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Neko: a Library for Exploring Neuromorphic Learning Rules

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The field of neuromorphic computing is in a period of active exploration. While many tools have been developed to simulate neuronal dynamics or convert deep networks to spiking models, general software libraries for learning rules remain underexplored. This is partly due to the diverse, challenging nature of efforts to design new learning rules, which range from encoding methods to gradient approximations, from population approaches that mimic the Bayesian brain to constrained learning algorithms deployed on memristor crossbars. To address this gap, we present Neko, a modular, extensible library with a focus on aiding the design of new learning algorithms. We demonstrate the utility of Neko in three exemplar cases: online local learning, probabilistic learning, and analog on-device learning. Our results show that Neko can replicate the state-of-the-art algorithms and, in one case, lead to significant outperformance in accuracy and speed. Further, it offers tools including gradient comparison that can help develop new algorithmic variants. Neko is an open source Python library that supports PyTorch and TensorFlow backends.


A Peek Into the Reasoning of Neural Networks: Interpreting with Structural Visual Concepts

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Despite substantial progress in applying neural networks (NN) to a wide variety of areas, they still largely suffer from a lack of transparency and interpretability. While recent developments in explainable artificial intelligence attempt to bridge this gap (e.g., by visualizing the correlation between input pixels and final outputs), these approaches are limited to explaining low-level relationships, and crucially, do not provide insights on error correction. In this work, we propose a framework (VRX) to interpret classification NNs with intuitive structural visual concepts. Given a trained classification model, the proposed VRX extracts relevant class-specific visual concepts and organizes them using structural concept graphs (SCG) based on pairwise concept relationships. By means of knowledge distillation, we show VRX can take a step towards mimicking the reasoning process of NNs and provide logical, concept-level explanations for final model decisions. With extensive experiments, we empirically show VRX can meaningfully answer "why" and "why not" questions about the prediction, providing easy-to-understand insights about the reasoning process. We also show that these insights can potentially provide guidance on improving NN's performance.


Q&A: Vivienne Sze on crossing the hardware-software divide for efficient artificial intelligence

#artificialintelligence

Not so long ago, watching a movie on a smartphone seemed impossible. Vivienne Sze was a graduate student at MIT at the time, in the mid 2000s, and she was drawn to the challenge of compressing video to keep image quality high without draining the phone's battery. The solution she hit upon called for co-designing energy-efficient circuits with energy-efficient algorithms. Sze would go on to be part of the team that won an Engineering Emmy Award for developing the video compression standards still in use today. Now an associate professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Sze has set her sights on a new milestone: bringing artificial intelligence applications to smartphones and tiny robots.


USC, Amazon Partner to Launch Machine Learning Research Center

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The University of Southern California and Amazon have joined forces to establish the Center for Secure and Trusted Machine Learning. Housed at USC's Viterbi School of Engineering, the center will provide support to researchers who will focus on developing innovative approaches to privacy-preserving machine learning solutions. This university-industry partnership symbolizes both organizations' shared commitment to "advancing understanding and developing solutions," said USC Provost Charles F. Zukoski in the university's announcement of the partnership. Plans call for the center to leverage talent from both entities in a cooperative effort to unearth new research in this controversial area of study. In USC's announcement, Prem Natarajan, Alexa AI vice president of natural understanding, added, "We are delighted to bring together top talent at Amazon and USC in a joint mission to drive ground-breaking advances in privacy and security preserving machine learning--advances that enable us to continue to safely and securely deliver experiences that enrich and delight our customers worldwide."


The Left Hand of Darkness Is a Sci-Fi Classic

WIRED

Ursula K. Le Guin's 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness is about a planet where the genetically-engineered inhabitants randomly become male or female for a few days each month. Science fiction professor Lisa Yaszek says that the book is one of the genre's most important explorations of gender. "This stuff was all in the air, so I think that Le Guin is definitely thinking about it at the right time," Yaszek says in Episode 464 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "No one had really put it together into a sustained novel--well, I think some people had, but they hadn't been published yet. She was definitely the first to the punch. So this is the first person to pick up some things that were beginning to happen in some of the edgier, more avant-garde science fiction."


