Artificial Intelligence is one of the fastest growing technologies of the 21st century and accompanies us in our daily lives when interacting with technical applications. However, reliance on such technical systems is crucial for their widespread applicability and acceptance. The societal tools to express reliance are usually formalized by lawful regulations, i.e., standards, norms, accreditations, and certificates. Therefore, the T\"UV AUSTRIA Group in cooperation with the Institute for Machine Learning at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, proposes a certification process and an audit catalog for Machine Learning applications. We are convinced that our approach can serve as the foundation for the certification of applications that use Machine Learning and Deep Learning, the techniques that drive the current revolution in Artificial Intelligence. While certain high-risk areas, such as fully autonomous robots in workspaces shared with humans, are still some time away from certification, we aim to cover low-risk applications with our certification procedure. Our holistic approach attempts to analyze Machine Learning applications from multiple perspectives to evaluate and verify the aspects of secure software development, functional requirements, data quality, data protection, and ethics. Inspired by existing work, we introduce four criticality levels to map the criticality of a Machine Learning application regarding the impact of its decisions on people, environment, and organizations. Currently, the audit catalog can be applied to low-risk applications within the scope of supervised learning as commonly encountered in industry. Guided by field experience, scientific developments, and market demands, the audit catalog will be extended and modified accordingly.

This paper surveys state-of-the-art methods and models dedicated to time series analysis and modeling, with the final aim of prediction. This review aims to offer a structured and comprehensive view of the full process flow, and encompasses time series decomposition, stationary tests, modeling and forecasting. Besides, to meet didactic purposes, a unified presentation has been adopted throughout this survey, to present decomposition frameworks on the one hand and linear and nonlinear time series models on the other hand. First, we decrypt the relationships between stationarity and linearity, and further examine the main classes of methods used to test for weak stationarity. Next, the main frameworks for time series decomposition are presented in a unified way: depending on the time series, a more or less complex decomposition scheme seeks to obtain nonstationary effects (the deterministic components) and a remaining stochastic component. An appropriate modeling of the latter is a critical step to guarantee prediction accuracy. We then present three popular linear models, together with two more flexible variants of the latter. A step further in model complexity, and still in a unified way, we present five major nonlinear models used for time series. Amongst nonlinear models, artificial neural networks hold a place apart as deep learning has recently gained considerable attention. A whole section is therefore dedicated to time series forecasting relying on deep learning approaches. A final section provides a list of R and Python implementations for the methods, models and tests presented throughout this review. In this document, our intention is to bring sufficient in-depth knowledge, while covering a broad range of models and forecasting methods: this compilation spans from well-established conventional approaches to more recent adaptations of deep learning to time series forecasting.

This paper surveys the recent attempts at leveraging machine learning to solve constrained optimization problems. It focuses on surveying the work on integrating combinatorial solvers and optimization methods with machine learning architectures. These approaches hold the promise to develop new hybrid machine learning and optimization methods to predict fast, approximate, solutions to combinatorial problems and to enable structural logical inference. This paper presents a conceptual review of the recent advancements in this emerging area.

In humans, Attention is a core property of all perceptual and cognitive operations. Given our limited ability to process competing sources, attention mechanisms select, modulate, and focus on the information most relevant to behavior. For decades, concepts and functions of attention have been studied in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and computing. For the last six years, this property has been widely explored in deep neural networks. Currently, the state-of-the-art in Deep Learning is represented by neural attention models in several application domains. This survey provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of developments in neural attention models. We systematically reviewed hundreds of architectures in the area, identifying and discussing those in which attention has shown a significant impact. We also developed and made public an automated methodology to facilitate the development of reviews in the area. By critically analyzing 650 works, we describe the primary uses of attention in convolutional, recurrent networks and generative models, identifying common subgroups of uses and applications. Furthermore, we describe the impact of attention in different application domains and their impact on neural networks' interpretability. Finally, we list possible trends and opportunities for further research, hoping that this review will provide a succinct overview of the main attentional models in the area and guide researchers in developing future approaches that will drive further improvements.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have dramatically advanced in recent years, resulting in revolutionary changes in people's lives. Empowered by edge computing, AI workloads are migrating from centralized cloud architectures to distributed edge systems, introducing a new paradigm called edge AI. While edge AI has the promise of bringing significant increases in autonomy and intelligence into everyday lives through common edge devices, it also raises new challenges, especially for the development of its algorithms and the deployment of its services, which call for novel design methodologies catered to these unique challenges. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the latest enabling design methodologies that span the entire edge AI development stack. We suggest that the key methodologies for effective edge AI development are single-layer specialization and cross-layer co-design. We discuss representative methodologies in each category in detail, including on-device training methods, specialized software design, dedicated hardware design, benchmarking and design automation, software/hardware co-design, software/compiler co-design, and compiler/hardware co-design. Moreover, we attempt to reveal hidden cross-layer design opportunities that can further boost the solution quality of future edge AI and provide insights into future directions and emerging areas that require increased research focus.

