As we begin 2020 with new excitement and vigor, it's also the time to plan ahead and look at what the year has in store for us for corporate Learning and Development (L&D). With workplace learning trends embracing technology on a larger scale, one thing we can say for certain is that emerging technologies are transforming the world of work, and businesses need to rethink their approach toward L&D and employee training. One of the key shifts observed in 2019 and going into 2020 is learning in-the-flow of work, which only makes more and more sense as we live our connected lives in this connected world. Meanwhile, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping how organizations do business, engage with clients and customers, and manage their operations. As a result, an increasing number of organizations are now depending on emerging technologies to gain the desired competitive advantage.

New research from the Global Talent Competitiveness Index 2020 confirms that to succeed in the age of AI, more investment is needed in skills development and lifelong learning. While the emerging markets lag far behind the talent-rich nations, the gap can be bridged with the right set of policies. The currency of the AI-driven economy is talent. But while it is true that talent is high in demand, it is also short in supply. This especially rings true for the economies that fail to attract and build their own talented workforces.

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Facial recognition technology was introduced in the 1960s, languished through the AI winter, and in recent years has taken off -- boosted by increasingly powerful deep neural networks. Facial recognition has been applied in Face ID device unlocking functions, public security services, smart payment systems and more. During Taylor Swift's 2018 "Reputation" tour, the American singer-songwriter's security team utilized the tech to safeguard her from stalkers. Now, a research team from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Harbin Engineering University has adopted facial recognition technology to analyze students' emotions in the classroom through a visual analytics system called "EmotionCues." Paper co-author Huamin Qu says the system "provides teachers with a quick and convenient measure of students' engagement level in a class. Knowing whether the lectures are too hard and when students get bored can help improve teaching."

This paper studies the decentralized optimization and learning problem where multiple interconnected agents aim to learn an optimal decision function defined over a reproducing kernel Hilbert (RKH) space by jointly minimizing a global objective function, with access to locally observed data only. As a non-parametric approach, kernel learning faces a major challenge in distributed implementation: the decision variables of local objective functions are data-dependent with different sizes and thus cannot be optimized under the decentralized consensus framework without any raw data exchange among agents. To circumvent this major challenge and preserve data privacy, we leverage the random feature (RF) approximation approach to map the large-volume data represented in the RKH space into a smaller RF space, which facilitates the same-size parameter exchange and enables distributed agents to reach consensus on the function decided by the parameters in the RF space. For fast convergent implementation, we design an iterative algorithm for Decentralized Kernel Learning via Alternating direction method of multipliers (DKLA). Further, we develop a COmmunication-censored KErnel learning (COKE) algorithm to reduce the communication load in DKLA. To do so, we apply a communication-censoring strategy, which prevents an agent from transmitting at every iteration unless its local updates are deemed informative. Theoretical results in terms of linear convergence guarantee and generalization performance analysis of DKLA and COKE are provided. Comprehensive tests with both synthetic and real datasets are conducted to verify the communication efficiency and learning effectiveness of COKE.

The creation of machine learning algorithms for intelligent agents capable of continuous, lifelong learning is a critical objective for algorithms being deployed on real-life systems in dynamic environments. Here we present an algorithm inspired by neuromodulatory mechanisms in the human brain that integrates and expands upon Stephen Grossberg\'s ground-breaking Adaptive Resonance Theory proposals. Specifically, it builds on the concept of uncertainty, and employs a series of neuromodulatory mechanisms to enable continuous learning, including self-supervised and one-shot learning. Algorithm components were evaluated in a series of benchmark experiments that demonstrate stable learning without catastrophic forgetting. We also demonstrate the critical role of developing these systems in a closed-loop manner where the environment and the agent\'s behaviors constrain and guide the learning process. To this end, we integrated the algorithm into an embodied simulated drone agent. The experiments show that the algorithm is capable of continuous learning of new tasks and under changed conditions with high classification accuracy (greater than 94 percent) in a virtual environment, without catastrophic forgetting. The algorithm accepts high dimensional inputs from any state-of-the-art detection and feature extraction algorithms, making it a flexible addition to existing systems. We also describe future development efforts focused on imbuing the algorithm with mechanisms to seek out new knowledge as well as employ a broader range of neuromodulatory processes.

