Signed languages are the primary means of communication for many deaf and hard of hearing individuals. Since signed languages exhibit all the fundamental linguistic properties of natural language, we believe that tools and theories of Natural Language Processing (NLP) are crucial towards its modeling. However, existing research in Sign Language Processing (SLP) seldom attempt to explore and leverage the linguistic organization of signed languages. This position paper calls on the NLP community to include signed languages as a research area with high social and scientific impact. We first discuss the linguistic properties of signed languages to consider during their modeling. Then, we review the limitations of current SLP models and identify the open challenges to extend NLP to signed languages. Finally, we urge (1) the adoption of an efficient tokenization method; (2) the development of linguistically-informed models; (3) the collection of real-world signed language data; (4) the inclusion of local signed language communities as an active and leading voice in the direction of research.

In the past decade, deep neural networks have seen unparalleled improvements that continue to impact every aspect of today's society. With the development of high performance GPUs and the availability of vast amounts of data, learning capabilities of ML systems have skyrocketed, going from classifying digits in a picture to beating world-champions in games with super-human performance. However, even as ML models continue to achieve new frontiers, their practical success has been hindered by the lack of a deep theoretical understanding of their inner workings. Fortunately, a known information-theoretic method called the information bottleneck theory has emerged as a promising approach to better understand the learning dynamics of neural networks. In principle, IB theory models learning as a trade-off between the compression of the data and the retainment of information. The goal of this survey is to provide a comprehensive review of IB theory covering it's information theoretic roots and the recently proposed applications to understand deep learning models.

As part of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future's series of research briefs, Professor Thomas Malone, Professor Daniela Rus, and Robert Laubacher collaborated on "Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work," a brief that provides a comprehensive overview of AI today and what lies at the AI frontier. The authors delve into the question of how work will change with AI and provide policy prescriptions that speak to different parts of society. Thomas Malone is director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management in the MIT Sloan School of Management. Daniela Rus is director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a member of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future. Robert Laubacher is associate director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.

Matrix reordering is a task to permute the rows and columns of a given observed matrix such that the resulting reordered matrix shows meaningful or interpretable structural patterns. Most existing matrix reordering techniques share the common processes of extracting some feature representations from an observed matrix in a predefined manner, and applying matrix reordering based on it. However, in some practical cases, we do not always have prior knowledge about the structural pattern of an observed matrix. To address this problem, we propose a new matrix reordering method, called deep two-way matrix reordering (DeepTMR), using a neural network model. The trained network can automatically extract nonlinear row/column features from an observed matrix, which can then be used for matrix reordering. Moreover, the proposed DeepTMR provides the denoised mean matrix of a given observed matrix as an output of the trained network. This denoised mean matrix can be used to visualize the global structure of the reordered observed matrix. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DeepTMR by applying it to both synthetic and practical datasets.

In recent years, data and computing resources are typically distributed in the devices of end users, various regions or organizations. Because of laws or regulations, the distributed data and computing resources cannot be directly shared among different regions or organizations for machine learning tasks. Federated learning emerges as an efficient approach to exploit distributed data and computing resources, so as to collaboratively train machine learning models, while obeying the laws and regulations and ensuring data security and data privacy. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of existing works for federated learning. We propose a functional architecture of federated learning systems and a taxonomy of related techniques. Furthermore, we present the distributed training, data communication, and security of FL systems. Finally, we analyze their limitations and propose future research directions.

Vector representations have become a central element in semantic language modelling, leading to mathematical overlaps with many fields including quantum theory. Compositionality is a core goal for such representations: given representations for 'wet' and 'fish', how should the concept 'wet fish' be represented? This position paper surveys this question from two points of view. The first considers the question of whether an explicit mathematical representation can be successful using only tools from within linear algebra, or whether other mathematical tools are needed. The second considers whether semantic vector composition should be explicitly described mathematically, or whether it can be a model-internal side-effect of training a neural network. A third and newer question is whether a compositional model can be implemented on a quantum computer. Given the fundamentally linear nature of quantum mechanics, we propose that these questions are related, and that this survey may help to highlight candidate operations for future quantum implementation.

We describe the new field of mathematical analysis of deep learning. This field emerged around a list of research questions that were not answered within the classical framework of learning theory. These questions concern: the outstanding generalization power of overparametrized neural networks, the role of depth in deep architectures, the apparent absence of the curse of dimensionality, the surprisingly successful optimization performance despite the non-convexity of the problem, understanding what features are learned, why deep architectures perform exceptionally well in physical problems, and which fine aspects of an architecture affect the behavior of a learning task in which way. We present an overview of modern approaches that yield partial answers to these questions. For selected approaches, we describe the main ideas in more detail.

A pervasive design issue of AI systems is their explainability--how to provide appropriate information to help users understand the AI. The technical field of explainable AI (XAI) has produced a rich toolbox of techniques. Designers are now tasked with the challenges of how to select the most suitable XAI techniques and translate them into UX solutions. Informed by our previous work studying design challenges around XAI UX, this work proposes a design process to tackle these challenges. We review our and related prior work to identify requirements that the process should fulfill, and accordingly, propose a Question-Driven Design Process that grounds the user needs, choices of XAI techniques, design, and evaluation of XAI UX all in the user questions. We provide a mapping guide between prototypical user questions and exemplars of XAI techniques to reframe the technical space of XAI, also serving as boundary objects to support collaboration between designers and AI engineers. We demonstrate it with a use case of designing XAI for healthcare adverse events prediction, and discuss lessons learned for tackling design challenges of AI systems.

The trustworthiness of Robots and Autonomous Systems (RAS) has gained a prominent position on many research agendas towards fully autonomous systems. This research systematically explores, for the first time, the key facets of human-centered AI (HAI) for trustworthy RAS. In this article, five key properties of a trustworthy RAS initially have been identified. RAS must be (i) safe in any uncertain and dynamic surrounding environments; (ii) secure, thus protecting itself from any cyber-threats; (iii) healthy with fault tolerance; (iv) trusted and easy to use to allow effective human-machine interaction (HMI), and (v) compliant with the law and ethical expectations. Then, the challenges in implementing trustworthy autonomous system are analytically reviewed, in respects of the five key properties, and the roles of AI technologies have been explored to ensure the trustiness of RAS with respects to safety, security, health and HMI, while reflecting the requirements of ethics in the design of RAS. While applications of RAS have mainly focused on performance and productivity, the risks posed by advanced AI in RAS have not received sufficient scientific attention. Hence, a new acceptance model of RAS is provided, as a framework for requirements to human-centered AI and for implementing trustworthy RAS by design. This approach promotes human-level intelligence to augment human's capacity. while focusing on contributions to humanity.

With recent advances in data collection from multiple sources, multi-view data has received significant attention. In multi-view data, each view represents a different perspective of data. Since label information is often expensive to acquire, multi-view clustering has gained growing interest, which aims to obtain better clustering solution by exploiting complementary and consistent information across all views rather than only using an individual view. Due to inevitable sensor failures, data in each view may contain error. Error often exhibits as noise or feature-specific corruptions or outliers. Multi-view data may contain any or combination of these error types. Blindly clustering multi-view data i.e., without considering possible error in view(s) could significantly degrade the performance. The goal of error-robust multi-view clustering is to obtain useful outcome even if the multi-view data is corrupted. Existing error-robust multi-view clustering approaches with explicit error removal formulation can be structured into five broad research categories - sparsity norm based approaches, graph based methods, subspace based learning approaches, deep learning based methods and hybrid approaches, this survey summarizes and reviews recent advances in error-robust clustering for multi-view data. Finally, we highlight the challenges and provide future research opportunities.