Or Meaningless New research offers insights into what gives work meaning -- as well as into common management mistakes that can leave employees feeling that their work is meaningless. GE's Big Bet on Data and Analytics This case study focuses on GE's "industrial internet" strategy. Aligning the Organization for Its Digital Future In this report, MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte explore how digitally savvy executives are aligning their people, processes, and culture with an eye toward long-term digital success. Data Sharing and Analytics Drive Success with IoT This MIT Sloan Management Review study concluded that obtaining business value from the internet of things depends on companies' willingness to share data with other organizations. Beyond the Hype: The Hard Work Behind Analytics Success This report by MIT Sloan Management Review and SAS found that few companies have a strategic plan for analytics or are executing a strategy for what they hope to achieve with analytics.

The report anticipates economic effects across several fronts. AI, like any new technology, is key to growth because it increases output without requiring increases in labor or capital. "In the last decade, despite technology's positive push, measured productivity growth has slowed in 30 of the 31 advanced economies, slowing in the United States from an average annual growth rate of 2.5% in the decade after 1995 to only 1.0% growth in the decade after 2005," the report states. Any increase in aggregate productivity from adopting artificial intelligence would be a welcomed change. But the resultant job automation is causing alarm.

"How to Become a Super Learning Machine" is an excellent course that focuses on the practical basics of how to learn. The course teaches students about the right attitude to take when learning, the best way to absorb knowledge and how to set goals and achieve them. Thanks to my experience as a teacher, I went into the course understanding most of the concepts that Joe Parys covers. However, thanks to Joe's progressive and hybrid attitude towards learning I was able to take away some new things that have already helped me in my studies. First, Joe covers the importance of surrounding yourself with positive influence.

This paper introduces Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network (GCRN), a deep learning model able to predict structured sequences of data. Precisely, GCRN is a generalization of classical recurrent neural networks (RNN) to data structured by an arbitrary graph. Such structured sequences can represent series of frames in videos, spatio-temporal measurements on a network of sensors, or random walks on a vocabulary graph for natural language modeling. The proposed model combines convolutional neural networks (CNN) on graphs to identify spatial structures and RNN to find dynamic patterns. We study two possible architectures of GCRN, and apply the models to two practical problems: predicting moving MNIST data, and modeling natural language with the Penn Treebank dataset. Experiments show that exploiting simultaneously graph spatial and dynamic information about data can improve both precision and learning speed.

Joint Models for longitudinal and time-to-event data have gained a lot of attention in the last few years as they are a helpful technique to approach common a data structure in clinical studies where longitudinal outcomes are recorded alongside event times. Those two processes are often linked and the two outcomes should thus be modeled jointly in order to prevent the potential bias introduced by independent modelling. Commonly, joint models are estimated in likelihood based expectation maximization or Bayesian approaches using frameworks where variable selection is problematic and which do not immediately work for high-dimensional data. In this paper, we propose a boosting algorithm tackling these challenges by being able to simultaneously estimate predictors for joint models and automatically select the most influential variables even in high-dimensional data situations. We analyse the performance of the new algorithm in a simulation study and apply it to the Danish cystic fibrosis registry which collects longitudinal lung function data on patients with cystic fibrosis together with data regarding the onset of pulmonary infections. This is the first approach to combine state-of-the art algorithms from the field of machine-learning with the model class of joint models, providing a fully data-driven mechanism to select variables and predictor effects in a unified framework of boosting joint models.