Ethics of AI: Benefits and risks of artificial intelligence

#artificialintelligence

In 1949, at the dawn of the computer age, the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel warned of the danger of naively applying technology to solve life's problems. Life, Marcel wrote in Being and Having, cannot be fixed the way you fix a flat tire. Any fix, any technique, is itself a product of that same problematic world, and is therefore problematic, and compromised. Marcel's admonition is often summarized in a single memorable phrase: "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived." Despite that warning, seventy years later, artificial intelligence is the most powerful expression yet of humans' urge to solve or improve upon human life with computers. But what are these computer systems? As Marcel would have urged, one must ask where they come from, whether they embody the very problems they would purport to solve. Ethics in AI is essentially questioning, constantly investigating, and never taking for granted the technologies that are being rapidly imposed upon human life. That questioning is made all the more urgent because of scale. AI systems are reaching tremendous size in terms of the compute power they require, and the data they consume. And their prevalence in society, both in the scale of their deployment and the level of responsibility they assume, dwarfs the presence of computing in the PC and Internet eras. At the same time, increasing scale means many aspects of the technology, especially in its deep learning form, escape the comprehension of even the most experienced practitioners. Ethical concerns range from the esoteric, such as who is the author of an AI-created work of art; to the very real and very disturbing matter of surveillance in the hands of military authorities who can use the tools with impunity to capture and kill their fellow citizens. Somewhere in the questioning is a sliver of hope that with the right guidance, AI can help solve some of the world's biggest problems. The same technology that may propel bias can reveal bias in hiring decisions. The same technology that is a power hog can potentially contribute answers to slow or even reverse global warming. The risks of AI at the present moment arguably outweigh the benefits, but the potential benefits are large and worth pursuing. As Margaret Mitchell, formerly co-lead of Ethical AI at Google, has elegantly encapsulated, the key question is, "what could AI do to bring about a better society?" Mitchell's question would be interesting on any given day, but it comes within a context that has added urgency to the discussion. Mitchell's words come from a letter she wrote and posted on Google Drive following the departure of her co-lead, Timnit Gebru, in December.



Data Science 2021 : Complete Data Science & Machine Learning

#artificialintelligence

Data Science and Machine Learning are the hottest skills in demand but challenging to learn. Did you wish that there was one course for Data Science and Machine Learning that covers everything from Math for Machine Learning, Advance Statistics for Data Science, Data Processing, Machine Learning A-Z, Deep learning and more? Well, you have come to the right place. This Data Science and Machine Learning course has 11 projects, 250 lectures, more than 25 hours of content, one Kaggle competition project with top 1 percentile score, code templates and various quizzes. Today Data Science and Machine Learning is used in almost all the industries, including automobile, banking, healthcare, media, telecom and others.


The 23 Best Machine Learning Courses on Coursera for 2021

#artificialintelligence

The editors at Solutions Review have compiled this list of the best machine learning courses on Coursera to consider if you're looking to grow your skills. Machine learning involves studying computer algorithms that improve automatically through experience. It is a sub-field of artificial intelligence where machine learning algorithms build models based on sample (or training) data. Once a predictive model is constructed it can be used to make predictions or decisions without being specifically commanded to do so. Machine learning is now a mainstream technology with a wide variety of uses and applications.


A Beginner's Guide to Regression Analysis in Machine Learning

#artificialintelligence

In order to understand the motivation behind regression, let's consider the following simple example. The scatter plot below shows the number of college graduates in the US from the year 2001 to 2012. Now based on the available data, what if someone asks you how many college graduates with master's degrees will there be in the year 2018? It can be seen that the number of college graduates with master's degrees increases almost linearly with the year. So by simple visual analysis, we can get a rough estimate of that number to be between 2.0 to 2.1 million.