MIT senior Rachel Chae and alumnus Sihao Huang '22 have been selected to join the 2023 class of Marshall Scholars and will begin graduate studies in the U.K. next fall. Funded by the British government, the Marshall Scholarship provides up to 50 scholarships for exceptional American students to pursue advanced study in any field at any university in the U.K. MIT's endorsed Marshall candidates are advised and supported by the distinguished fellowships team, led by Associate Dean Kim Benard in Career Advising and Professional Development. They are also mentored by the MIT Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships, co-chaired by professors Will Broadhead and Tamar Schapiro. "Working with this year's Marshall applicants has been as rewarding and humbling as ever," says Broadhead. "These amazing students engage in a months-long exercise in critical introspection and personal growth, supported by the expert mentorship provided by Kim Benard and her team in the Distinguished Fellowships Office and by the dedicated faculty, staff, and graduate students who serve on the Distinguished Fellowships Committee. We on the committee have been inspired by all of this year's fellowship applicants and are especially pleased to congratulate Rachel and Sihao, whose wisdom, good humor, and future-minded optimism will serve them well as they take their richly deserved places in this year's class of Marshall Scholars."

Members of the AIRL lab at Imperial College, and authors of the reported work in this blog post. From left to right: Bryan Lim, Dr Antoine Cully (director of the AIRL lab), Manon Flageat, Luca Grillotti, Dr Simón C Smith, and Maxime Allard. Learning and finding different solutions to the same problem is commonly associated with creativity and adaptation, which are important characteristics of intelligence. In the AIRL lab at Imperial College, we believe in the importance of diversity in learning algorithms. With this focus in mind, we develop learning algorithms known as Quality-Diversity algorithms.

A decision tree is a type of machine-learning algorithm that is used for classification and regression tasks. To learn how to use decision trees, you can start by understanding the basic concepts and principles behind them. I'm mentioning one of the playlists in this article where you can embrace the power of decision trees and learn them in a single, focused session. That's the wrap for today, I hope you find this article useful. Stay tuned for the next insightful article.

This course can be taken for academic credit as part of CU Boulder's Master of Science in Data Science (MS-DS) degree offered on the Coursera platform. The MS-DS is an interdisciplinary degree that brings together faculty from CU Boulder's departments of Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Information Science, and others. With performance-based admissions and no application process, the MS-DS is ideal for individuals with a broad range of undergraduate education and/or professional experience in computer science, information science, mathematics, and statistics. In this course, you'll be learning about Computer Vision as a field of study and research. First we'll be exploring several Computer Vision tasks and suggested approaches, from the classic Computer Vision perspective.

Deep learning can extract rich data representations if provided sufficient quantities of labeled training data. For many tasks however, annotating data has significant costs in terms of time and money, owing to the high standards of subject matter expertise required, for example in medical and geophysical image interpretation tasks. Active Learning can identify the most informative training examples for the interpreter to train, leading to higher efficiency. We propose an Active learning method based on jointly learning representations for supervised and unsupervised tasks. The learned manifold structure is later utilized to identify informative training samples most dissimilar from the learned manifold from the error profiles on the unsupervised task. We verify the efficiency of the proposed method on a seismic facies segmentation dataset from the Netherlands F3 block survey, significantly outperforming contemporary methods to achieve the highest mean Intersection-Over-Union value of 0.773.

Methods of pattern recognition and machine learning are applied extensively in science, technology, and society. Hence, any advances in related theory may translate into large-scale impact. Here we explore how algorithmic information theory, especially algorithmic probability, may aid in a machine learning task. We study a multiclass supervised classification problem, namely learning the RNA molecule sequence-to-shape map, where the different possible shapes are taken to be the classes. The primary motivation for this work is a proof of concept example, where a concrete, well-motivated machine learning task can be aided by approximations to algorithmic probability. Our approach is based on directly estimating the class (i.e., shape) probabilities from shape complexities, and using the estimated probabilities as a prior in a Gaussian process learning problem. Naturally, with a large amount of training data, the prior has no significant influence on classification accuracy, but in the very small training data regime, we show that using the prior can substantially improve classification accuracy. To our knowledge, this work is one of the first to demonstrate how algorithmic probability can aid in a concrete, real-world, machine learning problem.

This work builds on the models and concepts presented in part 1 to learn approximate dictionary representations of Koopman operators from data. Part I of this paper presented a methodology for arguing the subspace invariance of a Koopman dictionary. This methodology was demonstrated on the state-inclusive logistic lifting (SILL) basis. This is an affine basis augmented with conjunctive logistic functions. The SILL dictionary's nonlinear functions are homogeneous, a norm in data-driven dictionary learning of Koopman operators. In this paper, we discover that structured mixing of heterogeneous dictionary functions drawn from different classes of nonlinear functions achieve the same accuracy and dimensional scaling as the deep-learning-based deepDMD algorithm. We specifically show this by building a heterogeneous dictionary comprised of SILL functions and conjunctive radial basis functions (RBFs). This mixed dictionary achieves the same accuracy and dimensional scaling as deepDMD with an order of magnitude reduction in parameters, while maintaining geometric interpretability. These results strengthen the viability of dictionary-based Koopman models to solving high-dimensional nonlinear learning problems.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) uses brain signals to communicate with external devices without actual control. Particularly, BCI is one of the interfaces for controlling the robotic arm. In this study, we propose a knowledge distillation-based framework to manipulate robotic arm through hybrid paradigm induced EEG signals for practical use. The teacher model is designed to decode input data hierarchically and transfer knowledge to student model. To this end, soft labels and distillation loss functions are applied to the student model training. According to experimental results, student model achieved the best performance among the singular architecture-based methods. It is confirmed that using hierarchical models and knowledge distillation, the performance of a simple architecture can be improved. Since it is uncertain what knowledge is transferred, it is important to clarify this part in future studies.

System identification, also known as learning forward models, transfer functions, system dynamics, etc., has a long tradition both in science and engineering in different fields. Particularly, it is a recurring theme in Reinforcement Learning research, where forward models approximate the state transition function of a Markov Decision Process by learning a mapping function from current state and action to the next state. This problem is commonly defined as a Supervised Learning problem in a direct way. This common approach faces several difficulties due to the inherent complexities of the dynamics to learn, for example, delayed effects, high non-linearity, non-stationarity, partial observability and, more important, error accumulation when using bootstrapped predictions (predictions based on past predictions), over large time horizons. Here we explore the use of Reinforcement Learning in this problem. We elaborate on why and how this problem fits naturally and sound as a Reinforcement Learning problem, and present some experimental results that demonstrate RL is a promising technique to solve these kind of problems.

Weakly-supervised text classification aims to train a classifier using only class descriptions and unlabeled data. Recent research shows that keyword-driven methods can achieve state-of-the-art performance on various tasks. However, these methods not only rely on carefully-crafted class descriptions to obtain class-specific keywords but also require substantial amount of unlabeled data and takes a long time to train. This paper proposes FastClass, an efficient weakly-supervised classification approach. It uses dense text representation to retrieve class-relevant documents from external unlabeled corpus and selects an optimal subset to train a classifier. Compared to keyword-driven methods, our approach is less reliant on initial class descriptions as it no longer needs to expand each class description into a set of class-specific keywords. Experiments on a wide range of classification tasks show that the proposed approach frequently outperforms keyword-driven models in terms of classification accuracy and often enjoys orders-of-magnitude faster training speed.