The increasing deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to inform decision making across diverse areas including healthcare, employment, social benefits, and government policy, presents a serious risk for disabled people, who have been shown to face bias in AI implementations. While there has been significant work on analysing and mitigating algorithmic bias, the broader mechanisms of how bias emerges in AI applications are not well understood, hampering efforts to address bias where it begins. In this article, we illustrate how bias in AI-assisted decision making can arise from a range of specific design decisions, each of which may seem self-contained and non-biasing when considered separately. These design decisions include basic problem formulation, the data chosen for analysis, the use the AI technology is put to, and operational design elements in addition to the core algorithmic design. We draw on three historical models of disability common to different decision-making settings to demonstrate how differences in the definition of disability can lead to highly distinct decisions on each of these aspects of design, leading in turn to AI technologies with a variety of biases and downstream effects. We further show that the potential harms arising from inappropriate definitions of disability in fundamental design stages are further amplified by a lack of transparency and disabled participation throughout the AI design process. Our analysis provides a framework for critically examining AI technologies in decision-making contexts and guiding the development of a design praxis for disability-related AI analytics. We put forth this article to provide key questions to facilitate disability-led design and participatory development to produce more fair and equitable AI technologies in disability-related contexts.

As AI algorithms increasingly participate in daily activities that used to be the sole province of humans, we are inevitably called upon to consider how much machines are really like us. To address this question, we turn to the Turing test and systematically benchmark current AIs in their abilities to imitate humans. We establish a methodology to evaluate humans versus machines in Turing-like tests and systematically evaluate a representative set of selected domains, parameters, and variables. The experiments involved testing 769 human agents, 24 state-of-the-art AI agents, 896 human judges, and 8 AI judges, in 21,570 Turing tests across 6 tasks encompassing vision and language modalities. Surprisingly, the results reveal that current AIs are not far from being able to impersonate human judges across different ages, genders, and educational levels in complex visual and language challenges. In contrast, simple AI judges outperform human judges in distinguishing human answers versus machine answers. The curated large-scale Turing test datasets introduced here and their evaluation metrics provide valuable insights to assess whether an agent is human or not. The proposed formulation to benchmark human imitation ability in current AIs paves a way for the research community to expand Turing tests to other research areas and conditions. All of source code and data are publicly available at https://tinyurl.com/8x8nha7p

Temporal sequences of satellite images constitute a highly valuable and abundant resource to analyze a given region. However, the labeled data needed to train most machine learning models are scarce and difficult to obtain. In this context, the current work investigates a fully unsupervised methodology that, given a sequence of images, learns a semantic embedding and then, creates a partition of the ground according to its semantic properties and its evolution over time. We illustrate the methodology by conducting the semantic analysis of a sequence of satellite images of a region of Navarre (Spain). The proposed approach reveals a novel broad perspective of the land, where potentially large areas that share both a similar semantic and a similar temporal evolution are connected in a compact and well-structured manner. The results also show a close relationship between the allocation of the clusters in the geographic space and their allocation in the embedded spaces. The semantic analysis is completed by obtaining the representative sequence of tiles corresponding to each cluster, the linear interpolation between related areas, and a graph that shows the relationships between the clusters, providing a concise semantic summary of the whole region.

The composition of the academic workforce thus shapes what advances are made and who benefits from them,20,21 in part because demographic diversity in science is known to accelerate innovation and improve problem solving.17,31 Despite a continued emphasis on broadening participation, women faculty in the U.S. remain underrepresented relative to women's share of the U.S. population by more than a factor of two, and Black, Hispanic, and Native faculty by more than a factor of five.37,40 Women's underrepresentation among computing researchers also persists internationally. For example, women are estimated to comprise less than 10% of contributors to international computer science journals.25 On one hand, there are generational problems, in which faculty diversity changes slowly because it takes many years for diversity increases at the earliest stages of training to propagate up to more senior levels.16 On the other hand, there are structural and social climate problems in the U.S.,1 in which members of underrepresented groups who aspire to or have a faculty career are pushed or pulled out of the community, which may counteract efforts to address generational problems. In concert, these two effects may lead to a persistent overrepresentation of majority groups5 despite efforts to the contrary. We consider a third class of problem, which exists because most faculty are hired via searches that focus on a particular subfield of computing--for example, artificial intelligence (AI). As a result, field-level demographic dynamics such as gender, racial, and socioeconomic representation are in fact driven by diversity differences across computing's subfields and the representation of those subfields among the suppliers of future faculty.8 For example, faculty searches in subfields with fewer women than other subfields are less likely to increase a department's gender diversity.

