LEGO robotics uses LEGO s as a fun tool to explore robotics, mechanical systems, electronics, and programming. This seminar is primarily a lab experience which provides students with resources to design, build, and program functional robots constructed from LEGO s and a few other parts such as motors and sensors.

Forecast combinations have flourished remarkably in the forecasting community and, in recent years, have become part of the mainstream of forecasting research and activities. Combining multiple forecasts produced from single (target) series is now widely used to improve accuracy through the integration of information gleaned from different sources, thereby mitigating the risk of identifying a single "best" forecast. Combination schemes have evolved from simple combination methods without estimation, to sophisticated methods involving time-varying weights, nonlinear combinations, correlations among components, and cross-learning. They include combining point forecasts and combining probabilistic forecasts. This paper provides an up-to-date review of the extensive literature on forecast combinations, together with reference to available open-source software implementations. We discuss the potential and limitations of various methods and highlight how these ideas have developed over time. Some important issues concerning the utility of forecast combinations are also surveyed. Finally, we conclude with current research gaps and potential insights for future research.

Applied mathematics and machine computations have raised a lot of hope since the recent success of supervised learning. Many practitioners in industries have been trying to switch from their old paradigms to machine learning. Interestingly, those data scientists spend more time scrapping, annotating and cleaning data than fine-tuning models. This thesis is motivated by the following question: can we derive a more generic framework than the one of supervised learning in order to learn from clutter data? This question is approached through the lens of weakly supervised learning, assuming that the bottleneck of data collection lies in annotation. We model weak supervision as giving, rather than a unique target, a set of target candidates. We argue that one should look for an ``optimistic'' function that matches most of the observations. This allows us to derive a principle to disambiguate partial labels. We also discuss the advantage to incorporate unsupervised learning techniques into our framework, in particular manifold regularization approached through diffusion techniques, for which we derived a new algorithm that scales better with input dimension then the baseline method. Finally, we switch from passive to active weakly supervised learning, introducing the ``active labeling'' framework, in which a practitioner can query weak information about chosen data. Among others, we leverage the fact that one does not need full information to access stochastic gradients and perform stochastic gradient descent.

Online continual learning, especially when task identities and task boundaries are unavailable, is a challenging continual learning setting. One representative kind of methods for online continual learning is replay-based methods, in which a replay buffer called memory is maintained to keep a small part of past samples for overcoming catastrophic forgetting. When tackling with online continual learning, most existing replay-based methods focus on single-label problems in which each sample in the data stream has only one label. But multi-label problems may also happen in the online continual learning setting in which each sample may have more than one label. In the online setting with multi-label samples, the class distribution in data stream is typically highly imbalanced, and it is challenging to control class distribution in memory since changing the number of samples belonging to one class may affect the number of samples belonging to other classes. But class distribution in memory is critical for replay-based memory to get good performance, especially when the class distribution in data stream is highly imbalanced. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method, called optimizing class distribution in memory (OCDM), for multi-label online continual learning. OCDM formulates the memory update mechanism as an optimization problem and updates the memory by solving this problem. Experiments on two widely used multi-label datasets show that OCDM can control the class distribution in memory well and can outperform other state-of-the-art methods.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has become increasingly utilized to provide adaptivity in educational applications. However, recent research has highlighted a variety of biases in pre-trained language models. While existing studies investigate bias in different domains, they are limited in addressing fine-grained analysis on educational and multilingual corpora. In this work, we analyze bias across text and through multiple architectures on a corpus of 9,165 German peer-reviews collected from university students over five years. Notably, our corpus includes labels such as helpfulness, quality, and critical aspect ratings from the peer-review recipient as well as demographic attributes. We conduct a Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) analysis on (1) our collected corpus in connection with the clustered labels, (2) the most common pre-trained German language models (T5, BERT, and GPT-2) and GloVe embeddings, and (3) the language models after fine-tuning on our collected data-set. In contrast to our initial expectations, we found that our collected corpus does not reveal many biases in the co-occurrence analysis or in the GloVe embeddings. However, the pre-trained German language models find substantial conceptual, racial, and gender bias and have significant changes in bias across conceptual and racial axes during fine-tuning on the peer-review data. With our research, we aim to contribute to the fourth UN sustainability goal (quality education) with a novel dataset, an understanding of biases in natural language education data, and the potential harms of not counteracting biases in language models for educational tasks.

In lifelong learning, an agent learns throughout its entire life without resets, in a constantly changing environment, as we humans do. Consequently, lifelong learning comes with a plethora of research problems such as continual domain shifts, which result in non-stationary rewards and environment dynamics. These non-stationarities are difficult to detect and cope with due to their continuous nature. Therefore, exploration strategies and learning methods are required that are capable of tracking the steady domain shifts, and adapting to them. We propose Reactive Exploration to track and react to continual domain shifts in lifelong reinforcement learning, and to update the policy correspondingly. To this end, we conduct experiments in order to investigate different exploration strategies. We empirically show that representatives of the policy-gradient family are better suited for lifelong learning, as they adapt more quickly to distribution shifts than Q-learning. Thereby, policy-gradient methods profit the most from Reactive Exploration and show good results in lifelong learning with continual domain shifts. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ml-jku/reactive-exploration.

Text-to-text transformers have shown remarkable success in the task of multi-task transfer learning, especially in natural language processing (NLP). However, while there have been several attempts to train transformers on different domains, there is usually a clear relationship between these domains, e.g.,, code summarization, where the natural language summary describes the code. There have been very few attempts to study how multi-task transfer learning works on tasks in significantly different domains. In this project, we investigated the behavior of multi-domain, multi-task learning using multi-domain text-to-text transfer transformers (MD-T5) on four tasks across two domains - Python Code and Chess. We carried out extensive experiments using three popular training strategies: Bert-style joint pretraining + successive finetuning, GPT-style joint pretraining + successive finetuning, and GPT-style joint pretraining + joint finetuning. Also, we evaluate the model on four metrics - Play Score, Eval Score, BLEU Score, and Multi-Domain Learning Score (MDLS). These metrics measure performance across the various tasks and multi-domain learning. We show that while negative knowledge transfer and catastrophic forgetting are still considerable challenges for all the models, the GPT-style joint pretraining + joint finetuning strategy showed the most promise in multi-domain, multi-task learning as it performs well across all four tasks while still keeping its multi-domain knowledge.

AI and Automation are disrupting all Industries and recruitment is no exception. In this webinar, learn the impact AI and Automation are making on Recruitment and how you can leverage them to get your team ahead in 2022. The prime objective of the webinar was to teach how the top leaders in the recruitment industry are using AI and automation powered recruitment trends to be successful and stay ahead in the market. Manish Grover has been a thought leader in recruitment and staffing industry for more than a decade. Manish has an Engineering Degree from IIT Delhi and MBA from IIM Kolkata.

This course will teach you the foundations of machine learning. The content was especially designed to help you pass machine learning interviews for data science jobs. In academic courses, your teacher spends hours speaking about calculus and linear algebra, but then none of that comes up in a job interview! That in-depth knowledge certainly has a place but is not what most companies are looking for. In bootcamps you tend to learn how to use many tools but not how they work under the hood.