PROVO (ABC4) – Algorithm can be a scary word, as Brigham Young University computer science professor Quinn Snell admits. The term, which has since reached a commonplace status in the modern-day lexicon, can conjure up imaginings of intrusive data analysis by artificial intelligence-led supercomputers that can understand human nature better than we as a species understand ourselves. Snell acknowledges that the expression can be a scary one for many, but when used properly, algorithms can be used to create impactful and positive change in human society. "When we say algorithm it can throw people off and make people nervous with artificial intelligence and all the hype surrounding that. But what we're really talking about is, the data is telling us a story," Quinn explains to ABC4.com.

Using @tf.function (a way to speed up your regular Python functions)

Learn more about what comes next. Palo Alto, California-based Landing AI, the AI startup led by Andrew Ng -- the cofounder of Google Brain, one of Google's AI research divisions -- today announced that it raised $57 million in a series A funding round led by McRock Capital. In addition, Insight Partners, Taiwania Capital, Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, Intel Capital, Samsung Catalyst Fund, Far Eastern Group's DRIVE Catalyst, Walsin Lihwa, and AI Fund participated, bringing Landing AI's total raised to around $100 million. The increased use of AI in manufacturing is dovetailing with the broader corporate sector's embrace of digitization. According to Google Cloud, 76% of manufacturing companies turned to data and analytics, cloud, and AI technologies due to the pandemic.

The Andrews Labor Government is making Victoria's Tech Schools more high-tech than ever, with funding for equipment like robots, benchtop milling machines and spectrometers to help them deliver innovative science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) programs. Minister for Education James Merlino today announced the state's 10 Tech Schools will share in $4.18 million through the 2021-22 Tech School Equipment Renewal Fund, helping them invest in cutting-edge equipment to help secondary students build their skills in STEM – preparing them for the jobs of the future. Monash Tech School will purchase an FTIR spectrometer – which is used in the space industry and medical research, and will allow students to analyse the composition of metals and alloys, geology samples, precious metals and gemstones, polymers and plastics, glass, and ceramics. A second benchtop milling machine at Whittlesea Tech School will ensure more students can see the creation of a product from start to finish during their schooling, supporting pathways to advanced manufacturing industries. Yarra Ranges Tech School will purchase educational robots – enhancing students' skills and experience in digital technologies, advanced manufacturing, and health care and social assistance.

Welcome to Hyperparameter Optimization for Machine Learning. In this course, you will learn multiple techniques to select the best hyperparameters and improve the performance of your machine learning models. If you are regularly training machine learning models as a hobby or for your organization and want to improve the performance of your models, if you are keen to jump up in the leader board of a data science competition, or you simply want to learn more about how to tune hyperparameters of machine learning models, this course will show you how. We'll take you step-by-step through engaging video tutorials and teach you everything you need to know about hyperparameter tuning. Throughout this comprehensive course, we cover almost every available approach to optimize hyperparameters, discussing their rationale, their advantages and shortcomings, the considerations to have when using the technique and their implementation in Python.

Let's say that you work with the sales and marketing team to reach your company's pre-set goals. While your company is doing well in terms of generating revenue and retaining customers, you can not help but think that it can do better. As things stand, the advertisements, promotions, and special offers are homogenous across all customers, which is a serious issue. Engaging with customers in a manner that they won't be receptive to is tantamount to wasting your advertising budget. After all, you don't want your company to spend its limited budget sending diaper coupons to college students or advertising gaming consoles to elderly women.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is on the verge of a major paradigm shift. In the IoT system of the future, IoFT, the cloud will be substituted by the crowd where model training is brought to the edge, allowing IoT devices to collaboratively extract knowledge and build smart analytics/models while keeping their personal data stored locally. This paradigm shift was set into motion by the tremendous increase in computational power on IoT devices and the recent advances in decentralized and privacy-preserving model training, coined as federated learning (FL). This article provides a vision for IoFT and a systematic overview of current efforts towards realizing this vision. Specifically, we first introduce the defining characteristics of IoFT and discuss FL data-driven approaches, opportunities, and challenges that allow decentralized inference within three dimensions: (i) a global model that maximizes utility across all IoT devices, (ii) a personalized model that borrows strengths across all devices yet retains its own model, (iii) a meta-learning model that quickly adapts to new devices or learning tasks. We end by describing the vision and challenges of IoFT in reshaping different industries through the lens of domain experts. Those industries include manufacturing, transportation, energy, healthcare, quality & reliability, business, and computing.

