Abstract--The novel research area of computational empathy is in its infancy and moving towards developing methods and standards. One major problem is the lack of agreement on the evaluation of empathy in artificial interactive systems . Even though the existence of well-established methods from psyc hol-ogy, psychiatry and neuroscience, the translation between these methods and computational empathy is not straightforward. It requires a collective effort to develop metrics that are mor e suitable for interactive artificial agents. This paper is ai med as an attempt to initiate the dialogue on this important proble m. We examine the evaluation methods for empathy in humans and provide suggestions for the development of better metri cs to evaluate empathy in artificial agents. We acknowledge the difficulty of arriving at a single solution in a vast variety o f interactive systems and propose a set of systematic approac hes that can be used with a variety of applications and systems. Emerging technologies continue to change the ways in which we interact with computers. Computational systems are evolving from being mere tools to assistants, trainers and companion agents. All of these new roles assigned to these systems highlight the importance of embodying these agents with social and emotional capabilities.

For over 50 years, researchers have been trying to teach computers to read music notation, referred to as Optical Music Recognition (OMR). However, this field is still difficult to access for new researchers, especially those without a significant musical background: few introductory materials are available, and furthermore the field has struggled with defining itself and building a shared terminology. In this tutorial, we address these shortcomings by (1) providing a robust definition of OMR and its relationship to related fields, (2) analyzing how OMR inverts the music encoding process to recover the musical notation and the musical semantics from documents, (3) proposing a taxonomy of OMR, with most notably a novel taxonomy of applications. Additionally, we discuss how deep learning affects modern OMR research, as opposed to the traditional pipeline. Based on this work, the reader should be able to attain a basic understanding of OMR: its objectives, its inherent structure, its relationship to other fields, the state of the art, and the research opportunities it affords.

German based Siemens Healthineers purpose is to enable healthcare providers to increase value by empowering them on their journey towards expanding precision medicine, transforming care delivery, and improving patient experience, all enabled by digitalising healthcare. An estimated five million patients globally everyday benefit from their innovative technologies and services in the areas of diagnostic and therapeutic imaging, laboratory diagnostics and molecular medicine, as well as digital health and enterprise services. They are a leading medical technology company with over 170 years of experience and 18,000 patents globally. With about 50,000 dedicated colleagues in over 70 countries, they will continue to innovate and shape the future of healthcare. Speaking to HEQ, Global Head of Digitalizing Healthcare Joerg Aumueller explains the integration of AI into healthcare and how Siemens Healthineers are leading the change.

Natural language understanding (NLU) of text is a fundamental challenge in AI, and it has received significant attention throughout the history of NLP research. This primary goal has been studied under different tasks, such as Question Answering (QA) and Textual Entailment (TE). In this thesis, we investigate the NLU problem through the QA task and focus on the aspects that make it a challenge for the current state-of-the-art technology. This thesis is organized into three main parts: In the first part, we explore multiple formalisms to improve existing machine comprehension systems. We propose a formulation for abductive reasoning in natural language and show its effectiveness, especially in domains with limited training data. Additionally, to help reasoning systems cope with irrelevant or redundant information, we create a supervised approach to learn and detect the essential terms in questions. In the second part, we propose two new challenge datasets. In particular, we create two datasets of natural language questions where (i) the first one requires reasoning over multiple sentences; (ii) the second one requires temporal common sense reasoning. We hope that the two proposed datasets will motivate the field to address more complex problems. In the final part, we present the first formal framework for multi-step reasoning algorithms, in the presence of a few important properties of language use, such as incompleteness, ambiguity, etc. We apply this framework to prove fundamental limitations for reasoning algorithms. These theoretical results provide extra intuition into the existing empirical evidence in the field.

