Overview
Opinion Artificial Intelligence's 'Black Box' Is Nothing to Fear
A recent MIT Technology Review article titled "The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI" warned: "No one really knows how the most advanced algorithms do what they do. That could be a problem." Thanks to this uncertainty and lack of accountability, a report by the AI Now Institute recommended that public agencies responsible for criminal justice, health care, welfare and education shouldn't use such technology. Given these types of concerns, the unseeable space between where data goes in and answers come out is often referred to as a "black box" -- seemingly a reference to the hardy (and in fact orange, not black) data recorders mandated on aircraft and often examined after accidents. In the context of A.I., the term more broadly suggests an image of being in the "dark" about how the technology works: We put in and provide the data and models and architectures, and then computers provide us answers while continuing to learn on their own, in a way that's seemingly impossible -- and certainly too complicated -- for us to understand.
Wayfair's chief architect talks AI-driven innovation, impactful IT
To compete in today's fierce retail environment, Wayfair Inc. has to think and act like a tech company, investing deeply in artificial intelligence technologies and other emerging tech to power its business. This complimentary document comprehensively details the elements of a strategic IT plan that are common across the board โ from identifying technology gaps and risks to allocating IT resources and capabilities. You forgot to provide an Email Address. This email address doesn't appear to be valid. This email address is already registered.
Data-Driven Impulse Response Regularization via Deep Learning
Andersson, Carl, Wahlstrรถm, Niklas, Schรถn, Thomas B.
Impulse response estimation has for a long time been at the core of system identification. Up until some five to seven years ago, the generally held belief in the field was indeed that we knew all there was to know about this topic. However, the enlightening work by Pillonetto and De Nicolao [2010] changed this by showing that the estimate can in fact be improved significantly by assuming a Gaussian Process (GP) prior over the impulse response, which acts as a regularizer. This model-driven approach has since then been further refined [Pillonetto et al., 2011, Chen et al., 2012, Pillonetto et al., 2014], where the prior in this case could be interpreted to encode not only smoothness information, but also information about the exponential decay of the impulse response. In this paper we employ deep leaning (DL) to find a suitable regularizer via a method that is driven by data. Deep learning is a fairly new area of research that continues the work on neural networks from the 1990's. To get a brief, but informative, overview of the field of deep learning we recommend the paper by LeCun et al. [2015] and for a more complete snapshot of the field we refer to the monograph by Goodfel-low et al. [2016]. Deep learning has recently revolutionized several fields, including image recognition (e.g.
Sewing a mechanical future
The Financial Times reported earlier this year that one of the largest clothing manufacturers, Hong Kong-based Crystal Group, proclaimed robotics could not compete with the cost and quality of manual labor. Crystal's Chief Executive, Andrew Lo, emphatically declared, "The handling of soft materials is really hard for robots." Lo did leave the door open for future consideration by acknowledging such budding technologies as "interesting." One company mentioned by Lo was Georgia Tech spinout, Softwear Automation. Softwear made news last summer by announcing its contract with an Arkansas apparel factory to update 21 production lines with its Sewbot automated sewing machines. The factory is owned by Chinese manufacturer Tianyuan Garments, which produces over 20 million T-shirts a year for Adidas.
Google's Vision for Mainstreaming Machine Learning
Here at The Next Platform, we've touched on the convergence of machine learning, HPC, and enterprise requirements looking at ways that vendors are trying to reduce the barriers to enable enterprises to leverage AI and machine learning to better address the rapid changes brought about by such emerging trends as the cloud, edge computing and mobility. At the SC17 show in November 2017, Dell EMC unveiled efforts underway to bring AI, machine learning and deep learning into the mainstream, similar to how the company and other vendors in recent years have been working to make it easier for enterprises to adopt HPC techniques for their environments. For Dell EMC, that means in part doing so through bundled, engineered systems. IBM has strategies underway, including through the integration of its PowerAI deep learning enterprise software with its Data Science Experience. Both offerings are aimed at making it easier for enterprises to embrace advance AI technologies and for developers and data scientists to develop and train machine learning models.
