The needs for precisely estimating a student's academic performance have been emphasized with an increasing amount of attention paid to Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). However, since labels for academic performance, such as test scores, are collected from outside of ITS, obtaining the labels is costly, leading to label-scarcity problem which brings challenge in taking machine learning approaches for academic performance prediction. To this end, inspired by the recent advancement of pre-training method in natural language processing community, we propose DPA, a transfer learning framework with Discriminative Pre-training tasks for Academic performance prediction. DPA pre-trains two models, a generator and a discriminator, and fine-tunes the discriminator on academic performance prediction. In DPA's pre-training phase, a sequence of interactions where some tokens are masked is provided to the generator which is trained to reconstruct the original sequence. Then, the discriminator takes an interaction sequence where the masked tokens are replaced by the generator's outputs, and is trained to predict the originalities of all tokens in the sequence. Compared to the previous state-of-the-art generative pre-training method, DPA is more sample efficient, leading to fast convergence to lower academic performance prediction error. We conduct extensive experimental studies on a real-world dataset obtained from a multi-platform ITS application and show that DPA outperforms the previous state-of-the-art generative pre-training method with a reduction of 4.05% in mean absolute error and more robust to increased label-scarcity.

Machine learning is a subfield of computer science where machines are trained to make decisions with the help of data provided without any human interference. For example, if we could teach a computer to tell if a person is lying about something, then the computer might be using machine learning as software. There are huge applications of machine learning such as Face recognition, image classification, stock market prediction, Emotion detection, self-driving cars, etc. More details about all these are covered in the training course videos. Machine learning uses knowledge from mathematics, statistics, computer science, and programming to build and deploy algorithms that can do one of those tasks mentioned above.

This article introduces and implements the framework of propensity score method from Dehejia and Wahba (1999) "Causal Effects in Non-Experimental Studies: Reevaluating the Evaluation of Training Programs," Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. I will briefly go over the theories and then walk through how I implemented the stratification matching step by step. The full Python code is provided at the end of the article. The intuition of propensity score method is: instead of conditioning on the full vector of covariates Xᵢ, which can get difficult when there are many pre-treatment variables and when the treatment and comparison groups are very different, we try to condition on the propensity score estimated with Xᵢ. Propensity score matching works in the same way as covariate matching except that we match on the score instead of the covariates directly.

Officials jointly launch the first batch of Digital Training Bases for Seniors at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2021 on Saturday.

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When it comes to the education landscape, the entire industry has undergone a rapid transformation in recent times. The next-gen technologies, including Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning, have portrayed their true potential in all industry verticals globally. As per a recent report, the global AI software market is forecast to reach 126 billion U.S. dollars by 2025. When every other industry is reaping the benefits from AI & ML, the education industry is no different. Artificial intelligence and machine learning in the education sector are acting as the driving force and have added value as never before.

I participated in the R package recommendation engine competition on Kaggle for two reasons. First, I use R a lot. I cannot learn statistics without R. This competition is my chance to give back to the community a R package recommendation engine. Second, during my day job as an engineer behind a machine learning service in the cloud, product recommendation is one of the most popular applications our early adopters want to use the web service for.

There is mounting public concern over the influence that AI based systems has in our society. Coalitions in all sectors are acting worldwide to resist hamful applications of AI. From indigenous people addressing the lack of reliable data, to smart city stakeholders, to students protesting the academic relationships with sex trafficker and MIT donor Jeffery Epstein, the questionable ethics and values of those heavily investing in and profiting from AI are under global scrutiny. There are biased, wrongful, and disturbing assumptions embedded in AI algorithms that could get locked in without intervention. Our best human judgment is needed to contain AI's harmful impact. Perhaps one of the greatest contributions of AI will be to make us ultimately understand how important human wisdom truly is in life on earth.

The improvement of computers' capacities, advancements in algorithmic techniques, and the significant increase of available data have enabled the recent developments of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. One of its branches, called Machine Learning (ML), has shown strong capacities in mimicking characteristics attributed to human intelligence, such as vision, speech, and problem-solving. However, as previous technological revolutions suggest, their most significant impacts could be mostly expected on other sectors that were not traditional users of that technology. The agricultural sector is vital for African economies; improving yields, mitigating losses, and effective management of natural resources are crucial in a climate change era. Machine Learning is a technology with an added value in making predictions, hence the potential to reduce uncertainties and risk across sectors, in this case, the agricultural sector. The purpose of this paper is to contextualize and discuss barriers to ML-based solutions for African agriculture. In the second section, we provided an overview of ML technology from a historical and technical perspective and its main driving force. In the third section, we provided a brief review of the current use of ML in agriculture. Finally, in section 4, we discuss ML growing interest in Africa and the potential barriers to creating and using ML-based solutions in the agricultural sector.

Energy-based models (EBMs) are explicit generative models which work by considering Gibbs measures defined through an energy function f, with a probability density proportional to exp( βf(x)), where β is the inverse temperature. Such models originate in statistical physics [Gibbs, 2010, Ruelle, 1969], and have become a fundamental modeling tool in statistics and machine learning [Wainwright and Jordan, 2008, Ranzato et al., 2007, LeCun et al., 2006, Du and Mordatch, 2019, Song and Kingma, 2021]. Given data samples from a target distribution, the learning algorithms for EBMs attempt to estimate an energy function f to model the samples density. The resulting learned model can then be used to obtain new samples, typically through Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques. The standard method to train EBMs is maximum likelihood estimation, i.e. the learned energy is the one maximizing the likelihood of the target samples, within a certain function class. One generic approach for this is to use gradient descent, where gradients may be approximated using MCMC samples from the trained model. However, this is computationally difficult for highly non-convex trained energies, which in recent years has motivated a myriad of alternative losses to learn EBM energies, such as the popular score matching; see [Song and Kingma, 2021] for a review. EBMs also have structural connections with maximum entropy (maxent) models, which have been studied for decades through Fenchel duality. Dai et al. [2019b] was the first work to leverage similar duality arguments