New York City has released a 116-page strategic vision for how it plans to benefit from artificial intelligence as a community, with an emphasis on doing so in ethical and responsible ways. The plan, dubbed The New York City Artificial Intelligence Strategy, was released yesterday by the NYC Mayor's Office of the Chief Technology Officer. This plan is perhaps unprecedented in many ways, marking the most extensive and proactive action taken toward one of the world's fast-evolving technologies by a U.S. city government. "AI will touch virtually every area of life in the years ahead," said John Paul Farmer, NYC's chief technology officer, during a conversation with Government Technology. While most prominently the report features the city's planned approach toward supporting AI, it also serves in part as a primer on the basics of how AI works.

Due to the complicated procedure and costly hardware, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) has been heavily dependent on public datasets for drill and evaluation, leading to many impressive demos and good benchmark scores. However, with a huge contrast, SLAM is still struggling on the way towards mature deployment, which sounds a warning: some of the datasets are overexposed, causing biased usage and evaluation. This raises the problem on how to comprehensively access the existing datasets and correctly select them. Moreover, limitations do exist in current datasets, then how to build new ones and which directions to go? Nevertheless, a comprehensive survey which can tackle the above issues does not exist yet, while urgently demanded by the community. To fill the gap, this paper strives to cover a range of cohesive topics about SLAM related datasets, including general collection methodology and fundamental characteristic dimensions, SLAM related tasks taxonomy and datasets categorization, introduction of state-of-the-arts, overview and comparison of existing datasets, review of evaluation criteria, and analyses and discussions about current limitations and future directions, looking forward to not only guiding the dataset selection, but also promoting the dataset research.

Scenario-based approaches have been receiving a huge amount of attention in research and engineering of automated driving systems. Due to the complexity and uncertainty of the driving environment, and the complexity of the driving task itself, the number of possible driving scenarios that an ADS or ADAS may encounter is virtually infinite. Therefore it is essential to be able to reason about the identification of scenarios and in particular critical ones that may impose unacceptable risk if not considered. Critical scenarios are particularly important to support design, verification and validation efforts, and as a basis for a safety case. In this paper, we present the results of a systematic literature review in the context of autonomous driving. The main contributions are: (i) introducing a comprehensive taxonomy for critical scenario identification methods; (ii) giving an overview of the state-of-the-art research based on the taxonomy encompassing 86 papers between 2017 and 2020; and (iii) identifying open issues and directions for further research. The provided taxonomy comprises three main perspectives encompassing the problem definition (the why), the solution (the methods to derive scenarios), and the assessment of the established scenarios. In addition, we discuss open research issues considering the perspectives of coverage, practicability, and scenario space explosion.

Recommender systems attempt to identify and recommend the most preferable item (product-service) to individual users. These systems predict user interest in items based on related items, users, and the interactions between items and users. We aim to build an auto-routine and color scheme recommender system for home-based smart lighting that leverages a wealth of historical data and machine learning methods. We utilize an unsupervised method to recommend a routine for smart lighting. Moreover, by analyzing users’ daily logs, geographical location, temporal and usage information, we understand user preferences and predict their preferred light colors. To do so, users are clustered based on their geographical information and usage distribution. We then build and train a predictive model within each cluster and aggregate the results. Results indicate that models based on similar users increases the prediction accuracy, with and without prior knowledge about user preferences.

This article is devoted to the features that were under development between RoboCup 2019 Sydney and RoboCup 2021 Worldwide. These features include vision-related matters, such as detection and localization, mechanical and algorithmic novelties. Since the competition was held virtually, the simulation-specific features are also considered in the article. We give an overview of the approaches that were tried out along with the analysis of their preconditions, perspectives and the evaluation of their performance.

Plants are dynamic systems that are integral to our existence and survival. Plants face environment changes and adapt over time to their surrounding conditions. We argue that plant responses to an environmental stimulus are a good example of a real-world problem that can be approached within a reinforcement learning (RL)framework. With the objective of controlling a plant by moving the light source, we propose GrowSpace, as a new RL benchmark. The back-end of the simulator is implemented using the Space Colonisation Algorithm, a plant growing model based on competition for space. Compared to video game RL environments, this simulator addresses a real-world problem and serves as a test bed to visualize plant growth and movement in a faster way than physical experiments. GrowSpace is composed of a suite of challenges that tackle several problems such as control, multi-stage learning,fairness and multi-objective learning. We provide agent baselines alongside case studies to demonstrate the difficulty of the proposed benchmark.

Global datasphere is increasing fast, and it is expected to reach 175 Zettabytes by 20251 . However, most of the content is unstructured and is not understandable by machines. Structuring this data into a knowledge graph enables multitudes of intelligent applications such as deep question answering, recommendation systems, semantic search, etc. The knowledge graph is an emerging technology that allows logical reasoning and uncovers new insights using content along with the context. Thereby, it provides necessary syntax and reasoning semantics that enable machines to solve complex healthcare, security, financial institutions, economics, and business problems. As an outcome, enterprises are putting their effort into constructing and maintaining knowledge graphs to support various downstream applications. Manual approaches are too expensive. Automated schemes can reduce the cost of building knowledge graphs up to 15-250 times. This paper critiques state-of-the-art automated techniques to produce knowledge graphs of near-human quality autonomously. Additionally, it highlights different research issues that need to be addressed to deliver high-quality knowledge graphs

Artificial intelligence is a hot topic having effect in many industries. This webinar will present an overview of legal discussions on artificial intelligence through the lens of current developments by government actors. The focus will be on global legal discussions, concerns, risks and opportunities that artificial intelligence poses on various industries including but not limited to mobilization, smart cities, surveillance, industrial data, and health-tech.

We saw excellent progress with enterprise acceptance of machine learning across a wide swath of industries and problem domains. In terms of pure research, I had a good time tracking the acceleration of progress in the area of machine learning. In this article, we'll take a tour of my top pick of papers that I found intriguing and useful. In my attempt to stay current with the field's research progress, the directions represented here are very promising. I hope you enjoy the results as much as I have. Overfitting & underfitting and stable training are important challenges in machine learning. Current approaches for these issues are mixup, SamplePairing, and BC learning. This paper states the hypothesis that mixing many images together can be more effective than just two.

In the past two decades, the number of mobile products being created by companies has grown exponentially. However, although these devices are constantly being upgraded with the newest features, the security measures used to protect these devices has stayed relatively the same over the past two decades. The vast difference in growth patterns between devices and their security is opening up the risk for more and more devices to easily become infiltrated by nefarious users. Working off of previous work in the field, this study looks at the different Machine Learning algorithms used in user authentication schemes involving touch dynamics and device movement. This study aims to give a comprehensive overview of the current uses of different machine learning algorithms that are frequently used in user authentication schemas involving touch dynamics and device movement. The benefits, limitations, and suggestions for future work will be thoroughly discussed throughout this paper.