The concepts of risk-aversion, chance-constrained optimization, and robust optimization have developed significantly over the last decade. Statistical learning community has also witnessed a rapid theoretical and applied growth by relying on these concepts. A modeling framework, called distributionally robust optimization (DRO), has recently received significant attention in both the operations research and statistical learning communities. This paper surveys main concepts and contributions to DRO, and its relationships with robust optimization, risk-aversion, chance-constrained optimization, and function regularization.

Cross-lingual representations of words enable us to reason about word meaning in multilingual contexts and are a key facilitator of cross-lingual transfer when developing natural language processing models for low-resource languages. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive typology of cross-lingual word embedding models. We compare their data requirements and objective functions. The recurring theme of the survey is that many of the models presented in the literature optimize for the same objectives, and that seemingly different models are often equivalent, modulo optimization strategies, hyper-parameters, and such. We also discuss the different ways cross-lingual word embeddings are evaluated, as well as future challenges and research horizons.

We study the algorithmic problem of estimating the mean of heavy-tailed random vector in $\mathbb{R}^d$, given $n$ i.i.d. samples. The goal is to design an efficient estimator that attains the optimal sub-gaussian error bound, only assuming that the random vector has bounded mean and covariance. Polynomial-time solutions to this problem are known but have high runtime due to their use of semi-definite programming (SDP). Conceptually, it remains open whether convex relaxation is truly necessary for this problem. In this work, we show that it is possible to go beyond SDP and achieve better computational efficiency. In particular, we provide a spectral algorithm that achieves the optimal statistical performance and runs in time $\widetilde O\left(n^2 d \right)$, improving upon the previous fastest runtime $\widetilde O\left(n^{3.5}+ n^2d\right)$ by Cherapanamjeri el al. (COLT '19) and matching the concurrent work by Depersin and Lecu\'e. Our algorithm is spectral in that it only requires (approximate) eigenvector computations, which can be implemented very efficiently by, for example, power iteration or the Lanczos method. At the core of our algorithm is a novel connection between the furthest hyperplane problem introduced by Karnin et al. (COLT '12) and a structural lemma on heavy-tailed distributions by Lugosi and Mendelson (Ann. Stat. '19). This allows us to iteratively reduce the estimation error at a geometric rate using only the information derived from the top singular vector of the data matrix, leading to a significantly faster running time.

Deep learning has penetrated all aspects of our lives and brought us great convenience. However, the process of building a high-quality deep learning system for a specific task is not only time-consuming but also requires lots of resources and relies on human expertise, which hinders the development of deep learning in both industry and academia. To alleviate this problem, a growing number of research projects focus on automated machine learning (AutoML). In this paper, we provide a comprehensive and up-to-date study on the state-of-the-art AutoML. First, we introduce the AutoML techniques in details according to the machine learning pipeline.

Deep Reinforcement Learning has made significant progress in multi-agent systems in recent years. In this review article, we have mostly focused on recent papers on Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) than the older papers, unless it was necessary. Several ideas and papers are proposed with different notations, and we tried our best to unify them with a single notation and categorize them by their relevance. In particular, we have focused on five common approaches on modeling and solving multi-agent reinforcement learning problems: (I) independent-learners, (II) fully observable critic, (III) value function decomposition, (IV) consensus, (IV) learn to communicate. Moreover, we discuss some new emerging research areas in MARL along with the relevant recent papers. In addition, some of the recent applications of MARL in real world are discussed. Finally, a list of available environments for MARL research are provided and the paper is concluded with proposals on the possible research directions.

Abstract--Over the past decade, many research articles have been published in the area of autonomous driving. However, most of them focus only on a specific technological area, such as visual environment perception, vehicle control, etc. Furthermore, due to fast advances in the self-driving car technology, such articles become obsolete very fast. Junior [7] software architecture has Over the past decade, with a number of autonomous system five parts: sensor interface, perception, navigation (planning technology breakthroughs being witnessed in the world, the and control), drive-by-wire interface (user interface and vehicle race to commercialize Autonomous Cars (ACs) has become interface) and global services. Boss [8] uses a threelayer fiercer than ever [1].