Problems affecting the transport of people or goods are plentiful in industry and commerce and they also appear to be at the origin of much more complex problems. In recent years, the logistics and transport sector keeps growing supported by technological progress, i.e. companies to be competitive are resorting to innovative technologies aimed at efficiency and effectiveness. This is why companies are increasingly using technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT). Artificial intelligence, in particular, is often used to solve optimization problems in order to provide users with the most efficient ways to exploit available resources. In this work we present an overview of our current research activities concerning the development of new algorithms, based on CLP techniques, for route planning problems exploiting the geometric information intrinsically present in many of them or in some of their variants. The research so far has focused in particular on the Euclidean Traveling Salesperson Problem (Euclidean TSP) with the aim to exploit the results obtained also to other problems of the same category, such as the Euclidean Vehicle Routing Problem (Euclidean VRP), in the future.

The recent decade has witnessed a blossom of developments on statistical learning theories and practice, embraced with the exciting progresses on large-scale optimizations and dimension reduction techniques. Factor models, as one of the central machinery on summarizing and extracting information from large scale datasets, have received much attention in this revolutionary era of data science, and many breakthrough methodologies and applications have been developed in this exciting area. This paper makes a selective overview on the recent developments of the factor model and its applications on econometric learning. Our review focuses on the perspective of the low-rank structure of factor models, and draws particular attentions to estimating the model from the low-rank recovery point of view. A central focus in the progress of this literature is the understanding and recovering low-rank structures of high-dimensional models. Many new learning theories and methods have been developed, which have revolutionized the modern understanding of econometric modeling. Meanwhile, the low-rank structure is one of the key properties of factor models. While this structure has long been aware of by researchers, studying the factor model from the perspective of low-rank matrix recovery is relatively new, and has led to many exciting new discoveries and understanding. The survey mainly consists of three parts: the first part is a review on new factor estimation based on modern techniques on recovering low-rank structures of high-dimensional models.

Artificial Intelligence is one of the most innovative technologies in recent times and is taking mobile technology to the next level. AI technology enhances user experience with various features like face recognition, voice commands, image labeling. Alan Turing, an American Computer Scientist has sowed the seeds of the concept of artificial intelligence in 1956. He also developed a'Turing test' to determine whether a computer (machine) can intelligently think like a human. Today, every industry has realized the fact that AI is the next big technology that will transform human machine interactions. AI automates specific tasks and helps in problem solving.

The paper focuses on some versions of connected dominating set problems: basic problems and multicriteria problems. A literature survey on basic problem formulations and solving approaches is presented. The basic connected dominating set problems are illustrated by simplifyed numerical examples. New integer programming formulations of dominating set problems (with multiset estimates) are suggested.

As part of its Hype Cycle for emerging technologies in 2020, Gartner has identified social distancing technologies, composable enterprise, AI-assisted design, differential privacy and biodegradable sensors as the five key emerging trends that will drive technology innovation over the next decade. "Emerging technologies are disruptive by nature, but the competitive advantage they provide is not yet well known or proven in the market. Most will take more than five years, and some more than 10 years, to reach the Plateau of Productivity. But some technologies on the Hype Cycle will mature in the near term and technology innovation leaders must understand the opportunities for these technologies, particularly those with transformational or high impact," said Brian Burke, research vice president at Gartner. For example, Gartner points to health passports and social distancing technologies, both related to the COVID-19 pandemic, that are taking the fast track through the Hype Cycle and having a high impact.

Recent progress in Game AI has demonstrated that given enough data from human gameplay, or experience gained via simulations, machines can rival or surpass the most skilled human players in classic games such as Go, or commercial computer games such as Starcraft. We review the current state-of-the-art through the lens of wargaming, and ask firstly what features of wargames distinguish them from the usual AI testbeds, and secondly which recent AI advances are best suited to address these wargame-specific features.