With the explosive growth of online products and content, recommendation techniques have been considered as an effective tool to overcome information overload, improve user experience, and boost business revenue. In recent years, we have observed a new desideratum of considering long-term rewards of multiple related recommendation tasks simultaneously. The consideration of long-term rewards is strongly tied to business revenue and growth. Learning multiple tasks simultaneously could generally improve the performance of individual task due to knowledge sharing in multi-task learning. While a few existing works have studied long-term rewards in recommendations, they mainly focus on a single recommendation task. In this paper, we propose {\it PoDiRe}: a \underline{po}licy \underline{di}stilled \underline{re}commender that can address long-term rewards of recommendations and simultaneously handle multiple recommendation tasks. This novel recommendation solution is based on a marriage of deep reinforcement learning and knowledge distillation techniques, which is able to establish knowledge sharing among different tasks and reduce the size of a learning model. The resulting model is expected to attain better performance and lower response latency for real-time recommendation services. In collaboration with Samsung Game Launcher, one of the world's largest commercial mobile game platforms, we conduct a comprehensive experimental study on large-scale real data with hundreds of millions of events and show that our solution outperforms many state-of-the-art methods in terms of several standard evaluation metrics.

Peer Assessment is a task of analysis and commenting on student's writing by peers, is core of all educational components both in campus and in MOOC's. However, with the sheer scale of MOOC's & its inherent personalised open ended learning, automatic grading and tools assisting grading at scale is highly important. Previously we presented survey on tasks of post classification, knowledge tracing and ended with brief review on Peer Assessment (PA), with some initial problems. In this review we shall continue review on PA from perspective of improving the review process itself. As such rest of this review focus on three facets of PA namely Auto grading and Peer Assessment Tools (we shall look only on how peer reviews/auto-grading is carried), strategies to handle Rogue Reviews, Peer Review Improvement using Natural Language Processing. The consolidated set of papers and resources so used are released in https://github.com/manikandan-ravikiran/cs6460-Survey-2.

Intelligent services are becoming increasingly more pervasive; application developers want to leverage the latest advances in areas such as computer vision to provide new services and products to users, and large technology firms enable this via RESTful APIs. While such APIs promise an easy-to-integrate on-demand machine intelligence, their current design, documentation and developer interface hides much of the underlying machine learning techniques that power them. Such APIs look and feel like conventional APIs but abstract away data-driven probabilistic behaviour - the implications of a developer treating these APIs in the same way as other, traditional cloud services, such as cloud storage, is of concern. The objective of this study is to determine the various pain-points developers face when implementing systems that rely on the most mature of these intelligent services, specifically those that provide computer vision. We use Stack Overflow to mine indications of the frustrations that developers appear to face when using computer vision services, classifying their questions against two recent classification taxonomies (documentation-related and general questions). We find that, unlike mature fields like mobile development, there is a contrast in the types of questions asked by developers. These indicate a shallow understanding of the underlying technology that empower such systems. We discuss several implications of these findings via the lens of learning taxonomies to suggest how the software engineering community can improve these services and comment on the nature by which developers use them.

Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Educational Data Mining (EDM) are two important parts of online educational environment with the former being a centralised web-based information systems where the learning content is managed and learning activities are organised (Stone and Zheng,2014) and latter focusing on using data mining techniques for the analysis of data so generated. As part of this work, we present a literature review of three major tasks of EDM (See section 2), by identifying shortcomings and existing open problems, and a Blumenfield chart (See section 3). The consolidated set of papers and resources so used are released in https://github.com/manikandan-ravikiran/cs6460-Survey. The coverage statistics and review matrix of the survey are as shown in Figure 1 & Table 1 respectively. Acronym expansions are added in the Appendix Section 4.1.