Computing competency is becoming an essential quality needed by industry. For decades, the gap between baccalaureate computing graduates and industry needs was a discussion topic. Most graduates seek employment in deference to continuing their full-time graduate (master's or doctoral) programs. While the percent of such choice varies by institution, it is estimated that about 5% of computing graduates choose full-time graduate study upon graduation, meaning that 95% of computing graduates seek jobs in business, government, or industry.15 While computing graduates may acquire jobs in today's world, they often lack the competencies (skills and dispositions) expected in the workplace. Most undergraduate computing-degree programs want to produce job-ready graduates who are productive on the first workday. They often seek local advisory boards composed of industry, government, and business representatives to help develop a functional computing curriculum for their students. Information technology and computing disciplines are changing, and new fields appear continuously. Computing curricula and undergraduate programs are challenged to keep up with this rapid change. Employers are looking for competent graduates who can apply the knowledge, skill, and culture they acquire in college to solve problems as soon as they enter the workforce. High-performance computing (HPC) and parallel and distributed computing (PDC) have become pervasive.

Andrew Ng is one of the biggest names in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, after team-founding and -leading stints at Google Brain, Baidu, and elsewhere, and as founder of Coursera and Landing AI. His online courses have attracted millions of views. AI has huge potential outside of consumer software and internet apps, he believes. I think the biggest potential of AI still lies ahead of us, to use it for all the other industries other than just consumer software and internet. But candidly, when I walk around everywhere from factories to hospitals, they just seek mentors.

We all know the different operators in python, i.e., Unary operators and Binary operators. An operator that can be used to negate a positive value with one operand is called the unary operator; for example, x -4, here we are negating a value 4 with operator –, so operator -- acts as a unary operator. An operator who works with two operands is called a binary operator; for example, x, 3 7, the operator acts as a binary operator.

In the past few years due to the Covid19 pandemic the adoption of e-learning platforms has increased significantly. The widespread restrictions have forced students to continue their education via online means which causes them to spend a significant amount of their time watching videos and attending classes. This sudden change from offline to online learning has affected a lot of students therefore making an attempt to build systems that can accurately simulate the experience of offline learning can help in smoothing out this drastic transition. Live classes is one such way that gives the students a chance to escape the monotony of watching recorded videos on a daily basis. The interaction aspect of such classes allow the students to clarify small scale doubts instantaneously and at the same time gives teachers the opportunity to compliment the students on good behaviour. All these tiny bits significantly affect the learning outcome for a student by making the course content more interesting and thus improving their overall engagement on the platform. In order to mimic this offline style of interaction there can be a multitude of implementations like live polls or quizzes to check whether the student is paying attention, dynamic interactive diagrams that fuel the curiosity of students by giving them a chance to tinker with it, in-session feedback to understand the student's opinions or the in-class chats mechanism between the participants of a given session. Unlike all the other mechanisms, chats are the most open medium of communication and provide the maximum opportunity to interact with each other.

Contact matrices are an important ingredient in age-structured epidemic models to inform the simulated spread of the disease between sub-groups of the population. These matrices are generally derived using resource-intensive diary-based surveys and few exist in the Global South or tailored to vulnerable populations. In particular, no contact matrices exist for refugee settlements - locations under-served by epidemic models in general. In this paper we present a novel, mixed-method approach, for deriving contact matrices in populations which combines a lightweight, rapidly deployable, survey with an agent-based model of the population informed by census and behavioural data. We use this method to derive the first set of contact matrices for the Cox's Bazar refugee settlement in Bangladesh. The matrices from the refugee settlement show strong banding effects due to different age cut-offs in attendance at certain venues, such as distribution centres and religious sites, as well as the important contribution of the demographic profile of the settlement which was encoded in the model. These can have significant implications to the modelled disease dynamics. To validate our approach, we also apply our method to the population of the UK and compare our derived matrices against well-known contact matrices previously collected using traditional approaches. Overall, our findings demonstrate that our mixed-method approach can address some of the challenges of both the traditional and previously proposed agent-based approaches to deriving contact matrices, and has the potential to be rolled-out in other resource-constrained environments. This work therefore contributes to a broader aim of developing new methods and mechanisms of data collection for modelling disease spread in refugee and IDP settlements and better serving these vulnerable communities.

This paper proposes new algorithms for the metric learning problem. We start by noticing that several classical metric learning formulations from the literature can be viewed as modified covariance matrix estimation problems. Leveraging this point of view, a general approach, called Robust Geometric Metric Learning (RGML), is then studied. This method aims at simultaneously estimating the covariance matrix of each class while shrinking them towards their (unknown) barycenter. We focus on two specific costs functions: one associated with the Gaussian likelihood (RGML Gaussian), and one with Tyler's M -estimator (RGML Tyler). In both, the barycenter is defined with the Riemannian distance, which enjoys nice properties of geodesic convexity and affine invariance. The optimization is performed using the Riemannian geometry of symmetric positive definite matrices and its submanifold of unit determinant. Finally, the performance of RGML is asserted on real datasets. Strong performance is exhibited while being robust to mislabeled data.