For e-commerce companies with large product selections, the organization and grouping of products in meaningful ways is important for creating great customer shopping experiences and cultivating an authoritative brand image. One important way of grouping products is to identify a family of product variants, where the variants are mostly the same with slight and yet distinct differences (e.g. color or pack size). In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to identifying product variants. It combines both constrained clustering and tailored NLP techniques (e.g. extraction of product family name from unstructured product title and identification of products with similar model numbers) to achieve superior performance compared with an existing baseline using a vanilla classification approach. In addition, we design the algorithm to meet certain business criteria, including meeting high accuracy requirements on a wide range of categories (e.g. appliances, decor, tools, and building materials, etc.) as well as prioritizing the interpretability of the model to make it accessible and understandable to all business partners.

The notion of Cyber-Physical-Social System (CPSS) is an emerging concept developed as a result of the need to understand the impact of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) on humans and vice versa. This paradigm shift from CPS to CPSS was mainly attributed to the increasing use of sensor-enabled smart devices and the tight link with the users. The concept of CPSS has been around for over a decade and it has gained increasing attention over the past few years. The evolution to incorporate human aspects in the CPS research has unlocked a number of research challenges. Particularly human dynamics brings additional complexity that is yet to be explored. The exploration to conceptualise the notion of CPSS has been partially addressed in few scientific literatures. Although its conceptualisation has always been use-case dependent. Thus, there is a lack of generic view as most works focus on specific domains. Furthermore, the systemic core and design principles linking it with the theory of systems are loose. This work aims at addressing these issues by first exploring and analysing scientific literature to understand the complete spectrum of CPSS through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). Thereby identifying the state-of-the-art perspectives on CPSS regarding definitions, underlining principles and application areas. Subsequently, based on the findings of the SLR, we propose a domain-independent definition and a meta-model for CPSS, grounded in the Theory of Systems. Finally, a discussion on feasible future research directions is presented based on the systemic notion and the proposed meta-models.

Machine Learning (ML) techniques are becoming an invaluable support for network intrusion detection, especially in revealing anomalous flows, which often hide cyber-threats. Typically, ML algorithms are exploited to classify/recognize data traffic on the basis of statistical features such as inter-arrival times, packets length distribution, mean number of flows, etc. Dealing with the vast diversity and number of features that typically characterize data traffic is a hard problem. This results in the following issues: i) the presence of so many features leads to lengthy training processes (particularly when features are highly correlated), while prediction accuracy does not proportionally improve; ii) some of the features may introduce bias during the classification process, particularly those that have scarce relation with the data traffic to be classified. To this end, by reducing the feature space and retaining only the most significant features, Feature Selection (FS) becomes a crucial pre-processing step in network management and, specifically, for the purposes of network intrusion detection. In this review paper, we complement other surveys in multiple ways: i) evaluating more recent datasets (updated w.r.t. obsolete KDD 99) by means of a designed-from-scratch Python-based procedure; ii) providing a synopsis of most credited FS approaches in the field of intrusion detection, including Multi-Objective Evolutionary techniques; iii) assessing various experimental analyses such as feature correlation, time complexity, and performance. Our comparisons offer useful guidelines to network/security managers who are considering the incorporation of ML concepts into network intrusion detection, where trade-offs between performance and resource consumption are crucial.

In recent years, the use of sophisticated statistical models that influence decisions in domains of high societal relevance is on the rise. Although these models can often bring substantial improvements in the accuracy and efficiency of organizations, many governments, institutions, and companies are reluctant to their adoption as their output is often difficult to explain in human-interpretable ways. Hence, these models are often regarded as black-boxes, in the sense that their internal mechanisms can be opaque to human audit. In real-world applications, particularly in domains where decisions can have a sensitive impact--e.g., criminal justice, estimating credit scores, insurance risk, health risks, etc.--model interpretability is desired. Recently, the academic literature has proposed a substantial amount of methods for providing interpretable explanations to machine learning models. This survey reviews the most relevant and novel methods that form the state-of-the-art for addressing the particular problem of explaining individual instances in machine learning. It seeks to provide a succinct review that can guide data science and machine learning practitioners in the search for appropriate methods to their problem domain.

