The 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI2021) starts on Tuesday 7 February and runs until Tuesday 14 February. Find out about some of the main events that are taking place throughout the conference, this year to be held in Washington DC. Francesca Rossi will deliver her presidential address on Thursday morning (9 February), following the official opening of the conference. AAAI have announced the following distinguished invited speakers at this year's conference. The diversity and inclusion events take place throughout the conference.

The AWS AI & ML Scholarship Program, in collaboration with Udacity, is an AI/ML-focused scholarship program providing 2,500 scholarships over 2023, as well as mentorship, to students that identify as underserved and underrepresented in technology. The program aims to make the future tech workforce more diverse by removing financial barriers, providing training for careers in tech, and offering mentorship support to individuals who are underserved or underrepresented in tech.

Bilevel optimization has been developed for many machine learning tasks with large-scale and high-dimensional data. This paper considers a constrained bilevel optimization problem, where the lower-level optimization problem is convex with equality and inequality constraints and the upper-level optimization problem is non-convex. The overall objective function is non-convex and non-differentiable. To solve the problem, we develop a gradient-based approach, called gradient approximation method, which determines the descent direction by computing several representative gradients of the objective function inside a neighborhood of the current estimate. We show that the algorithm asymptotically converges to the set of Clarke stationary points, and demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithm by the experiments on hyperparameter optimization and meta-learning.

AI constructivism as inspired by Jean Piaget, described and surveyed by Frank Guerin, and representatively implemented by Gary Drescher seeks to create algorithms and knowledge structures that enable agents to acquire, maintain, and apply a deep understanding of the environment through sensorimotor interactions. This paper aims to increase awareness of constructivist AI implementations to encourage greater progress toward enabling lifelong learning by machines. It builds on Guerin's 2008 "Learning Like a Baby: A Survey of AI approaches." After briefly recapitulating that survey, it summarizes subsequent progress by the Guerin referents, numerous works not covered by Guerin (or found in other surveys), and relevant efforts in related areas. The focus is on knowledge representations and learning algorithms that have been used in practice viewed through lenses of Piaget's schemas, adaptation processes, and staged development. The paper concludes with a preview of a simple framework for constructive AI being developed by the author that parses concepts from sensory input and stores them in a semantic memory network linked to episodic data.

In the post-pandemic era, the widespread adoption of remote work has prompted the educational sector to reassess conventional pedagogical methods. This paper is to scrutinize the underlying psychological principles of ChatGPT, delve into the factors that captivate user attention, and implicate its ramifications on the future of learning. The ultimate objective of this study is to instigate a scholarly discourse on the interplay between technological advancements in education and the evolution of human learning patterns, raising the question of whether technology is driving human evolution or vice versa. Keywords: Artificial intelligence (AI), Human-machine communication, COVID-19, Chat GPT, Learning 3.0, Critical Thinking 1.Introduction of ChatGPT ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI, can interpret and respond to natural language input using the GPT-3 language model which has 175 billion parameters (Floridi & Chiriatti, 2020). The utilization of a word-driven dialogue system offers assistance in cross-domain problem resolution and the generation of content to answer users' inquiries.

Model-based methods have recently shown great potential for off-policy evaluation (OPE); offline trajectories induced by behavioral policies are fitted to transitions of Markov decision processes (MDPs), which are used to rollout simulated trajectories and estimate the performance of policies. Model-based OPE methods face two key challenges. First, as offline trajectories are usually fixed, they tend to cover limited state and action space. Second, the performance of model-based methods can be sensitive to the initialization of their parameters. In this work, we propose the variational latent branching model (VLBM) to learn the transition function of MDPs by formulating the environmental dynamics as a compact latent space, from which the next states and rewards are then sampled. Specifically, VLBM leverages and extends the variational inference framework with the recurrent state alignment (RSA), which is designed to capture as much information underlying the limited training data, by smoothing out the information flow between the variational (encoding) and generative (decoding) part of VLBM. Moreover, we also introduce the branching architecture to improve the model's robustness against randomly initialized model weights. The effectiveness of the VLBM is evaluated on the deep OPE (DOPE) benchmark, from which the training trajectories are designed to result in varied coverage of the state-action space. We show that the VLBM outperforms existing state-of-the-art OPE methods in general.

Increasingly, researchers have suggested the benefits of temporal analysis to improve our understanding of the learning process. Sequential pattern mining (SPM), as a pattern recognition technique, has the potential to reveal the temporal aspects of learning and can be a valuable tool in educational data science. However, its potential is not well understood and exploited. This chapter addresses this gap by reviewing work that utilizes sequential pattern mining in educational contexts. We identify that SPM is suitable for mining learning behaviors, analyzing and enriching educational theories, evaluating the efficacy of instructional interventions, generating features for prediction models, and building educational recommender systems. SPM can contribute to these purposes by discovering similarities and differences in learners' activities and revealing the temporal change in learning behaviors. As a sequential analysis method, SPM can reveal unique insights about learning processes and be powerful for self-regulated learning research. It is more flexible in capturing the relative arrangement of learning events than the other sequential analysis methods. Future research may improve its utility in educational data science by developing tools for counting pattern occurrences as well as identifying and removing unreliable patterns. Future work needs to establish a systematic guideline for data preprocessing, parameter setting, and interpreting sequential patterns.

Machine learning is a rapidly growing field that is revolutionizing many industries, including healthcare, finance, and technology. With its ability to analyze large amounts of data and make predictions and decisions, machine learning is an essential skill for anyone interested in a career in data science or artificial intelligence. If you're looking to learn more about machine learning, you're in luck! There are many high-quality courses available online, offered by some of the top universities in the world. In this article, we'll introduce you to 10 free machine learning courses from top universities.

We're pleased to announce that we will be giving a tutorial on science communication for AI researchers at AAAI this year. This will be held in person on Wednesday 8 February (08:30-12:30). If you are attending the conference and fancy finding out how you can communicate your research to a general audience in different formats, then please do join us. The course will be hands-on, so you will need to come prepared with some research in mind that you'd like to communicate about. One of the challenges facing the field of AI is its portrayal in the media, which leads to misconceptions among policy makers, business leaders, and the general public alike.

Let's use ChatGPT's code generation capabilities to generate a full functional YouTube downloader app in Python without having to write a single line of code by our own! Don't believe this is possible?