With the increase in population densities and environmental awareness, public transport has become an important aspect of urban life. Consequently, large quantities of transportation data are generated, and mining data from smart card use has become a standardized method to understand the travel habits of passengers. Public transport datasets, however, often may lack data integrity; boarding stop information may be missing due to either imperfect acquirement processes or inadequate reporting. As a result, large quantities of observations and even complete sections of cities might be absent from the smart card database. We have developed a machine (supervised) learning method to impute missing boarding stops based on ordinal classification. In addition, we present a new metric, Pareto Accuracy, to evaluate algorithms where classes have an ordinal nature. Results are based on a case study in the Israeli city of Beer Sheva for one month of data. We show that our proposed method significantly notably outperforms current imputation methods and can improve the accuracy and usefulness of large-scale transportation data.

Automatic Curriculum Learning (ACL) has become a cornerstone of recent successes in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL).These methods shape the learning trajectories of agents by challenging them with tasks adapted to their capacities. In recent years, they have been used to improve sample efficiency and asymptotic performance, to organize exploration, to encourage generalization or to solve sparse reward problems, among others. The ambition of this work is dual: 1) to present a compact and accessible introduction to the Automatic Curriculum Learning literature and 2) to draw a bigger picture of the current state of the art in ACL to encourage the cross-breeding of existing concepts and the emergence of new ideas.

Deep learning models on graphs have achieved remarkable performance in various graph analysis tasks, e.g., node classification, link prediction and graph clustering. However, they expose uncertainty and unreliability against the well-designed inputs, i.e., adversarial examples. Accordingly, various studies have emerged for both attack and defense addressed in different graph analysis tasks, leading to the arms race in graph adversarial learning. For instance, the attacker has poisoning and evasion attack, and the defense group correspondingly has preprocessing- and adversarial- based methods. Despite the booming works, there still lacks a unified problem definition and a comprehensive review. To bridge this gap, we investigate and summarize the existing works on graph adversarial learning tasks systemically. Specifically, we survey and unify the existing works w.r.t. attack and defense in graph analysis tasks, and give proper definitions and taxonomies at the same time. Besides, we emphasize the importance of related evaluation metrics, and investigate and summarize them comprehensively. Hopefully, our works can serve as a reference for the relevant researchers, thus providing assistance for their studies. More details of our works are available at https://github.com/gitgiter/Graph-Adversarial-Learning.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular paradigm for addressing sequential decision tasks in which the agent has only limited environmental feedback. Despite many advances over the past three decades, learning in many domains still requires a large amount of interaction with the environment, which can be prohibitively expensive in realistic scenarios. To address this problem, transfer learning has been applied to reinforcement learning such that experience gained in one task can be leveraged when starting to learn the next, harder task. More recently, several lines of research have explored how tasks, or data samples themselves, can be sequenced into a curriculum for the purpose of learning a problem that may otherwise be too difficult to learn from scratch. In this article, we present a framework for curriculum learning (CL) in reinforcement learning, and use it to survey and classify existing CL methods in terms of their assumptions, capabilities, and goals. Finally, we use our framework to find open problems and suggest directions for future RL curriculum learning research.

A multitude of agent-oriented software engineering frameworks exist, most of which are developed by the academic multi-agent systems community. However, these frameworks often impose programming paradigms on their users that are challenging to learn for engineers who are used to modern high-level programming languages such as JavaScript and Python. To show how the adoption of agent-oriented programming by the software engineering mainstream can be facilitated, we provide a lean JavaScript library prototype for implementing reasoning-loop agents. The library focuses on core agent programming concepts and refrains from imposing further restrictions on the programming approach. To illustrate its usefulness, we show how the library can be applied to multi-agent systems simulations on the web, deployed to cloud-hosted function-as-a-service environments, and embedded in Python-based data science tools.

Earlier this month, TechCrunch held its annual Mobility Sessions event down in San Jose, where leading mobility-focused auto companies, startups, executives and thought leaders joined us to discuss all things autonomous vehicle technology, micromobility and electric vehicles. Extra Crunch is offering members access to full transcripts key panels and conversations from the event, including a mainstage conversation between Waymo CTO Dmitri Dolgov and TechCrunch mobility axe Kirsten Korosec. Dmitri and Kirsten dove into Waymo's full product evolution, and dissect the path ahead for the company and the AV industry as a whole. Dmitri Dolgov: So essentially, what makes this problem interesting in my mind is that it's not one or two things where you say "there's only this one challenge that remains and then you solve everything." It's really across a whole number of different areas -- a whole number of different disciplines from hardware, to more advanced sensors, more powerful sensors, sensors you can manufacture at scale, cheaper sensors, more powerful compute, cheaper compute software.

WBCSD's Future of Work project brings together the insights, innovation and influence of leading companies to develop solutions for better work – today and in the future. Our vision, in which people work to thrive, personally, professionally and as active members of society, applies to all current and potential workers. Mainstreaming inclusion and valuing diversity are therefore an essential requirement when developing business solutions that will shape the future of work. Microsoft's AI for Accessibility initiative is an example of how business can support innovations that help people with disabilities overcome barriers to equal opportunities in employment, communication and daily life. Announced in 2018, this USD $25 million grant program rewards passionate developers, startups, universities and non-profits who are building and sharing game-changing AI solutions that enable increased independence and productivity of people with disabilities.

Most state-of-the-art speech systems are using Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Those systems require a large amount of data to be learned. Hence, learning state-of-the-art frameworks on under-resourced speech languages/problems is a difficult task. Problems could be the limited amount of data for impaired speech. Furthermore, acquiring more data and/or expertise is time-consuming and expensive. In this paper we position ourselves for the following speech processing tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, speaker identification and emotion recognition. To assess the problem of limited data, we firstly investigate state-of-the-art Automatic Speech Recognition systems as it represents the hardest tasks (due to the large variability in each language). Next, we provide an overview of techniques and tasks requiring fewer data. In the last section we investigate few-shot techniques as we interpret under-resourced speech as a few-shot problem. In that sense we propose an overview of few-shot techniques and perspectives of using such techniques for the focused speech problems in this survey. It occurs that the reviewed techniques are not well adapted for large datasets. Nevertheless, some promising results from the literature encourage the usage of such techniques for speech processing.

We introduce a novel formulation for incorporating visual feedback in controlling robots. We define a generative model from actions to image observations of features on the end-effector. Inference in the model allows us to infer the robot state corresponding to target locations of the features. This, in turn, guides motion of the robot and allows for matching the target locations of the features in significantly fewer steps than state-of-the-art visual servoing methods. The training procedure for our model enables effective learning of the kinematics, feature structure, and camera parameters, simultaneously. This can be done with no prior information about the robot, structure, and cameras that observe it. Learning is done sample-efficiently and shows strong generalization to test data. Since our formulation is modular, we can modify components of our setup, like cameras and objects, and relearn them quickly online. Our method can handle noise in the observed state and noise in the controllers that we interact with. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by executing grasping and tight-fit insertions on robots with inaccurate controllers.

Planning is an essential topic in the realm of automated driving. Besides planning algorithms that are widely covered in the literature, planning requires different software tools for its development, validation, and execution. This paper presents a survey of such tools including map representations, communication, traffic rules, open-source planning stacks and middleware, simulation, and visualization tools as well as benchmarks. We start by defining the planning task and different supporting tools. Next, we provide a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art developments and analysis of relations among them. Finally, we discuss the current gaps and suggest future research directions.