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) has made various industries eager to explore the benefits of AI. There is an increasing amount of research surrounding AI, most of which is centred on the development of new AI algorithms and techniques. However, the advent of AI is bringing an increasing set of practical problems related to AI model lifecycle management that need to be ... [Show full abstract] investigated. We address this gap by conducting a systematic mapping study on the lifecycle of AI model. Through quantitative research, we provide an overview of the field, identify research opportunities, and provide suggestions for future research. Our study yields 405 publications published from 2005 to 2020, mapped in 5 different main research topics, and 31 sub-topics.

We introduce Platform for Situated Intelligence, an open-source framework created to support the rapid development and study of multimodal, integrative-AI systems. The framework provides infrastructure for sensing, fusing, and making inferences from temporal streams of data across different modalities, a set of tools that enable visualization and debugging, and an ecosystem of components that encapsulate a variety of perception and processing technologies. These assets jointly provide the means for rapidly constructing and refining multimodal, integrative-AI systems, while retaining the efficiency and performance characteristics required for deployment in open-world settings.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning involves multiple agents interacting with each other and a shared environment to complete tasks. When rewards provided by the environment are sparse, agents may not receive immediate feedback on the quality of actions that they take, thereby affecting learning of policies. In this paper, we propose a method called Shaping Advice in deep Multi-agent reinforcement learning (SAM) to augment the reward signal from the environment with an additional reward termed shaping advice. The shaping advice is given by a difference of potential functions at consecutive time-steps. Each potential function is a function of observations and actions of the agents. The shaping advice needs to be specified only once at the start of training, and can be easily provided by non-experts. We show through theoretical analyses and experimental validation that shaping advice provided by SAM does not distract agents from completing tasks specified by the environment reward. Theoretically, we prove that convergence of policy gradients and value functions when using SAM implies convergence of these quantities in the absence of SAM. Experimentally, we evaluate SAM on three tasks in the multi-agent Particle World environment that have sparse rewards. We observe that using SAM results in agents learning policies to complete tasks faster, and obtain higher rewards than: i) using sparse rewards alone; ii) a state-of-the-art reward redistribution method.

Since many real world networks are evolving over time, such as social networks and user-item networks, there are increasing research efforts on dynamic network embedding in recent years. They learn node representations from a sequence of evolving graphs but not only the latest network, for preserving both structural and temporal information from the dynamic networks. Due to the lack of comprehensive investigation of them, we give a survey of dynamic network embedding in this paper. Our survey inspects the data model, representation learning technique, evaluation and application of current related works and derives common patterns from them. Specifically, we present two basic data models, namely, discrete model and continuous model for dynamic networks. Correspondingly, we summarize two major categories of dynamic network embedding techniques, namely, structural-first and temporal-first that are adopted by most related works. Then we build a taxonomy that refines the category hierarchy by typical learning models. The popular experimental data sets and applications are also summarized. Lastly, we have a discussion of several distinct research topics in dynamic network embedding.

Markov Chain Monte Carlo based Bayesian data analysis has now become the method of choice for analyzing and interpreting data in almost all disciplines of science. In astronomy, over the last decade, we have also seen a steady increase in the number of papers that employ Monte Carlo based Bayesian analysis. New, efficient Monte Carlo based methods are continuously being developed and explored. In this review, we first explain the basics of Bayesian theory and discuss how to set up data analysis problems within this framework. Next, we provide an overview of various Monte Carlo based methods for performing Bayesian data analysis.