Rosetta Stone English from Lexia Learning, a Cambium Learning Group company, was named the winner of a Gold Stevie Award in the ELL/World Language Acquisition Instructional Solution category in The 19th Annual American Business Awards . The American Business Awards are the U.S.A.'s premier business awards program. All organizations operating in the U.S.A. are eligible to submit nominations – public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small. Nicknamed the Stevies for the Greek word meaning "crowned," the awards will be virtually presented to winners during a live event on Wednesday, June 30. More than 3,800 nominations – a record number – from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted this year for consideration in a wide range of categories.

Many of these challenges are won by neural network models created by full-time artificial intelligence scientists. Due to this origin, they have a black-box character that makes their use and application less clear to learning scientists. We describe our experience with competition from the perspective of educational data mining, a field founded in the learning sciences and connected with roots in psychology and statistics. We describe our efforts from the perspectives of learning scientists and the challenges to our methods, some real and some imagined. We also discuss some basic results in the Kaggle system and our thoughts on how those results may have been improved. Finally, we describe how learner model predictions are used to make pedagogical decisions for students. Their practical use entails a) model predictions and b) a decision rule (based on the predictions). We point out how increased model accuracy can be of limited practical utility, especially when paired with simple decision rules and argue instead for the need to further investigate optimal decision rules.

A key feature of intelligent behaviour is the ability to learn abstract strategies that scale and transfer to unfamiliar problems. An abstract strategy solves every sample from a problem class, no matter its representation or complexity -- like algorithms in computer science. Neural networks are powerful models for processing sensory data, discovering hidden patterns, and learning complex functions, but they struggle to learn such iterative, sequential or hierarchical algorithmic strategies. Extending neural networks with external memories has increased their capacities in learning such strategies, but they are still prone to data variations, struggle to learn scalable and transferable solutions, and require massive training data. We present the Neural Harvard Computer (NHC), a memory-augmented network based architecture, that employs abstraction by decoupling algorithmic operations from data manipulations, realized by splitting the information flow and separated modules. This abstraction mechanism and evolutionary training enable the learning of robust and scalable algorithmic solutions. On a diverse set of 11 algorithms with varying complexities, we show that the NHC reliably learns algorithmic solutions with strong generalization and abstraction: perfect generalization and scaling to arbitrary task configurations and complexities far beyond seen during training, and being independent of the data representation and the task domain.

Recent years have witnessed significant advances in technologies and services in modern network applications, including smart grid management, wireless communication, cybersecurity as well as multi-agent autonomous systems. Considering the heterogeneous nature of networked entities, emerging network applications call for game-theoretic models and learning-based approaches in order to create distributed network intelligence that responds to uncertainties and disruptions in a dynamic or an adversarial environment. This paper articulates the confluence of networks, games and learning, which establishes a theoretical underpinning for understanding multi-agent decision-making over networks. We provide an selective overview of game-theoretic learning algorithms within the framework of stochastic approximation theory, and associated applications in some representative contexts of modern network systems, such as the next generation wireless communication networks, the smart grid and distributed machine learning. In addition to existing research works on game-theoretic learning over networks, we highlight several new angles and research endeavors on learning in games that are related to recent developments in artificial intelligence. Some of the new angles extrapolate from our own research interests. The overall objective of the paper is to provide the reader a clear picture of the strengths and challenges of adopting game-theoretic learning methods within the context of network systems, and further to identify fruitful future research directions on both theoretical and applied studies.

There you are, sitting front row of Miss Ryan's English class in your underwear, when in walks Chris Hemsworth holding a saxophone in one hand and a turtle in the other, asking you to play in his band. "Why not?" you say, taking the turtle before snapping awake in a cold sweat, the darkness pressing in as you whisper to yourself, "…WTF?" Decades – if not centuries – of psychological analysis have ventured to explain why it is our imaginations go on strange, unconstrained journeys while we sleep, with the general consensus being it has to do with processing experiences from our waking hours. That's all well and good, but seriously, do they have to be so … well, bizarre? Neuroscientist Erik Hoel from Tufts University has taken inspiration from the way we teach neural networks to recognize patterns, arguing the very experience of dreaming is its own purpose, and its weirdness might be a feature, not a bug.

