pumas workflows. We start by giving a brief motivation of Bayesian inference for pharmacometrics highlighting limitations in existing software that Pumas addresses. We then follow by a description of all the steps of a standard Bayesian workflow for pharmacometrics using code snippets and examples. This includes: model definition, prior selection, sampling from the posterior, prior and posterior simulations and predictions, counter-factual simulations and predictions, convergence diagnostics, visual predictive checks, and finally model comparison with cross-validation. Finally, the background and intuition behind many advanced concepts in Bayesian statistics are explained in simple language. This includes many important ideas and precautions that users need to keep in mind when performing Bayesian analysis. Many of the algorithms, codes, and ideas presented in this paper are highly applicable to clinical research and statistical learning at large but we chose to focus our discussions on pharmacometrics in this paper to have a narrower scope in mind and given the nature of Pumas as a software primarily for pharmacometricians.

Social Robotics and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research relies on different Affective Computing (AC) solutions for sensing, perceiving and understanding human affective behaviour during interactions. This may include utilising off-the-shelf affect perception models that are pre-trained on popular affect recognition benchmarks and directly applied to situated interactions. However, the conditions in situated human-robot interactions differ significantly from the training data and settings of these models. Thus, there is a need to deepen our understanding of how AC solutions can be best leveraged, customised and applied for situated HRI. This paper, while critiquing the existing practices, presents four critical lessons to be noted by the hitchhiker when applying AC for HRI research. These lessons conclude that: (i) The six basic emotions categories are irrelevant in situated interactions, (ii) Affect recognition accuracy (%) improvements are unimportant, (iii) Affect recognition does not generalise across contexts, and (iv) Affect recognition alone is insufficient for adaptation and personalisation. By describing the background and the context for each lesson, and demonstrating how these lessons have been learnt, this paper aims to enable the hitchhiker to successfully and insightfully leverage AC solutions for advancing HRI research.

The abundance of instructional videos and their narrations over the Internet offers an exciting avenue for understanding procedural activities. In this work, we propose to learn video representation that encodes both action steps and their temporal ordering, based on a large-scale dataset of web instructional videos and their narrations, without using human annotations. Our method jointly learns a video representation to encode individual step concepts, and a deep probabilistic model to capture both temporal dependencies and immense individual variations in the step ordering. We empirically demonstrate that learning temporal ordering not only enables new capabilities for procedure reasoning, but also reinforces the recognition of individual steps. Our model significantly advances the state-of-the-art results on step classification (+2.8% / +3.3% on COIN / EPIC-Kitchens) and step forecasting (+7.4% on COIN). Moreover, our model attains promising results in zero-shot inference for step classification and forecasting, as well as in predicting diverse and plausible steps for incomplete procedures. Our code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/ProcedureVRL.

I am a postgraduate in Computer Science (Cyber Security) from IIT Bombay and hold a keen interest in Cyber Security, Blockchain, AI & IoT, Electric Vehicle (EV) among other deeptech areas. At the application level, I love SaaS applications. Currently, I am the Founder & CEO of Tosh Innovations Private Limited, a Gurugram based Bootstrapped, Cash positive EdTech Company. Tosh Innovations offers online educational certifications in deeptech areas. Tosh Innovations is a Bootstrapped company of 30 young people who create exceptionally informative content for a global community.

Selective experience replay is a popular strategy for integrating lifelong learning with deep reinforcement learning. Selective experience replay aims to recount selected experiences from previous tasks to avoid catastrophic forgetting. Furthermore, selective experience replay based techniques are model agnostic and allow experiences to be shared across different models. However, storing experiences from all previous tasks make lifelong learning using selective experience replay computationally very expensive and impractical as the number of tasks increase. To that end, we propose a reward distribution-preserving coreset compression technique for compressing experience replay buffers stored for selective experience replay. We evaluated the coreset compression technique on the brain tumor segmentation (BRATS) dataset for the task of ventricle localization and on the whole-body MRI for localization of left knee cap, left kidney, right trochanter, left lung, and spleen. The coreset lifelong learning models trained on a sequence of 10 different brain MR imaging environments demonstrated excellent performance localizing the ventricle with a mean pixel error distance of 12.93 for the compression ratio of 10x. In comparison, the conventional lifelong learning model localized the ventricle with a mean pixel distance of 10.87. Similarly, the coreset lifelong learning models trained on whole-body MRI demonstrated no significant difference (p=0.28) between the 10x compressed coreset lifelong learning models and conventional lifelong learning models for all the landmarks. The mean pixel distance for the 10x compressed models across all the landmarks was 25.30, compared to 19.24 for the conventional lifelong learning models. Our results demonstrate that the potential of the coreset-based ERB compression method for compressing experiences without a significant drop in performance.

Note: The Coursera courses mentioned in the blog can be audited for free, meaning that you have access to all the course content without any cost. Programming is an essential part of your data science journey. If you know how to code in R, Python, or Julia, it will be quite easy for you to translate algorithms into functions. Moreover, you will learn better techniques to create a program or data reports. I will highly recommend you start with Python and learn the basic syntax and advanced functionalities.

Note: The Coursera courses mentioned in the blog can be audited for free, meaning that you have access to all the course content and can read and view it without any cost. Machine learning is the backbone of modern technology. Almost every big company in the world is trying to use it to get the most out of the data. By taking the free courses, you will learn about classification, regression, clustering, and reinforcement learning. Moreover, you will learn about feature engineering, advanced algorithms, and optimizing techniques.

By combining extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to create an immersive experience, this ground-breaking solution aims to increase accessibility and make technical guides simpler to grasp. The two businesses have already started collaborating to develop this solution using government funding and bids. The usage of avatars for human-machine interaction will be one of the special aspects of this approach. These avatars can walk users through the troubleshooting process and give them step-by-step instructions. Users are able to communicate with avatars using normal language and get precise answers to their inquiries.

We are currently in a great era for researchers and scientists studying and developing in the field of complex systems. Half of the physics Nobel prize of 2021 was awarded to the physicist Giorgio Parisi for his contributions to the theory of complex systems [9] and the other half to two meteorologists Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann to the modeling of the Earth's climate [10]. Parisi has made significant contributions to the literature on complex systems, including areas such as spin glass [11, 12, 13], stochastic resonance [14], surface growth [15], multifractality [16], and bird flocking [17].