Although neural networks are powerful function approximators, the underlying modelling assumptions ultimately define the likelihood and thus the hypothesis class they are parameterizing. In classification, these assumptions are minimal as the commonly employed softmax is capable of representing any categorical distribution. In regression, however, restrictive assumptions on the type of continuous distribution to be realized are typically placed, like the dominant choice of training via mean-squared error and its underlying Gaussianity assumption. Recently, modelling advances allow to be agnostic to the type of continuous distribution to be modelled, granting regression the flexibility of classification models. While past studies stress the benefit of such flexible regression models in terms of performance, here we study the effect of the model choice on uncertainty estimation. We highlight that under model misspecification, aleatoric uncertainty is not properly captured, and that a Bayesian treatment of a misspecified model leads to unreliable epistemic uncertainty estimates. Overall, our study provides an overview on how modelling choices in regression may influence uncertainty estimation and thus any downstream decision making process.

Humans' continual learning (CL) ability is closely related to Stability Versus Plasticity Dilemma that describes how humans achieve ongoing learning capacity and preservation for learned information. The notion of CL has always been present in artificial intelligence (AI) since its births. This paper proposes a comprehensive review of CL. Different from previous reviews that mainly focus on the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon in CL, this paper surveys CL from a more macroscopic perspective based on the Stability Versus Plasticity mechanism. Analogous to biological counterpart, "smart" AI agents are supposed to i) remember previously learned information (information retrospection); ii) infer on new information continuously (information prospection:); iii) transfer useful information (information transfer), to achieve high-level CL. According to the taxonomy, evaluation metrics, algorithms, applications as well as some open issues are then introduced. Our main contributions concern i) rechecking CL from the level of artificial general intelligence; ii) providing a detailed and extensive overview on CL topics; iii) presenting some novel ideas on the potential development of CL.

The increasing amounts of semantic resources offer valuable storage of human knowledge; however, the probability of wrong entries increases with the increased size. The development of approaches that identify potentially spurious parts of a given knowledge base is thus becoming an increasingly important area of interest. In this work, we present a systematic evaluation of whether structure-only link analysis methods can already offer a scalable means to detecting possible anomalies, as well as potentially interesting novel relation candidates. Evaluating thirteen methods on eight different semantic resources, including Gene Ontology, Food Ontology, Marine Ontology and similar, we demonstrated that structure-only link analysis could offer scalable anomaly detection for a subset of the data sets. Further, we demonstrated that by considering symbolic node embedding, explanations of the predictions (links) could be obtained, making this branch of methods potentially more valuable than the black-box only ones. To our knowledge, this is currently one of the most extensive systematic studies of the applicability of different types of link analysis methods across semantic resources from different domains.

Designing recommendation systems with limited or no available training data remains a challenge. To that end, a new combinatorial optimization problem is formulated to generate optimized item selection for experimentation with the goal to shorten the time for collecting randomized training data. We first present an overview of the optimized item selection problem and a multi-level optimization framework to solve it. The approach integrates techniques from discrete optimization, unsupervised clustering, and latent text embeddings. We then discuss how to incorporate optimized item selection with active learning as part of randomized exploration in an ongoing fashion.

Multi-core and highly-connected architectures have become ubiquitous, and this has brought renewed interest in language-based approaches to the exploitation of parallelism. Since its inception, logic programming has been recognized as a programming paradigm with great potential for automated exploitation of parallelism. The comprehensive survey of the first twenty years of research in parallel logic programming, published in 2001, has served since as a fundamental reference to researchers and developers. The contents are quite valid today, but at the same time the field has continued evolving at a fast pace in the years that have followed. Many of these achievements and ongoing research have been driven by the rapid pace of technological innovation, that has led to advances such as very large clusters, the wide diffusion of multi-core processors, the game-changing role of general-purpose graphic processing units, and the ubiquitous adoption of cloud computing. This has been paralleled by significant advances within logic programming, such as tabling, more powerful static analysis and verification, the rapid growth of Answer Set Programming, and in general, more mature implementations and systems. This survey provides a review of the research in parallel logic programming covering the period since 2001, thus providing a natural continuation of the previous survey. The goal of the survey is to serve not only as a reference for researchers and developers of logic programming systems, but also as engaging reading for anyone interested in logic and as a useful source for researchers in parallel systems outside logic programming. Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).

