A team of researchers at Canada's University of Waterloo wondered whether a chatbot with a sense of humor, in getting a few laughs out of its teachers, might better motivate them, lower their stress and anxiety levels, and help them learn more. Technology has brought us many wonderful things, but chatbots are not one of them. On banking and e-commerce sites, for instance, where these text-based conversational agents have been pressed into service to replace customer-support staff, even simple requests are often met with baffling arrays of options. For example, a bank's online chatbot recently asked me which of four types of savings account I was interested in – but it did not explain how they differed from each other. When I typed in "I don't know" the bankbot replied tersely: "That is not an option".

In the realm of international cybersecurity, "dual use" technologies are capable of both affirming and eroding human rights. Facial recognition may identify a missing child, or make anonymity impossible. Hacking may save lives by revealing key intel on a terrorist attack, or empower dictators to identify and imprison political dissidents. The same is true for gadgets. Your smart speaker makes it easier to order pizza and listen to music, but also helps tech giants track you even more intimately and target you with more ads.

Many guides give you advice on how to get started in data science: which online courses to take, which projects to implement for your portfolio, and which skills to acquire. But what if you got started with your learning journey, and now you are somewhere in the middle and don't know where to go next? After finishing my Data Scientist nanodegree at Udacity, I was at that middle point. I had built a foundation in various data science topics -- ML, deep neural networks, NLP, recommendation systems, and more -- and my learning curve had been very steep. So I felt that simply taking another online course wouldn't yield as many "things learned per day."

This module in the PySpark tutorials section will help you learn about certain advanced concepts of PySpark. In the first section of these advanced tutorials, we will be performing a Recency Frequency Monetary segmentation (RFM). RFM analysis is typically used to identify outstanding customer groups further we shall also look at K-means clustering. Next up in these PySpark tutorials is learning Text Mining and using Monte Carlo Simulation from scratch. Pyspark is a big data solution that is applicable for real-time streaming using Python programming language and provides a better and efficient way to do all kinds of calculations and computations.

This module on PySpark Tutorials aims to explain the intermediate concepts such as those like the use of Spark session in case of later versions and the use of Spark Config and Spark Context in case of earlier versions. This will also help you in understanding how the Spark-related environment is set up, concepts of Broadcasting and accumulator, other optimization techniques include those like parallelism, tungsten, and catalyst optimizer. You will also be taught about the various compression techniques such as Snappy and Zlib. We will also understand and talk about the various Big data ecosystem related concepts such as HDFS and block storage, various components of Spark such as Spark Core, Mila, GraphX, R, Streaming, SQL, etc. and will also study the basics of Python language which is related and relevant to be used along with Apache Spark thereby making it Pyspark. We will learn the following in this course: -Regression -Linear Regression -Output Column -Test Data -Prediction -Generalized Linear Regression -Forest Regression -Classification -Binomial Logistic Regression -Multinomial Logistic Regression -Decision Tree -Random Forest -Clustering -K-Means Model Pyspark is a big data solution that is applicable for real-time streaming using Python programming language and provides a better and efficient way to do all kinds of calculations and computations.

Artificial Intelligence is creating cutting-edge technologies for more efficient workflow in multiple industries across the world in this tech-driven era. There are machine learning and deep learning algorithms that are too complicated for people to understand besides AI engineers or related employees. Artificial Intelligence has generated self-explaining algorithms for stakeholders and partners to comprehend the entire process of transforming enormous complex sets of real-time data into meaningful in-depth insights. This is known as Explainable Artificial Intelligence or XAI in which the results of these solutions can be easily understood by humans. It helps AI designers to explain how AI machines have generated a specific kind of insight or outcome for businesses to thrive in the market. Multiple online courses and platforms are available for a better understanding of Explainable AI by designing interpretable and inclusive Artificial Intelligence.

This open problem asks whether there exists an online learning algorithm for binary classification that guarantees, for all target concepts, to make a sublinear number of mistakes, under only the assumption that the (possibly random) sequence of points X allows that such a learning algorithm can exist for that sequence. As a secondary problem, it also asks whether a specific concise condition completely determines whether a given (possibly random) sequence of points X admits the existence of online learning algorithms guaranteeing a sublinear number of mistakes for all target concepts.

Although virtual agents are increasingly situated in environments where natural language is the most effective mode of interaction with humans, these exchanges are rarely used as an opportunity for learning. Leveraging language interactions effectively requires addressing limitations in the two most common approaches to language grounding: semantic parsers built on top of fixed object categories are precise but inflexible and end-to-end models are maximally expressive, but fickle and opaque. Our goal is to develop a system that balances the strengths of each approach so that users can teach agents new instructions that generalize broadly from a single example. We introduce the idea of neural abstructions: a set of constraints on the inference procedure of a label-conditioned generative model that can affect the meaning of the label in context. Starting from a core programming language that operates over abstructions, users can define increasingly complex mappings from natural language to actions. We show that with this method a user population is able to build a semantic parser for an open-ended house modification task in Minecraft. The semantic parser that results is both flexible and expressive: the percentage of utterances sourced from redefinitions increases steadily over the course of 191 total exchanges, achieving a final value of 28%.

Biosemiosis is a process of choice-making between simultaneously alternative options. It is well-known that, when sufficiently young children encounter a new word, they tend to interpret it as pointing to a meaning that does not have a word yet in their lexicon rather than to a meaning that already has a word attached. In previous research, the strategy was shown to be optimal from an information theoretic standpoint. In that framework, interpretation is hypothesized to be driven by the minimization of a cost function: the option of least communication cost is chosen. However, the information theoretic model employed in that research neither explains the weakening of that vocabulary learning bias in older children or polylinguals nor reproduces Zipf's meaning-frequency law, namely the non-linear relationship between the number of meanings of a word and its frequency. Here we consider a generalization of the model that is channeled to reproduce that law. The analysis of the new model reveals regions of the phase space where the bias disappears consistently with the weakening or loss of the bias in older children or polylinguals. The model is abstract enough to support future research on other levels of life that are relevant to biosemiotics. In the deep learning era, the model is a transparent low-dimensional tool for future experimental research and illustrates the predictive power of a theoretical framework originally designed to shed light on the origins of Zipf's rank-frequency law.

Detecting customized moments and highlights from videos given natural language (NL) user queries is an important but under-studied topic. One of the challenges in pursuing this direction is the lack of annotated data. To address this issue, we present the Query-based Video Highlights (QVHighlights) dataset. It consists of over 10,000 YouTube videos, covering a wide range of topics, from everyday activities and travel in lifestyle vlog videos to social and political activities in news videos. Each video in the dataset is annotated with: (1) a human-written free-form NL query, (2) relevant moments in the video w.r.t. the query, and (3) five-point scale saliency scores for all query-relevant clips. This comprehensive annotation enables us to develop and evaluate systems that detect relevant moments as well as salient highlights for diverse, flexible user queries. We also present a strong baseline for this task, Moment-DETR, a transformer encoder-decoder model that views moment retrieval as a direct set prediction problem, taking extracted video and query representations as inputs and predicting moment coordinates and saliency scores end-to-end. While our model does not utilize any human prior, we show that it performs competitively when compared to well-engineered architectures. With weakly supervised pretraining using ASR captions, Moment-DETR substantially outperforms previous methods. Lastly, we present several ablations and visualizations of Moment-DETR. Data and code is publicly available at https://github.com/jayleicn/moment_detr