Bandit algorithms are often used in the e-commerce industry to train Machine Learning (ML) systems when pre-labeled data is unavailable. However, the industry setting poses various challenges that make implementing bandit algorithms in practice non-trivial. In this paper, we elaborate on the challenges of off-policy optimisation, delayed reward, concept drift, reward design, and business rules constraints that practitioners at Booking.com encounter when applying bandit algorithms. Our main contributions is an extension to the Open Bandit Pipeline (OBP) framework. We provide simulation components for some of the above-mentioned challenges to provide future practitioners, researchers, and educators with a resource to address challenges encountered in the e-commerce industry.

Place recognition is the fundamental module that can assist Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) in loop-closure detection and re-localization for long-term navigation. The place recognition community has made astonishing progress over the last $20$ years, and this has attracted widespread research interest and application in multiple fields such as computer vision and robotics. However, few methods have shown promising place recognition performance in complex real-world scenarios, where long-term and large-scale appearance changes usually result in failures. Additionally, there is a lack of an integrated framework amongst the state-of-the-art methods that can handle all of the challenges in place recognition, which include appearance changes, viewpoint differences, robustness to unknown areas, and efficiency in real-world applications. In this work, we survey the state-of-the-art methods that target long-term localization and discuss future directions and opportunities. We start by investigating the formulation of place recognition in long-term autonomy and the major challenges in real-world environments. We then review the recent works in place recognition for different sensor modalities and current strategies for dealing with various place recognition challenges. Finally, we review the existing datasets for long-term localization and introduce our datasets and evaluation API for different approaches. This paper can be a tutorial for researchers new to the place recognition community and those who care about long-term robotics autonomy. We also provide our opinion on the frequently asked question in robotics: Do robots need accurate localization for long-term autonomy? A summary of this work and our datasets and evaluation API is publicly available to the robotics community at: https://github.com/MetaSLAM/GPRS.

The rapid progress in digitalization and automation have led to an accelerated growth in healthcare, generating novel models that are creating new channels for rendering treatment with reduced cost. The Metaverse is an emerging technology in the digital space which has huge potential in healthcare, enabling realistic experiences to the patients as well as the medical practitioners. The Metaverse is a confluence of multiple enabling technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, internet of medical devices, robotics, quantum computing, etc. through which new directions for providing quality healthcare treatment and services can be explored. The amalgamation of these technologies ensures immersive, intimate and personalized patient care. It also provides adaptive intelligent solutions that eliminates the barriers between healthcare providers and receivers. This article provides a comprehensive review of the Metaverse for healthcare, emphasizing on the state of the art, the enabling technologies for adopting the Metaverse for healthcare, the potential applications and the related projects. The issues in the adaptation of the Metaverse for healthcare applications are also identified and the plausible solutions are highlighted as part of future research directions.

Continual learning aims to learn a sequence of tasks by leveraging the knowledge acquired in the past in an online-learning manner while being able to perform well on all previous tasks, this ability is crucial to the artificial intelligence (AI) system, hence continual learning is more suitable for most real-word and complex applicative scenarios compared to the traditional learning pattern. However, the current models usually learn a generic representation base on the class label on each task and an effective strategy is selected to avoid catastrophic forgetting. We postulate that selecting the related and useful parts only from the knowledge obtained to perform each task is more effective than utilizing the whole knowledge. Based on this fact, in this paper we propose a new framework, named Selecting Related Knowledge for Online Continual Learning (SRKOCL), which incorporates an additional efficient channel attention mechanism to pick the particular related knowledge for every task. Our model also combines experience replay and knowledge distillation to circumvent the catastrophic forgetting. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted on different benchmarks and the competitive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed SRKOCL is a promised approach against the state-of-the-art.

The use of neural networks in safety-critical systems requires safe and robust models, due to the existence of adversarial attacks. Knowing the minimal adversarial perturbation of any input x, or, equivalently, knowing the distance of x from the classification boundary, allows evaluating the classification robustness, providing certifiable predictions. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art techniques for computing such a distance are computationally expensive and hence not suited for online applications. This work proposes a novel family of classifiers, namely Signed Distance Classifiers (SDCs), that, from a theoretical perspective, directly output the exact distance of x from the classification boundary, rather than a probability score (e.g., SoftMax). SDCs represent a family of robust-by-design classifiers. To practically address the theoretical requirements of a SDC, a novel network architecture named Unitary-Gradient Neural Network is presented. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture approximates a signed distance classifier, hence allowing an online certifiable classification of x at the cost of a single inference.

Leakage of data from publicly available Machine Learning (ML) models is an area of growing significance as commercial and government applications of ML can draw on multiple sources of data, potentially including users' and clients' sensitive data. We provide a comprehensive survey of contemporary advances on several fronts, covering involuntary data leakage which is natural to ML models, potential malevolent leakage which is caused by privacy attacks, and currently available defence mechanisms. We focus on inference-time leakage, as the most likely scenario for publicly available models. We first discuss what leakage is in the context of different data, tasks, and model architectures. We then propose a taxonomy across involuntary and malevolent leakage, available defences, followed by the currently available assessment metrics and applications. We conclude with outstanding challenges and open questions, outlining some promising directions for future research.

Analogies play a central role in human commonsense reasoning. The ability to recognize analogies such as "eye is to seeing what ear is to hearing", sometimes referred to as analogical proportions, shape how we structure knowledge and understand language. Surprisingly, however, the task of identifying such analogies has not yet received much attention in the language model era. In this paper, we analyze the capabilities of transformer-based language models on this unsupervised task, using benchmarks obtained from educational settings, as well as more commonly used datasets. We find that off-the-shelf language models can identify analogies to a certain extent, but struggle with abstract and complex relations, and results are highly sensitive to model architecture and hyperparameters. Overall the best results were obtained with GPT-2 and RoBERTa, while configurations using BERT were not able to outperform word embedding models. Our results raise important questions for future work about how, and to what extent, pre-trained language models capture knowledge about abstract semantic relations.

When you're working on a machine learning project, the most tedious steps are often data cleaning and preprocessing. Especially when you're working in a Jupyter Notebook, running code in many cells can be confusing. The Scikit-learn library has tools called Pipeline and ColumnTransformer that can really make your life easier. Instead of transforming the dataframe step by step, the pipeline combines all transformation steps. You can get the same result with less code.

Deep Learning & Deep Neural Networks made super easy for absolute beginners without digging deep into harsh mathematics. Yes, we know you can choose from lots of similar courses and lectures out there regarding DNNs. But this truly step-by-step course is different! In every new video tutorial, you will build on what you have already learned and advance one extra step. You strengthen your learning by solving the small task that we assign at the end of each video before you proceed to the next one.

An artificial intelligence (AI) specialist applies their skills in engineering and computer science to create machines and software programs that can think for themselves. The key contribution of an AI specialist is using emerging technologies to solve business problems in new and creative ways that provide greater insight, accuracy, and consistency. This skill set is most often sought by government, health care, and higher education institutions. Explore the resources below to learn how to hire an AI specialist, including tips on identifying the right skills, writing a job description, and interviewing candidates.