In the tensor completion problem, one seeks to estimate a low-rank tensor based on a random sample of revealed entries. In terms of the required sample size, earlier work revealed a large gap between estimation with unbounded computational resources (using, for instance, tensor nuclear norm minimization) and polynomial-time algorithms. Among the latter, the best statistical guarantees have been proved, for third-order tensors, using the sixth level of the sum-of-squares (SOS) semidefinite programming hierarchy (Barak and Moitra, 2014). However, the SOS approach does not scale well to large problem instances. By contrast, spectral methods --- based on unfolding or matricizing the tensor --- are attractive for their low complexity, but have been believed to require a much larger sample size. This paper presents two main contributions. First, we propose a new unfolding-based method, which outperforms naive ones for symmetric $k$-th order tensors of rank $r$. For this result we make a study of singular space estimation for partially revealed matrices of large aspect ratio, which may be of independent interest. For third-order tensors, our algorithm matches the SOS method in terms of sample size (requiring about $rd^{3/2}$ revealed entries), subject to a worse rank condition ($r\ll d^{3/4}$ rather than $r\ll d^{3/2}$). We complement this result with a different spectral algorithm for third-order tensors in the overcomplete ($r\ge d$) regime. Under a random model, this second approach succeeds in estimating tensors of rank $d\le r \ll d^{3/2}$ from about $rd^{3/2}$ revealed entries.

Representation of human actions as a sequence of human body movements or action attributes enables the development of models for human activity recognition and summarization. We present an extension of the low-rank representation (LRR) model, termed the clustering-aware structure-constrained low-rank representation (CS-LRR) model, for unsupervised learning of human action attributes from video data. Our model is based on the union-of-subspaces (UoS) framework, and integrates spectral clustering into the LRR optimization problem for better subspace clustering results. We lay out an efficient linear alternating direction method to solve the CS-LRR optimization problem. We also introduce a hierarchical subspace clustering approach, termed hierarchical CS-LRR, to learn the attributes without the need for a priori specification of their number. By visualizing and labeling these action attributes, the hierarchical model can be used to semantically summarize long video sequences of human actions at multiple resolutions. A human action or activity can also be uniquely represented as a sequence of transitions from one action attribute to another, which can then be used for human action recognition. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for semantic summarization and action recognition through comprehensive experiments on five real-world human action datasets.

This paper investigates a type of instability that is linked to the greedy policy improvement in approximated reinforcement learning. We show empirically that non-deterministic policy improvement can stabilize methods like LSPI by controlling the improvements' stochasticity. Additionally we show that a suitable representation of the value function also stabilizes the solution to some degree. The presented approach is simple and should also be easily transferable to more sophisticated algorithms like deep reinforcement learning.

Most of the existing studies on voice conversion (VC) are conducted in acoustically matched conditions between source and target signal. However, the robustness of VC methods in presence of mismatch remains unknown. In this paper, we report a comparative analysis of different VC techniques under mismatched conditions. The extensive experiments with five different VC techniques on CMU ARCTIC corpus suggest that performance of VC methods substantially degrades in noisy conditions. We have found that bilinear frequency warping with amplitude scaling (BLFWAS) outperforms other methods in most of the noisy conditions. We further explore the suitability of different speech enhancement techniques for robust conversion. The objective evaluation results indicate that spectral subtraction and log minimum mean square error (logMMSE) based speech enhancement techniques can be used to improve the performance in specific noisy conditions.

Currently there are two predominant ways to train deep neural networks. The first one uses restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) and the second one autoencoders. RBMs are stacked in layers to form deep belief network (DBN); the final representation layer is attached to the target to complete the deep neural network. Autoencoders are nested one inside the other to form stacked autoencoders; once the stcaked autoencoder is learnt the decoder portion is detached and the target attached to the deepest layer of the encoder to form the deep neural network. This work proposes a new approach to train deep neural networks using dictionary learning as the basic building block; the idea is to use the features from the shallower layer as inputs for training the next deeper layer. One can use any type of dictionary learning (unsupervised, supervised, discriminative etc.) as basic units till the pre-final layer. In the final layer one needs to use the label consistent dictionary learning formulation for classification. We compare our proposed framework with existing state-of-the-art deep learning techniques on benchmark problems; we are always within the top 10 results. In actual problems of age and gender classification, we are better than the best known techniques.