One of the reasons for the success of convolutional networks is their equivariance/invariance under translations. However, rotatable data such as molecules, living cells, everyday objects, or galaxies require processing with equivariance/invariance under rotations in cases where the rotation of the coordinate system does not affect the meaning of the data (e.g. object classification). On the other hand, estimation/processing of rotations is necessary in cases where rotations are important (e.g. motion estimation). There has been recent progress in methods and theory in all these regards. Here we provide an overview of existing methods, both for 2D and 3D rotations (and translations), and identify commonalities and links between them, in the hope that our insights will be useful for choosing and perfecting the methods.

Automatic machine learning (AutoML) is an area of research aimed at automating machine learning (ML) activities that currently require human experts. One of the most challenging tasks in this field is the automatic generation of end-to- end ML pipelines: combining multiple types of ML algorithms into a single architecture used for end-to-end analysis of previously-unseen data. This task has two challenging aspects: the first is the need to explore a large search space of algorithms and pipeline architectures. The second challenge is the computational cost of training and evaluating multiple pipelines. In this study we present DeepLine, a reinforcement learning based approach for automatic pipeline generation. Our proposed approach utilizes an efficient representation of the search space and leverages past knowledge gained from previously-analyzed datasets to make the problem more tractable. Additionally, we propose a novel hierarchical-actions algorithm that serves as a plugin, mediating the environment-agent interaction in deep reinforcement learning problems. The plugin significantly speeds up the training process of our model. Evaluation on 56 datasets shows that DeepLine outperforms state-of-the-art approaches both in accuracy and in computational cost.

Debra Fahey will be joining the company as Senior Vice President, Global Head of Delivery & Operations, and Michael Fox will be joining as Senior Vice President of Product Management. Together, these leaders bring over 40 years of experience in the fields of technology, business analytics, innovation strategy, and software development to ElectrifAi's growing team of skilled professionals. "I am proud to welcome Debra and Michael as the newest additions to ElectrifAi's deep executive leadership team," said CEO, Edward Scott. "Their wealth of knowledge and invaluable experience in the fields of delivery, operations, and product management will be vital in their new roles advancing ElectrifAi's industry-leading Ai and ML products. I am confident Ms. Fahey and Mr. Fox will add value to our expanding global leadership team and continue to strengthen our expertise within the Ai and ML technology, innovation, and delivery of solutions."

We propose a contrastive attention mechanism to extend the sequence-to-sequence framework for abstractive sentence summarization task, which aims to generate a brief summary of a given source sentence. The proposed contrastive attention mechanism accommodates two categories of attention: one is the conventional attention that attends to relevant parts of the source sentence, the other is the opponent attention that attends to irrelevant or less relevant parts of the source sentence. Both attentions are trained in an opposite way so that the contribution from the conventional attention is encouraged and the contribution from the opponent attention is discouraged through a novel softmax and softmin functionality. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that, the proposed contrastive attention mechanism is more focused on the relevant parts for the summary than the conventional attention mechanism, and greatly advances the state-of-the-art performance on the abstractive sentence summarization task. We release the code at https://github.com/travel-go/

The SaaS company will explore how it can leverage AI to improve its software's lead conversion capabilities Is IIT-M becoming India's new-age technology hub? New-age technology like artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way in bringing unique solutions for companies working across multiple sectors. The revolutionary technology has also become a go-to innovation tool for software-as-a-service (SAAS) companies as well. This time SaaS unicorn Freshworks has partnered with Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence in Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT Madras) to improve the predictive capability of its customer relationship management (CRM) software. Freshworks will initially work with the centre exploring how it can leverage AI to improve its software's lead-conversion capabilities, helping its clients to increase their business.

Science fiction is quickly becoming everyday reality. Chatbots, robots, digital assistants, automated vehicles, virtual assistants, and much more... are the products of artificial intelligence (AI), which is already transforming entire industries. An infographic by TechJury, provider of one-step tech guides and product reviews, provides a detailed overview of AI. The infographic begins with a timeline of AI, starting in the mid-20th century with the "father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence," Alan Turing, who developed the "Turing test" for determining what qualifies as artificial intelligence. The infographic goes on to outline various classifications of AI, provides examples of AI technology, highlights statistics about the AI market, and lists the companies and countries at the forefront of the AI race.

Our research aims at developing intelligent systems to reduce the transportation-related energy expenditure of a large city by influencing individual behavior. We introduce Copter - an intelligent travel assistant that evaluates multi-modal travel alternatives to find a plan that is acceptable to a person given their context and preferences. We propose a formulation for acceptable planning that brings together ideas from AI, machine learning, and economics. This formulation has been incorporated in Copter that produces acceptable plans in real-time. We adopt a novel empirical evaluation framework that combines human decision data with a high fidelity multi-modal transportation simulation to demonstrate a 4% energy reduction and 20% delay reduction in a realistic deployment scenario in Los Angeles, California, USA. This article is part of the special track on AI and Society.

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are increasingly embraced around the world to advance smart mobility and more broadly, smart, and sustainable cities. Algorithms form the basis of decision-making in AVs, allowing them to perform driving tasks autonomously, efficiently, and more safely than human drivers and offering various economic, social, and environmental benefits. However, algorithmic decision-making in AVs can also introduce new issues that create new safety risks and perpetuate discrimination. We identify bias, ethics, and perverse incentives as key ethical issues in the AV algorithms' decision-making that can create new safety risks and discriminatory outcomes. Technical issues in the AVs' perception, decision-making and control algorithms, limitations of existing AV testing and verification methods, and cybersecurity vulnerabilities can also undermine the performance of the AV system. This article investigates the ethical and technical concerns surrounding algorithmic decision-making in AVs by exploring how driving decisions can perpetuate discrimination and create new safety risks for the public. We discuss steps taken to address these issues, highlight the existing research gaps and the need to mitigate these issues through the design of AV's algorithms and of policies and regulations to fully realise AVs' benefits for smart and sustainable cities.

We propose a heuristically modified FP-Tree for ontology learning from text. Unlike previous research, for concept extraction, we use a regular expression parser approach widely adopted in compiler construction, i.e., deterministic finite automata (DFA). Thus, the concepts are extracted from unstructured documents. For ontology learning, we use a frequent pattern mining approach and employ a rule mining heuristic function to enhance its quality. This process does not rely on predefined lexico-syntactic patterns, thus, it is applicable for different subjects. We employ the ontology in a question-answering system for students' content-related questions. For validation, we used textbook questions/answers and questions from online course forums. Subject experts rated the quality of the system's answers on a subset of questions and their ratings were used to identify the most appropriate automatic semantic text similarity metric to use as a validation metric for all answers. The Latent Semantic Analysis was identified as the closest to the experts' ratings. We compared the use of our ontology with the use of Text2Onto for the question-answering system and found that with our ontology 80% of the questions were answered, while with Text2Onto only 28.4% were answered, thanks to the finer grained hierarchy our approach is able to produce.

We propose a general framework for the estimation of observables with generative neural samplers focusing on modern deep generative neural networks that provide an exact sampling probability. In this framework, we present asymptotically unbiased estimators for generic observables, including those that explicitly depend on the partition function such as free energy or entropy, and derive corresponding variance estimators. We demonstrate their practical applicability by numerical experiments for the 2d Ising model which highlight the superiority over existing methods. Our approach greatly enhances the applicability of generative neural samplers to real-world physical systems.