Clustering genotypes based upon their phenotypic characteristics is used to obtain diverse sets of parents that are useful in their breeding programs. The Hierarchical Clustering (HC) algorithm is the current standard in clustering of phenotypic data. This algorithm suffers from low accuracy and high computational complexity issues. To address the accuracy challenge, we propose the use of Spectral Clustering (SC) algorithm. To make the algorithm computationally cheap, we propose using sampling, specifically, Pivotal Sampling that is probability based. Since application of samplings to phenotypic data has not been explored much, for effective comparison, another sampling technique called Vector Quantization (VQ) is adapted for this data as well. VQ has recently given promising results for genome data. The novelty of our SC with Pivotal Sampling algorithm is in constructing the crucial similarity matrix for the clustering algorithm and defining probabilities for the sampling technique. Although our algorithm can be applied to any plant genotypes, we test it on the phenotypic data obtained from about 2400 Soybean genotypes. SC with Pivotal Sampling achieves substantially more accuracy (in terms of Silhouette Values) than all the other proposed competitive clustering with sampling algorithms (i.e. SC with VQ, HC with Pivotal Sampling, and HC with VQ). The complexities of our SC with Pivotal Sampling algorithm and these three variants are almost same because of the involved sampling. In addition to this, SC with Pivotal Sampling outperforms the standard HC algorithm in both accuracy and computational complexity. We experimentally show that we are up to 45% more accurate than HC in terms of clustering accuracy. The computational complexity of our algorithm is more than a magnitude lesser than HC.

This paper reviews the current state of the art in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and applications in the context of the creative industries. A brief background of AI, and specifically Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, is provided including Convolutional Neural Network (CNNs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). We categorise creative applications into five groups related to how AI technologies are used: i) content creation, ii) information analysis, iii) content enhancement and post production workflows, iv) information extraction and enhancement, and v) data compression. We critically examine the successes and limitations of this rapidly advancing technology in each of these areas. We further differentiate between the use of AI as a creative tool and its potential as a creator in its own right. We foresee that, in the near future, machine learning-based AI will be adopted widely as a tool or collaborative assistant for creativity. In contrast, we observe that the successes of machine learning in domains with fewer constraints, where AI is the `creator', remain modest. The potential of AI (or its developers) to win awards for its original creations in competition with human creatives is also limited, based on contemporary technologies. We therefore conclude that, in the context of creative industries, maximum benefit from AI will be derived where its focus is human centric -- where it is designed to augment, rather than replace, human creativity.

Graph-based Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) aims to transfer the labels of a handful of labeled data to the remaining massive unlabeled data via a graph. As one of the most popular graph-based SSL approaches, the recently proposed Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have gained remarkable progress by combining the sound expressiveness of neural networks with graph structure. Nevertheless, the existing graph-based methods do not directly address the core problem of SSL, i.e., the shortage of supervision, and thus their performances are still very limited. To accommodate this issue, a novel GCN-based SSL algorithm is presented in this paper to enrich the supervision signals by utilizing both data similarities and graph structure. Firstly, by designing a semi-supervised contrastive loss, improved node representations can be generated via maximizing the agreement between different views of the same data or the data from the same class. Therefore, the rich unlabeled data and the scarce yet valuable labeled data can jointly provide abundant supervision information for learning discriminative node representations, which helps improve the subsequent classification result. Secondly, the underlying determinative relationship between the data features and input graph topology is extracted as supplementary supervision signals for SSL via using a graph generative loss related to the input features. Intensive experimental results on a variety of real-world datasets firmly verify the effectiveness of our algorithm compared with other state-of-the-art methods.

Artificial intelligence (AI) provides many opportunities to improve private and public life. Discovering patterns and structures in large troves of data in an automated manner is a core component of data science, and currently drives applications in diverse areas such as computational biology, law and finance. However, such a highly positive impact is coupled with significant challenges: how do we understand the decisions suggested by these systems in order that we can trust them? In this report, we focus specifically on data-driven methods -- machine learning (ML) and pattern recognition models in particular -- so as to survey and distill the results and observations from the literature. The purpose of this report can be especially appreciated by noting that ML models are increasingly deployed in a wide range of businesses. However, with the increasing prevalence and complexity of methods, business stakeholders in the very least have a growing number of concerns about the drawbacks of models, data-specific biases, and so on. Analogously, data science practitioners are often not aware about approaches emerging from the academic literature, or may struggle to appreciate the differences between different methods, so end up using industry standards such as SHAP. Here, we have undertaken a survey to help industry practitioners (but also data scientists more broadly) understand the field of explainable machine learning better and apply the right tools. Our latter sections build a narrative around a putative data scientist, and discuss how she might go about explaining her models by asking the right questions.