This paper aims to provide an overview of the ethical concerns in artificial intelligence (AI) and the framework that is needed to mitigate those risks, and to suggest a practical path to ensure the development and use of AI at the United Nations (UN) aligns with our ethical values. The overview discusses how AI is an increasingly powerful tool with potential for good, albeit one with a high risk of negative side-effects that go against fundamental human rights and UN values. It explains the need for ethical principles for AI aligned with principles for data governance, as data and AI are tightly interwoven. It explores different ethical frameworks that exist and tools such as assessment lists. It recommends that the UN develop a framework consisting of ethical principles, architectural standards, assessment methods, tools and methodologies, and a policy to govern the implementation and adherence to this framework, accompanied by an education program for staff.

The conference starts on Monday, April 12th and is virtual. "The sessions at NVIDIA'S GTC event are always illuminating. Kinetic Vision's two presentations will show how new AI-driven digital twin models are changing the foundations of retail operations and product development," said Jeremy Jarrett, Executive Vice President of Kinetic Vision. The first session is a deep dive into physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). This innovative technology is able to provide real-time simulation results within the design environment, and could even create'intelligent CAD' to guide the user towards the most functional design.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines artificial intelligence (AI) as "a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers" or "the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior." The layman may think of AI as mere algorithms and programs; however, there is a distinct difference from the usual programs which are task-specific and written to perform repetitive tasks. Machine learning (ML) refers to a computing machine or system's ability to teach or improve itself using experience without explicit programming for each improvement, using methods of forward chaining of algorithms derived from backward chaining of algorithm deduction from data. Deep learning is a subsection within ML focussed on using artificial neural networks to address highly abstract problems;1 however, this is still a primitive form of AI. When fully developed, it will be capable of sentient and recursive or iterative self-improvement.

Following the recent progress in Terahertz (THz) signal generation and radiation methods, joint THz communications and sensing applications are shaping the future of wireless systems. Towards this end, THz spectroscopy is expected to be carried over user equipment devices to identify material and gaseous components of interest. THz-specific signal processing techniques should complement this re-surged interest in THz sensing for efficient utilization of the THz band. In this paper, we present an overview of these techniques, with an emphasis on signal pre-processing (standard normal variate normalization, min-max normalization, and Savitzky-Golay filtering), feature extraction (principal component analysis, partial least squares, t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding, and nonnegative matrix factorization), and classification techniques (support vector machines, k-nearest neighbor, discriminant analysis, and naive Bayes). We also address the effectiveness of deep learning techniques by exploring their promising sensing capabilities at the THz band. Lastly, we investigate the performance and complexity trade-offs of the studied methods in the context of joint communications and sensing; we motivate the corresponding use-cases, and we present few future research directions in the field.

Given two large lists of records, the task in entity resolution (ER) is to find the pairs from the Cartesian product of the lists that correspond to the same real world entity. Typically, passive learning methods on tasks like ER require large amounts of labeled data to yield useful models. Active Learning is a promising approach for ER in low resource settings. However, the search space, to find informative samples for the user to label, grows quadratically for instance-pair tasks making active learning hard to scale. Previous works, in this setting, rely on hand-crafted predicates, pre-trained language model embeddings, or rule learning to prune away unlikely pairs from the Cartesian product. This blocking step can miss out on important regions in the product space leading to low recall. We propose DIAL, a scalable active learning approach that jointly learns embeddings to maximize recall for blocking and accuracy for matching blocked pairs. DIAL uses an Index-By-Committee framework, where each committee member learns representations based on powerful transformer models. We highlight surprising differences between the matcher and the blocker in the creation of the training data and the objective used to train their parameters. Experiments on five benchmark datasets and a multilingual record matching dataset show the effectiveness of our approach in terms of precision, recall and running time. Code is available at https://github.com/ArjitJ/DIAL

The increasing need for economic, safe, and sustainable smart manufacturing combined with novel technological enablers, has paved the way for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data in support of smart manufacturing. This implies a substantial integration of AI, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Robotics, Big data, Blockchain, 5G communications, in support of smart manufacturing and the dynamical processes in modern industries. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of different aspects of AI and Big Data in Industry 4.0 with a particular focus on key applications, techniques, the concepts involved, key enabling technologies, challenges, and research perspective towards deployment of Industry 5.0. In detail, we highlight and analyze how the duo of AI and Big Data is helping in different applications of Industry 4.0. We also highlight key challenges in a successful deployment of AI and Big Data methods in smart industries with a particular emphasis on data-related issues, such as availability, bias, auditing, management, interpretability, communication, and different adversarial attacks and security issues. In a nutshell, we have explored the significance of AI and Big data towards Industry 4.0 applications through panoramic reviews and discussions. We believe, this work will provide a baseline for future research in the domain.