International collaboration has become imperative in the field of AI. However, few studies exist concerning how distance factors have affected the international collaboration in AI research. In this study, we investigate this problem by using 1,294,644 AI related collaborative papers harvested from the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) dataset. A framework including 13 indicators to quantify the distance factors between countries from 5 perspectives (i.e., geographic distance, economic distance, cultural distance, academic distance, and industrial distance) is proposed. The relationships were conducted by the methods of descriptive analysis and regression analysis. The results show that international collaboration in the field of AI today is not prevalent (only 15.7%). All the separations in international collaborations have increased over years, except for the cultural distance in masculinity/felinity dimension and the industrial distance. The geographic distance, economic distance and academic distances have shown significantly negative relationships with the degree of international collaborations in the field of AI. The industrial distance has a significant positive relationship with the degree of international collaboration in the field of AI. Also, the results demonstrate that the participation of the United States and China have promoted the international collaboration in the field of AI. This study provides a comprehensive understanding of internationalizing AI research in geographic, economic, cultural, academic, and industrial aspects.

Modern quantum machine learning (QML) methods involve variationally optimizing a parameterized quantum circuit on a training data set, and subsequently making predictions on a testing data set (i.e., generalizing). In this work, we provide a comprehensive study of generalization performance in QML after training on a limited number $N$ of training data points. We show that the generalization error of a quantum machine learning model with $T$ trainable gates scales at worst as $\sqrt{T/N}$. When only $K \ll T$ gates have undergone substantial change in the optimization process, we prove that the generalization error improves to $\sqrt{K / N}$. Our results imply that the compiling of unitaries into a polynomial number of native gates, a crucial application for the quantum computing industry that typically uses exponential-size training data, can be sped up significantly. We also show that classification of quantum states across a phase transition with a quantum convolutional neural network requires only a very small training data set. Other potential applications include learning quantum error correcting codes or quantum dynamical simulation. Our work injects new hope into the field of QML, as good generalization is guaranteed from few training data.

Knowledge distillation is a promising learning paradigm for boosting the performance and reliability of resource-efficient graph neural networks (GNNs) using more expressive yet cumbersome teacher models. Past work on distillation for GNNs proposed the Local Structure Preserving loss (LSP), which matches local structural relationships across the student and teacher's node embedding spaces. In this paper, we make two key contributions: From a methodological perspective, we study whether preserving the global topology of how the teacher embeds graph data can be a more effective distillation objective for GNNs, as real-world graphs often contain latent interactions and noisy edges. The purely local LSP objective over pre-defined edges is unable to achieve this as it ignores relationships among disconnected nodes. We propose two new approaches which better preserve global topology: (1) Global Structure Preserving loss (GSP), which extends LSP to incorporate all pairwise interactions; and (2) Graph Contrastive Representation Distillation (G-CRD), which uses contrastive learning to align the student node embeddings to those of the teacher in a shared representation space. From an experimental perspective, we introduce an expanded set of benchmarks on large-scale real-world datasets where the performance gap between teacher and student GNNs is non-negligible. We believe this is critical for testing the efficacy and robustness of knowledge distillation, but was missing from the LSP study which used synthetic datasets with trivial performance gaps. Experiments across 4 datasets and 14 heterogeneous GNN architectures show that G-CRD consistently boosts the performance and robustness of lightweight GNN models, outperforming the structure preserving approaches, LSP and GSP, as well as baselines adapted from 2D computer vision.