Numerous municipalities nationwide are struggling to aid foreign students who are learning at local public schools but cannot understand the Japanese language fully or at all, a Kyodo News survey showed Saturday. In a questionnaire survey on issues facing foreign children living in Japan, 46 percent of the 1,612 municipalities that responded said that learning the Japanese language and other subjects, which are taught in Japanese, remain a challenge for foreign students. The survey, conducted from May to July, also highlighted another stumbling block in aiding foreign students: many are dispersed in small numbers -- sometimes one or two -- in public schools nationwide. In the survey, the city of Utsunomiya, Tochigi Prefecture, said foreign students who speak 14 languages, including Vietnamese and Thai, are scattered across 39 of its 93 public elementary schools and junior high schools. In the southwestern city of Kagoshima, some of the foreign students cannot maintain the pace of classes with their Japanese peers and struggle in understanding tests, the questionnaire showed.

In this paper, we deal with the problem of marginalization over and conditioning on two disjoint subsets of the node set of chain graphs (CGs) with the LWF Markov property. For this purpose, we define the class of chain mixed graphs (CMGs) with three types of edges and, for this class, provide a separation criterion under which the class of CMGs is stable under marginalization and conditioning and contains the class of LWF CGs as its subclass. We provide a method for generating such graphs after marginalization and conditioning for a given CMG or a given LWF CG. We then define and study the class of anterial graphs, which is also stable under marginalization and conditioning and contains LWF CGs, but has a simpler structure than CMGs.

This is the Proceedings of the ICML Workshop on #Data4Good: Machine Learning in Social Good Applications, which was held on June 24, 2016 in New York.

Developing intelligent systems requires combining results from both industry and academia. In this report you find an overview of relevant research fields and industrially applicable technologies for building very large scale cyber physical systems. A concept architecture is used to illustrate how existing pieces may fit together, and the maturity of the subsystems is estimated. The goal is to structure the developments and the challenge of machine intelligence for Consumer and Industrial Internet technologists, cyber physical systems researchers and people interested in the convergence of data & Internet of Things. It can be used for planning developments of intelligent systems.

We describe a learning-based approach to hand-eye coordination for robotic grasping from monocular images. To learn hand-eye coordination for grasping, we trained a large convolutional neural network to predict the probability that task-space motion of the gripper will result in successful grasps, using only monocular camera images and independently of camera calibration or the current robot pose. This requires the network to observe the spatial relationship between the gripper and objects in the scene, thus learning hand-eye coordination. We then use this network to servo the gripper in real time to achieve successful grasps. To train our network, we collected over 800,000 grasp attempts over the course of two months, using between 6 and 14 robotic manipulators at any given time, with differences in camera placement and hardware. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that our method achieves effective real-time control, can successfully grasp novel objects, and corrects mistakes by continuous servoing.

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Label ranking aims to learn a mapping from instances to rankings over a finite number of predefined labels. Random forest is a powerful and one of the most successfully general-purpose machine learning algorithms of modern times. In the literature, there seems no research has yet been done in applying random forest to label ranking. In this paper, We present a powerful random forest label ranking method which uses random decision trees to retrieve nearest neighbors that are not only similar in the feature space but also in the ranking space. We have developed a novel two-step rank aggregation strategy to effectively aggregate neighboring rankings discovered by the random forest into a final predicted ranking. Compared with existing methods, the new random forest method has many advantages including its intrinsically scalable tree data structure, highly parallel-able computational architecture and much superior performances. We present extensive experimental results to demonstrate that our new method achieves the best predictive accuracy performances compared with state-of-the-art methods for datasets with complete ranking and datasets with only partial ranking information.

Deep neural networks have been shown to suffer from a surprising weakness: their classification outputs can be changed by small, non-random perturbations of their inputs. This adversarial example phenomenon has been explained as originating from deep networks being "too linear" (Goodfellow et al., 2014). We show here that the linear explanation of adversarial examples presents a number of limitations: the formal argument is not convincing, linear classifiers do not always suffer from the phenomenon, and when they do their adversarial examples are different from the ones affecting deep networks. We propose a new perspective on the phenomenon. We argue that adversarial examples exist when the classification boundary lies close to the submanifold of sampled data, and present a mathematical analysis of this new perspective in the linear case. We define the notion of adversarial strength and show that it can be reduced to the deviation angle between the classifier considered and the nearest centroid classifier. Then, we show that the adversarial strength can be made arbitrarily high independently of the classification performance due to a mechanism that we call boundary tilting. This result leads us to defining a new taxonomy of adversarial examples. Finally, we show that the adversarial strength observed in practice is directly dependent on the level of regularisation used and the strongest adversarial examples, symptomatic of overfitting, can be avoided by using a proper level of regularisation.

Graphs are a common data modality, useful for modeling complex relationships between objects, with applications spanning fields as varied as biology (Jeong et al., 2001; Bullmore and Sporns, 2009), sociology (Wasserman and Faust, 1994), and computer vision (Foggia et al., 2014; Kandel et al., 2007), to name a few. For example, in neuroscience, vertices may be neurons and edges adjoin pairs of neurons that share a synapse (Bullmore and Sporns, 2009); in social networks, vertices may correspond to people and edges to friendships between them (Carrington et al., 2005; Yang and Leskovec, 2015); in computer vision, vertices may represent pixels in an image and edges may represent spatial proximity or multi-resolution mappings (Kandel et al., 2007). In many useful networks, vertices with similar attributes form densely-connected communities compared to vertices with highly disparate attributes, and uncovering these communities is an important step in understanding the structure of the network. There is an extensive literature devoted to uncovering this community structure in network data, including methods based on maximum modularity (Newman and Girvan, 2004; Newman, 2006b), spectral partitioning algorithms (Luxburg, 2007; Rohe et al., 2011; Sussman et al., 2012; Lyzinski et al., 2014b), and likelihood-based methods (Bickel and Chen, 2009), among others. In the setting of vertex nomination, one community in the network is of particular interest, and the inference task is to order the vertices into a nomination list with those vertices from the community of interest concentrating at the top of the list.

Newswire) ColoArtificial intelligence (AI) is poised to have a transformative effect on consumer, enterprise, and government markets around the world. An umbrella term that refers to information systems inspired by biological systems, AI encompasses multiple technologies including machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, natural language processing (NLP), machine reasoning, and strong AI. According to a new report from Tractica, these technologies have use cases and applications in almost every industry and promise to significantly change existing business models while simultaneously creating new ones. The market intelligence firm forecasts that annual worldwide AI revenue will grow from 643.7 million in 2016 to 36.8 billion by 2025. In sizing and forecasting the total global AI market, Tractica has identified 191 real-world use cases for AI, organized into 27 different industry sectors and corresponding with six major technology categories, plus multiple combinations of technologies.