Clustering with Deep Learning: Taxonomy and New Methods
Aljalbout, Elie, Golkov, Vladimir, Siddiqui, Yawar, Cremers, Daniel
Clustering is a fundamental machine learning method. The quality of its results is dependent on the data distribution. For this reason, deep neural networks can be used for learning better representations of the data. In this paper, we propose a systematic taxonomy for clustering with deep learning, in addition to a review of methods from the field. Based on our taxonomy, creating new methods is more straightforward. We also propose a new approach which is built on the taxonomy and surpasses some of the limitations of some previous work. Our experimental evaluation on image datasets shows that the method approaches state-of-the-art clustering quality, and performs better in some cases.
Estimating Heterogeneous Consumer Preferences for Restaurants and Travel Time Using Mobile Location Data
Athey, Susan, Blei, David, Donnelly, Robert, Ruiz, Francisco, Schmidt, Tobias
This paper analyzes consumer choices over lunchtime restaurants using data from a sample of several thousand anonymous mobile phone users in the San Francisco Bay Area. The data is used to identify users' approximate typical morning location, as well as their choices of lunchtime restaurants. We build a model where restaurants have latent characteristics (whose distribution may depend on restaurant observables, such as star ratings, food category, and price range), each user has preferences for these latent characteristics, and these preferences are heterogeneous across users. Similarly, each item has latent characteristics that describe users' willingness to travel to the restaurant, and each user has individual-specific preferences for those latent characteristics. Thus, both users' willingness to travel and their base utility for each restaurant vary across user-restaurant pairs. We use a Bayesian approach to estimation. To make the estimation computationally feasible, we rely on variational inference to approximate the posterior distribution, as well as stochastic gradient descent as a computational approach. Our model performs better than more standard competing models such as multinomial logit and nested logit models, in part due to the personalization of the estimates. We analyze how consumers re-allocate their demand after a restaurant closes to nearby restaurants versus more distant restaurants with similar characteristics, and we compare our predictions to actual outcomes. Finally, we show how the model can be used to analyze counterfactual questions such as what type of restaurant would attract the most consumers in a given location.
Innovative Report on Artificial Intelligence in Fintech Market CAGR of 40% by 2022- Emerging Trends, Growth Factors, Newly Invented Strategies, Investigation and Key Players like Microsoft, Google, Salesforce.com, IBM, Intel, Amazon Web Services, Inbenta Technologies, IPsoft, Nuance Communications โ satPRnews
The Global Artificial Intelligence in Fintech Market is anticipated to grow rapidly and will post a CAGR of 40% during the forecast period. The availability of spatial data is a major factor driving the growth of the Artificial Intelligence in Fintech market. Sustaining in a competitive market has become crucial for the financial sector due to technological advancements. In order to achieve efficiency across business processes, enterprises need to design and layout a plan of action. This can be done by properly implementing AI practices into its operations.
Visual Analytics in Deep Learning: An Interrogative Survey for the Next Frontiers
Hohman, Fred, Kahng, Minsuk, Pienta, Robert, Chau, Duen Horng
Deep learning has recently seen rapid development and significant attention due to its state-of-the-art performance on previously-thought hard problems. However, because of the innate complexity and nonlinear structure of deep neural networks, the underlying decision making processes for why these models are achieving such high performance are challenging and sometimes mystifying to interpret. As deep learning spreads across domains, it is of paramount importance that we equip users of deep learning with tools for understanding when a model works correctly, when it fails, and ultimately how to improve its performance. Standardized toolkits for building neural networks have helped democratize deep learning; visual analytics systems have now been developed to support model explanation, interpretation, debugging, and improvement. We present a survey of the role of visual analytics in deep learning research, noting its short yet impactful history and summarize the state-of-the-art using a human-centered interrogative framework, focusing on the Five W's and How (Why, Who, What, How, When, and Where), to thoroughly summarize deep learning visual analytics research. We conclude by highlighting research directions and open research problems. This survey helps new researchers and practitioners in both visual analytics and deep learning to quickly learn key aspects of this young and rapidly growing body of research, whose impact spans a diverse range of domains.