Graph is a universe data structure that is widely used to organize data in real-world. Various real-word networks like the transportation network, social and academic network can be represented by graphs. Recent years have witnessed the quick development on representing vertices in the network into a low-dimensional vector space, referred to as network representation learning. Representation learning can facilitate the design of new algorithms on the graph data. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of current literature on network representation learning. Existing algorithms can be categorized into three groups: shallow embedding models, heterogeneous network embedding models, graph neural network based models. We review state-of-the-art algorithms for each category and discuss the essential differences between these algorithms. One advantage of the survey is that we systematically study the underlying theoretical foundations underlying the different categories of algorithms, which offers deep insights for better understanding the development of the network representation learning field.

Automotive head-up displays (HUDs), systems that transparently project critical vehicle information into the driver's field of vision, were developed originally for military aviation use, with the origin of the name stemming from a pilot being able to view information with his or her head positioned "up" and looking forward, rather than positioned "down" to look at the cockpit gauges and instruments. The HUD projects and superimposes data in the pilot's natural field of view (FOV), providing the added benefit of eliminating the pilot's need to refocus when switching between the outside view and the instruments, which can impact reaction time, efficiency, and safety, particularly in combat situations. In cars, the main concern is distracted driving, or the act of taking the driver's attention away from the road. According to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, distracted driving claimed 3,142 lives in 2019, the most recent year for which statistics have been published. Looking away from the road for even five seconds at a speed of 55 mph is the equivalent of driving the length of a football field with one's eyes closed.

In this paper, we propose a deterministic variational inference approach and generate low-discrepancy points by minimizing the kernel discrepancy, also known as the Maximum Mean Discrepancy or MMD. Based on the general energetic variational inference framework by Wang et. al. (2021), minimizing the kernel discrepancy is transformed to solving a dynamic ODE system via the explicit Euler scheme. We name the resulting algorithm EVI-MMD and demonstrate it through examples in which the target distribution is fully specified, partially specified up to the normalizing constant, and empirically known in the form of training data. Its performances are satisfactory compared to alternative methods in the applications of distribution approximation, numerical integration, and generative learning. The EVI-MMD algorithm overcomes the bottleneck of the existing MMD-descent algorithms, which are mostly applicable to two-sample problems. Algorithms with more sophisticated structures and potential advantages can be developed under the EVI framework.

Medical Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a combination of medical artificial intelligence and popular VQA challenges. Given a medical image and a clinically relevant question in natural language, the medical VQA system is expected to predict a plausible and convincing answer. Although the general-domain VQA has been extensively studied, the medical VQA still needs specific investigation and exploration due to its task features. In the first part of this survey, we cover and discuss the publicly available medical VQA datasets up to date about the data source, data quantity, and task feature. In the second part, we review the approaches used in medical VQA tasks. In the last part, we analyze some medical-specific challenges for the field and discuss future research directions.

From commerce, finance and agriculture to self-driving cars, personalised healthcare and social media – advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) unlock countless opportunities. New applications promise to improve the quality of people's lives throughout the world, but at the same time, raise a number of societal questions. A joint panel discussion of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Korean Academy of Science and Technology (KAST) explores AI technologies, their benefits and their challenges for society. Virtual panel discussion of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Korean Academy of Science and Technology „Realizing the Promises of Artificial Intelligence" Thursday, 25 November 2021, 8am to 9am (CET) Online Following opening remarks from the President of the Leopoldina, Prof (ETHZ) Dr Gerald Haug and Prof Min-Koo Han, PhD, President of the KAST, legal scholar Prof Ryan Song, PhD, Kyung Hee University, Seoul/South Korea, will provide an introduction into the topic. Subsequently, computer scientist Prof Alice Oh PhD, KAIST School of Computing, Daejeon/ South Korea, and Member of the Leopoldina Prof Dr Alexander Waibel, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology/Germany and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh/USA, will provide input statements for further discussion.