Will the decade we just entered come to be known, once again, as the Roaring Twenties? Will it usher in an era marked by widespread prosperity, global tranquility and social congeniality? Or will it be remembered for something different? As we enter the new year, there are signs pointing in both directions. But no one ever succeeded by placing their bets on the world ending, so we choose to look at the optimistic side.

Nearly two years ago, Seattle Sport Sciences, a company that provides data to soccer club executives, coaches, trainers and players to improve training, made a hard turn into AI. It began developing a system that tracks ball physics and player movements from video feeds. To build it, the company needed to label millions of video frames to teach computer algorithms what to look for. It started out by hiring a small team to sit in front of computer screens, identifying players and balls on each frame. But it quickly realized that it needed a software platform in order to scale.

AI is expected to be better equipped than humans to write a high school essay by 2026, drive a truck by 2027, work in retail by 2031, write a best-selling book by 2049, and perform surgery by 2053. There is a 50 percent chance AI will outperform all human tasks in 45 years and automate all human jobs in 120 years.2 I don't know what high school West attended, but driving a truck or working in retail are exactly the jobs waiting for you if you suck at writing high school essays. Even today we have robotic vehicles capable of navigating city streets. They can even disregard bicyclists, just like we do.

Google's DeepMind just shared AI-generated predictions about the coronavirus that could help researchers stem the global outbreak

Do your non-player characters lack drive and ambition? Are they slow, stupid and constantly banging their heads against the wall? Then this course is for you. Join Penny as she explains, demonstrates and assists you to create your very own NPCs in Unity with C#. All you need is a sound knowledge of Unity, C# and the ability to add two numbers together.

Ranking alternatives is a natural way for humans to explain their preferences. It is used in many settings, such as school choice, course allocations and residency matches. Without having any information on the underlying cardinal utilities, arguing about the fairness of allocations requires extending the ordinal item ranking to ordinal bundle ranking. The most commonly used such extension is stochastic dominance (SD), where a bundle X is preferred over a bundle Y if its score is better according to all additive score functions. SD is a very conservative extension, by which few allocations are necessarily fair while many allocations are possibly fair. We propose to make a natural assumption on the underlying cardinal utilities of the players, namely that the difference between two items at the top is larger than the difference between two items at the bottom. This assumption implies a preference extension which we call diminishing differences (DD), where X is preferred over Y if its score is better according to all additive score functions satisfying the DD assumption. We give a full characterization of allocations that are necessarily-proportional or possibly-proportional according to this assumption. Based on this characterization, we present a polynomial-time algorithm for finding a necessarily-DD-proportional allocation whenever it exists. Using simulations, we compare the various fairness criteria in terms of their probability of existence, and their probability of being fair by the underlying cardinal valuations. We find that necessary-DD-proportionality fares well in both measures. We also consider envy-freeness and Pareto optimality under diminishing-differences, as well as chore allocation under the analogous condition --- increasing-differences.

Multi-way data analysis has become an essential tool for capturing underlying structures in higher-order data sets where standard two-way analysis techniques often fail to discover the hidden correlations between variables in multi-way data. We propose a multi-objective variational autoencoder (MVA) method for smart infrastructure damage detection and diagnosis in multi-way sensing data based on the reconstruction probability of autoencoder deep neural network (ADNN). Our method fuses data from multiple sensors in one ADNN at which informative features are being extracted and utilized for damage identification. It generates probabilistic anomaly scores to detect damage, asses its severity and further localize it via a new localization layer introduced in the ADNN. We evaluated our method on multi-way datasets in the area of structural health monitoring for damage diagnosis purposes. The data was collected from our deployed data acquisition system on a cable-stayed bridge in Western Sydney and from a laboratory based building structure obtained from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately detect structural damage. It was also able to estimate the different levels of damage severity, and capture damage locations in an unsupervised aspect. Compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, our proposed method shows better performance in terms of damage detection and localization.

Automatic Curriculum Learning (ACL) has become a cornerstone of recent successes in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL).These methods shape the learning trajectories of agents by challenging them with tasks adapted to their capacities. In recent years, they have been used to improve sample efficiency and asymptotic performance, to organize exploration, to encourage generalization or to solve sparse reward problems, among others. The ambition of this work is dual: 1) to present a compact and accessible introduction to the Automatic Curriculum Learning literature and 2) to draw a bigger picture of the current state of the art in ACL to encourage the cross-breeding of existing concepts and the emergence of new ideas.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular paradigm for addressing sequential decision tasks in which the agent has only limited environmental feedback. Despite many advances over the past three decades, learning in many domains still requires a large amount of interaction with the environment, which can be prohibitively expensive in realistic scenarios. To address this problem, transfer learning has been applied to reinforcement learning such that experience gained in one task can be leveraged when starting to learn the next, harder task. More recently, several lines of research have explored how tasks, or data samples themselves, can be sequenced into a curriculum for the purpose of learning a problem that may otherwise be too difficult to learn from scratch. In this article, we present a framework for curriculum learning (CL) in reinforcement learning, and use it to survey and classify existing CL methods in terms of their assumptions, capabilities, and goals. Finally, we use our framework to find open problems and suggest directions for future RL curriculum learning research.

Large-scale natural language understanding (NLU) systems have made impressive progress: they can be applied flexibly across a variety of tasks, and employ minimal structural assumptions. However, extensive empirical research has shown this to be a double-edged sword, coming at the cost of shallow understanding: inferior generalization, grounding and explainability. Grounded language learning approaches offer the promise of deeper understanding by situating learning in richer, more structured training environments, but are limited in scale to relatively narrow, predefined domains. How might we enjoy the best of both worlds: grounded, general NLU? Following extensive contemporary cognitive science, we propose treating environments as ``first-class citizens'' in semantic representations, worthy of research and development in their own right. Importantly, models should also be partners in the creation and configuration of environments, rather than just actors within them, as in existing approaches. To do so, we argue that models must begin to understand and program in the language of affordances (which define possible actions in a given situation) both for online, situated discourse comprehension, as well as large-scale, offline common-sense knowledge mining. To this end we propose an environment-oriented ecological semantics, outlining theoretical and practical approaches towards implementation. We further provide actual demonstrations building upon interactive fiction programming languages.