Data analytics firm Orbital Insight is partnering with the World Bank to test technology that could help measure global poverty using satellite imagery and artificial intelligence. The new partnership will test the use of AI to supplement these surveys and increase the accuracy of poverty data. Orbital said its AI software will analyze satellite images to see if characteristics such as building height and rooftop material can effectively indicate wealth. The pilot study will be conducted in Sri Lanka. If successful, the World Bank hopes to scale it worldwide.

Editor's Note: While Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu was delivering his ISC keynote this morning on how HPC is supercharging AI, his colleague Greg Diamos, research scientist at Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Lab, was preparing to present a paper on GPU-based deep learning at the 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning in New York. Greg Diamos, senior researcher, Silicon Valley AI Lab, Baidu, is on the front lines of the reinvigorated frontier of machine learning. Before joining Baidu, Diamos was in the employ of NVIDIA, first as a research scientist and then an architect (for the GPU streaming multiprocessor and the CUDA software). Given this background, it's natural that Diamos' research is focused on advancing breakthroughs in GPU-based deep learning. Ahead of the paper he is presenting, Diamos answered questions about his research and his vision for the future of machine learning.

We present a framework that couples the syntax and semantics of natural language sentences in a generative model, in order to develop a semantic parser that jointly infers the syntactic, morphological, and semantic representations of a given sentence under the guidance of background knowledge. To generate a sentence in our framework, a semantic statement is first sampled from a prior, such as from a set of beliefs in a knowledge base. Given this semantic statement, a grammar probabilistically generates the output sentence. A joint semantic-syntactic parser is derived that returns the $k$-best semantic and syntactic parses for a given sentence. The semantic prior is flexible, and can be used to incorporate background knowledge during parsing, in ways unlike previous semantic parsing approaches. For example, semantic statements corresponding to beliefs in a knowledge base can be given higher prior probability, type-correct statements can be given somewhat lower probability, and beliefs outside the knowledge base can be given lower probability. The construction of our grammar invokes a novel application of hierarchical Dirichlet processes (HDPs), which in turn, requires a novel and efficient inference approach. We present experimental results showing, for a simple grammar, that our parser outperforms a state-of-the-art CCG semantic parser and scales to knowledge bases with millions of beliefs.

Many real-world relations can be represented by signed networks with positive and negative links, as a result of which signed network analysis has attracted increasing attention from multiple disciplines. With the increasing prevalence of social media networks, signed network analysis has evolved from developing and measuring theories to mining tasks. In this article, we present a review of mining signed networks in the context of social media and discuss some promising research directions and new frontiers. We begin by giving basic concepts and unique properties and principles of signed networks. Then we classify and review tasks of signed network mining with representative algorithms. We also delineate some tasks that have not been extensively studied with formal definitions and also propose research directions to expand the field of signed network mining.

Bottom line: Machine learning is providing the needed algorithms, applications, and frameworks to bring greater predictive accuracy and value to enterprises' data, leading to diverse company-wide strategies succeeding faster and more profitably than before. The good news for businesses is that all the data they have been saving for years can now be turned into a competitive advantage and lead to strategic goals being accomplished. Revenue teams are using machine learning to optimize promotions, compensation and rebates drive the desired behavior across selling channels. Predicting propensity to buy across all channels, making personalized recommendations to customers, forecasting long-term customer loyalty and anticipating potential credit risks of suppliers and buyers are Figure 1 provides an overview of machine learning applications by industry. Unlike advanced analytics techniques that seek out causality first, machine learning techniques are designed to seek out opportunities to optimize decisions based on the predictive value of large-scale data sets.

It seems like almost every day a new headline warns us that artificial intelligence (AI) will soon take over the world, or at the very least steal jobs. Even when AI is not in the news, Hollywood offers up a steady stream of entertainment that depicts a very near future in which life as we know it is threatened by super-intelligent machines. These scenarios have something in common: they oversimplify and misrepresent an important and broader set of transformative technologies that hold great promise for business and society. They indulge in fantasy rather than take into account a rational and better-informed dialogue currently underway in the scientific, policy and business communities about what we consider the third age of computing – the cognitive era. What is Cognitive Computing Cognitive computing -- of which AI is but one part – refers to an entirely new class of technologies whose purpose is to deepen human engagement, scale and elevate expertise, enable new products and services, and enhance exploration and discovery.

Now, researchers from Google DeepMind and Stanford University have updated a theory originally developed to explain how humans and other animals learn. "The evidence seems compelling that the brain has these two kinds of learning systems, and the complementary learning systems theory explains how they complement each other to provide a powerful solution to a key learning problem that faces the brain," explained James McClelland, lead author of the 1995 paper from Stanford University. Components of the neural network architecture that succeeded in achieving human-level performance in a variety of computer games like Space Invaders and Breakout were inspired by complementary learning systems theory. According to DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, "the extended version of the complementary learning systems theory is likely to continue to provide a framework for future research not only in neuroscience but also in the quest to develop Artificial General Intelligence -- our goal at Google DeepMind."

Product shipments of artificial intelligence (AI) systems for vehicles will grow from 7 million in 2015 to 122 million by 2025, which, according to IHS Technology, is a reflection of the automotive industry's growing appetite for AI.

We propose to prune a random forest (RF) for resource-constrained prediction. We first construct a RF and then prune it to optimize expected feature cost & accuracy. We pose pruning RFs as a novel 0-1 integer program with linear constraints that encourages feature re-use. We establish total unimodularity of the constraint set to prove that the corresponding LP relaxation solves the original integer program. We then exploit connections to combinatorial optimization and develop an efficient primal-dual algorithm, scalable to large datasets. In contrast to our bottom-up approach, which benefits from good RF initialization, conventional methods are top-down acquiring features based on their utility value and is generally intractable, requiring heuristics. Empirically, our pruning algorithm outperforms existing state-of-the-art resource-constrained algorithms.

Machine learning is providing the needed algorithms, applications, and frameworks to bring greater predictive accuracy and value to enterprises' data, leading to diverse company-wide strategies succeeding faster and more profitably than before. The good news for businesses is that all the data they have been saving for years can now be turned into a competitive advantage and lead to strategic goals being accomplished. Revenue teams are using machine learning to optimise promotions, compensation and rebates to drive the desired behaviour across selling channels. Predicting propensity to buy across all channels, making personalised recommendations to customers, forecasting long-term customer loyalty and anticipating potential credit risks of suppliers and buyers are also key. Figure 1 provides an overview of machine learning applications by industry. Unlike advanced analytics techniques that seek out causality first, machine learning techniques are designed to seek out opportunities to optimise decisions based on the predictive value of large-scale data sets.