Education
Artificial Intelligence (AI): Salaries Heading Skyward
Artificial intelligence salaries benefit from the perfect recipe for a sweet paycheck: a hot field and high demand for scarce talent. It's the ever-reliable law of supply and demand, and right now, anything artificial intelligence-related is in very high demand. According to Indeed.com, the average IT salary -- the keyword is "artificial intelligence engineer" -- in the San Francisco area ranges from approximately $134,135 per year for "software engineer" to $169,930 per year for "machine learning engineer." Check out our editorial recommendations on the best machine learning books. However, it can go much higher if you have the credentials firms need.
Ticker: MassArt holds auction to fund scholarships; Facebook data on more than 500M accounts found online
The Massachusetts College of Art and Design is holding a virtual auction to help support student scholarships. The silent auction portion of the fundraising event ends at noon on April 11, while a live auction takes place online on the evening of April 10. The 32nd annual MassArt Auction is the second conducted online due to the pandemic. Artists who have had their works juried into the auction donate either 50% or 100% of the sale price to support MassArt scholarships. The two auctions will feature over 300 works from MassArt students, graduates, members of the faculty and others.
AI for Medicine
AI is transforming the practice of medicine. It's helping doctors diagnose patients more accurately, make predictions about patients' future health, and recommend better treatments. As an AI practitioner, you have the opportunity to join in this transformation of modern medicine. If you're already familiar with some of the math and coding behind AI algorithms, and are eager to develop your skills further to tackle challenges in the healthcare industry, then this specialization is for you. No prior medical expertise is required!
Holberton Launches Expanded Program to Accelerate Learning Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence
SAN FRANCISCO, April 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Holberton, making software engineering education affordable and accessible globally, today announced the appointment of a new Machine Learning and Mathematics Team to build out a comprehensive program to accelerate training students in the key tenets of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the engine of the New Economy. On LinkedIn, there are currently 60,000 machine learning jobs open in the U.S. alone. Many are technology giants such as Twitter and TikTok. But increasingly traditional tech companies are investing in machine learning and recruiting machine learning engineers: even companies like McDonald's. According to LinkedIn, machine learning has created one of the biggest employment opportunities of 2021.
Students are the Best Teacher: Exit-Ensemble Distillation with Multi-Exits
This paper proposes a novel knowledge distillation-based learning method to improve the classification performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) without a pre-trained teacher network, called exit-ensemble distillation. Our method exploits the multi-exit architecture that adds auxiliary classifiers (called exits) in the middle of a conventional CNN, through which early inference results can be obtained. The idea of our method is to train the network using the ensemble of the exits as the distillation target, which greatly improves the classification performance of the overall network. Our method suggests a new paradigm of knowledge distillation; unlike the conventional notion of distillation where teachers only teach students, we show that students can also help other students and even the teacher to learn better. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvement of classification performance on various popular CNN architectures (VGG, ResNet, ResNeXt, WideResNet, etc.). Furthermore, the proposed method can expedite the convergence of learning with improved stability. Our code will be available on Github.
FixMyPose: Pose Correctional Captioning and Retrieval
Kim, Hyounghun, Zala, Abhay, Burri, Graham, Bansal, Mohit
Interest in physical therapy and individual exercises such as yoga/dance has increased alongside the well-being trend. However, such exercises are hard to follow without expert guidance (which is impossible to scale for personalized feedback to every trainee remotely). Thus, automated pose correction systems are required more than ever, and we introduce a new captioning dataset named FixMyPose to address this need. We collect descriptions of correcting a "current" pose to look like a "target" pose (in both English and Hindi). The collected descriptions have interesting linguistic properties such as egocentric relations to environment objects, analogous references, etc., requiring an understanding of spatial relations and commonsense knowledge about postures. Further, to avoid ML biases, we maintain a balance across characters with diverse demographics, who perform a variety of movements in several interior environments (e.g., homes, offices). From our dataset, we introduce the pose-correctional-captioning task and its reverse target-pose-retrieval task. During the correctional-captioning task, models must generate descriptions of how to move from the current to target pose image, whereas in the retrieval task, models should select the correct target pose given the initial pose and correctional description. We present strong cross-attention baseline models (uni/multimodal, RL, multilingual) and also show that our baselines are competitive with other models when evaluated on other image-difference datasets. We also propose new task-specific metrics (object-match, body-part-match, direction-match) and conduct human evaluation for more reliable evaluation, and we demonstrate a large human-model performance gap suggesting room for promising future work. To verify the sim-to-real transfer of our FixMyPose dataset, we collect a set of real images and show promising performance on these images.
Understanding Continual Learning Settings with Data Distribution Drift Analysis
Lesort, Timothรฉe, Caccia, Massimo, Rish, Irina
Classical machine learning algorithms often assume that the data are drawn i.i.d. from a stationary probability distribution. Recently, continual learning emerged as a rapidly growing area of machine learning where this assumption is relaxed, namely, where the data distribution is non-stationary, i.e., changes over time. However, data distribution drifts may interfere with the learning process and erase previously learned knowledge; thus, continual learning algorithms must include specialized mechanisms to deal with such distribution drifts. A distribution drift may change the class labels distribution, the input distribution, or both. Moreover, distribution drifts might be abrupt or gradual. In this paper, we aim to identify and categorize different types of data distribution drifts and potential assumptions about them, to better characterize various continual-learning scenarios. Moreover, we propose to use the distribution drift framework to provide more precise definitions of several terms commonly used in the continual learning field.
ReCAM@IITK at SemEval-2021 Task 4: BERT and ALBERT based Ensemble for Abstract Word Prediction
Mittal, Abhishek, Modi, Ashutosh
This paper describes our system for Task 4 of SemEval-2021: Reading Comprehension of Abstract Meaning (ReCAM). We participated in all subtasks where the main goal was to predict an abstract word missing from a statement. We fine-tuned the pre-trained masked language models namely BERT and ALBERT and used an Ensemble of these as our submitted system on Subtask 1 (ReCAM-Imperceptibility) and Subtask 2 (ReCAM-Nonspecificity). For Subtask 3 (ReCAM-Intersection), we submitted the ALBERT model as it gives the best results. We tried multiple approaches and found that Masked Language Modeling(MLM) based approach works the best.
Machine Learning Crash Course
Are you interested in machine learning? Then, this course is right for you! This course is designed by two professional data scientists so that we can share our knowledge and help you easily learn complex theories, algorithms and coding libraries. Take you step by step into the world of machine learning. In each tutorial, you will develop new skills and improve your understanding of the challenging but lucrative part of data science.