I believe that the book describes itself quite well when it says: Mathematically correct yet highly intuitive…This book would be great for a class that one takes before one takes my statistical learning class. I often run into beginning graduate Data Science students whose background is not math (e.g., CS or Business) and they are not ready…The book fills an important niche, in that it provides a self-contained introduction to material that is useful for a higher-level statistical learning course. I think that it compares well with competing books, particularly in that it takes a more "Data Science" and "example driven" approach than more classical books." "This text by Matloff (Univ. of California, Davis) affords an excellent introduction to statistics for the data science student…Its examples are often drawn from data science applications such as hidden Markov models and remote sensing, to name a few… All the models and concepts are explained well in precise mathematical terms (not presented as formal proofs), to help students gain an intuitive understanding."

VTB has launched a machine learning (ML) model management system, a new product of the Artificial Intelligence Factory.

When a computational system continuously learns from an ever-changing environment, it rapidly forgets its past experiences. This phenomenon is called catastrophic forgetting. While a line of studies has been proposed with respect to avoiding catastrophic forgetting, most of the methods are based on intuitive insights into the phenomenon, and their performances have been evaluated by numerical experiments using benchmark datasets. Therefore, in this study, we provide the theoretical framework for analyzing catastrophic forgetting by using teacher-student learning. Teacher-student learning is a framework in which we introduce two neural networks: one neural network is a target function in supervised learning, and the other is a learning neural network. To analyze continual learning in the teacher-student framework, we introduce the similarity of the input distribution and the input-output relationship of the target functions as the similarity of tasks. In this theoretical framework, we also provide a qualitative understanding of how a single-layer linear learning neural network forgets tasks. Based on the analysis, we find that the network can avoid catastrophic forgetting when the similarity among input distributions is small and that of the input-output relationship of the target functions is large. The analysis also suggests that a system often exhibits a characteristic phenomenon called overshoot, which means that even if the learning network has once undergone catastrophic forgetting, it is possible that the network may perform reasonably well after further learning of the current task.

Biological infants are naturally curious and try to comprehend their physical surroundings by interacting, in myriad multisensory ways, with different objects - primarily macroscopic solid objects - around them. Through their various interactions, they build hypotheses and predictions, and eventually learn, infer and understand the nature of the physical characteristics and behavior of these objects. Inspired thus, we propose a model for curiosity-driven learning and inference for real-world AI agents. This model is based on the arousal of curiosity, deriving from observations along discontinuities in the fundamental macroscopic solid-body physics parameters, i.e., shape constancy, spatial-temporal continuity, and object permanence. We use the term body-budget to represent the perceived fundamental properties of solid objects. The model aims to support the emulation of learning from scratch followed by substantiation through experience, irrespective of domain, in real-world AI agents.

To accurately pour drinks into various containers is an essential skill for service robots. However, drink pouring is a dynamic process and difficult to model. Traditional deep imitation learning techniques for implementing autonomous robotic pouring have an inherent black-box effect and require a large amount of demonstration data for model training. To address these issues, an Explainable Hierarchical Imitation Learning (EHIL) method is proposed in this paper such that a robot can learn high-level general knowledge and execute low-level actions across multiple drink pouring scenarios. Moreover, with EHIL, a logical graph can be constructed for task execution, through which the decision-making process for action generation can be made explainable to users and the causes of failure can be traced out. Based on the logical graph, the framework is manipulable to achieve different targets while the adaptability to unseen scenarios can be achieved in an explainable manner. A series of experiments have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Results indicate that EHIL outperforms the traditional behavior cloning method in terms of success rate, adaptability, manipulability and explainability.