Fast developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology has enabled various applied systems deployed in the real world, impacting people's everyday lives. However, many current AI systems were found vulnerable to imperceptible attacks, biased against underrepresented groups, lacking in user privacy protection, etc., which not only degrades user experience but erodes the society's trust in all AI systems. In this review, we strive to provide AI practitioners a comprehensive guide towards building trustworthy AI systems. We first introduce the theoretical framework of important aspects of AI trustworthiness, including robustness, generalization, explainability, transparency, reproducibility, fairness, privacy preservation, alignment with human values, and accountability. We then survey leading approaches in these aspects in the industry. To unify the current fragmented approaches towards trustworthy AI, we propose a systematic approach that considers the entire lifecycle of AI systems, ranging from data acquisition to model development, to development and deployment, finally to continuous monitoring and governance. In this framework, we offer concrete action items to practitioners and societal stakeholders (e.g., researchers and regulators) to improve AI trustworthiness. Finally, we identify key opportunities and challenges in the future development of trustworthy AI systems, where we identify the need for paradigm shift towards comprehensive trustworthy AI systems.

Pre-trained models learn contextualized word representations on large-scale text corpus through a self-supervised learning method, which has achieved promising performance after fine-tuning. These models, however, suffer from poor robustness and lack of interpretability. Pre-trained models with knowledge injection, which we call knowledge enhanced pre-trained models (KEPTMs), possess deep understanding and logical reasoning and introduce interpretability to some extent. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of KEPTMs for natural language processing. We first introduce the progress of pre-trained models and knowledge representation learning. Then we systematically categorize existing KEPTMs from three different perspectives. Finally, we outline some potential directions of KEPTMs for future research.

We look into Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), its prevalent variants and applications in a number of sectors. GANs combine two neural networks that compete against one another using zero-sum game theory, allowing them to create much crisper and discrete outputs. GANs can be used to perform image processing, video generation and prediction, among other computer vision applications. GANs can also be utilised for a variety of science-related activities, including protein engineering, astronomical data processing, remote sensing image dehazing, and crystal structure synthesis. Other notable fields where GANs have made gains include finance, marketing, fashion design, sports, and music. Therefore in this article we provide a comprehensive overview of the applications of GANs in a wide variety of disciplines. We first cover the theory supporting GAN, GAN variants, and the metrics to evaluate GANs. Then we present how GAN and its variants can be applied in twelve domains, ranging from STEM fields, such as astronomy and biology, to business fields, such as marketing and finance, and to arts, such as music. As a result, researchers from other fields may grasp how GANs work and apply them to their own study. To the best of our knowledge, this article provides the most comprehensive survey of GAN's applications in different fields.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) sometimes needs a large amount of data to converge in the training procedure and in some cases, each action of the agent may produce regret. This barrier naturally motivates different data sets or environment owners to cooperate to share their knowledge and train their agents more efficiently. However, it raises privacy concerns if we directly merge the raw data from different owners. To solve this problem, we proposed a new Deep Neural Network (DNN) architecture with both global NN and local NN, and a distributed training framework. We allow the global weights to be updated by all the collaborator agents while the local weights are only updated by the agent they belong to. In this way, we hope the global weighs can share the common knowledge among these collaborators while the local NN can keep the specialized properties and ensure the agent to be compatible with its specific environment. Experiments show that the framework can efficiently help agents in the same or similar environments to collaborate in their training process and gain a higher convergence rate and better performance.

Global models are trained to be as generalizable as possible, with user invariance considered desirable since the models are shared across multitudes of users. As such, these models are often unable to produce personalized responses for individual users, based on their data. Contrary to widely-used personalization techniques based on few-shot learning, we propose UserIdentifier, a novel scheme for training a single shared model for all users. Our approach produces personalized responses by adding fixed, non-trainable user identifiers to the input data. We empirically demonstrate that this proposed method outperforms the prefix-tuning based state-of-the-art approach by up to 13%, on a suite of sentiment analysis datasets. We also show that, unlike prior work, this method needs neither any additional model parameters nor any extra rounds of few-shot fine-tuning.

Style is an integral component of a sentence indicated by the choice of words a person makes. Different people have different ways of expressing themselves, however, they adjust their speaking and writing style to a social context, an audience, an interlocutor or the formality of an occasion. Text style transfer is defined as a task of adapting and/or changing the stylistic manner in which a sentence is written, while preserving the meaning of the original sentence. A systematic review of text style transfer methodologies using deep learning is presented in this paper. We point out the technological advances in deep neural networks that have been the driving force behind current successes in the fields of natural language understanding and generation. The review is structured around two key stages in the text style transfer process, namely, representation learning and sentence generation in a new style. The discussion highlights the commonalities and differences between proposed solutions as well as challenges and opportunities that are expected to direct and foster further research in the field.

The fast-paced evolution of technology has meant a lot of different things for different sectors and companies all over the world. This is especially true for the FinTech sector, which has observed the emergence of artificial intelligence, machine learning, mixed reality, etc. in myriad capacities. However, there is one tool in particular that has proven to be particularly interesting for the FinTech sector: AI-driven chatbots. Well, because they stand to enable companies in the sector to not only achieve significantly better customer experiences but also much better business results. FinTech offers next-level customer service for the users by using chatbots.

Like many other revolutionary technologies of the modern day, machine learning was once science fiction. However, its applications in real world industries are only limited by our imagination. In 2021, recent innovations in machine learning have made a great deal of tasks more feasible, efficient, and precise than ever before. Powered by data science, machine learning makes our lives easier. When properly trained, they can complete tasks more efficiently than a human. Understanding the possibilities and recent innovations of ML technology is important for businesses so that they can plot a course for the most efficient ways of conducting their business.

Switching dynamical systems provide a powerful, interpretable modeling framework for inference in time-series data in, e.g., the natural sciences or engineering applications. Since many areas, such as biology or discrete-event systems, are naturally described in continuous time, we present a model based on an Markov jump process modulating a subordinated diffusion process. We provide the exact evolution equations for the prior and posterior marginal densities, the direct solutions of which are however computationally intractable. Therefore, we develop a new continuous-time variational inference algorithm, combining a Gaussian process approximation on the diffusion level with posterior inference for Markov jump processes. By minimizing the path-wise Kullback-Leibler divergence we obtain (i) Bayesian latent state estimates for arbitrary points on the real axis and (ii) point estimates of unknown system parameters, utilizing variational expectation maximization. We extensively evaluate our algorithm under the model assumption and for real-world examples.

One of the biggest challenges in the data science industry is the Black Box Debate and the lack of trust in the algorithm. In the talk titled "Explainable and Interpretable Deep Learning" during the DevCon 2021, Dipyaman Sanyal, Head, Academics & Learning at Hero Vired, discusses the developing solution for the black box problem. Dipyaman Sanyal's educational background consists of an MS and a PhD in Economics. His career only becomes more colourful, with his current title being the co-founder of Drop Math. In his 15 year career, he has been awarded several honours, including 40 under 40 in India in Data Science in 2019.