Education
Artificial intelligence in education is changing America's classrooms
Artificial intelligence--the ability of a computer program to perform human tasks such as thinking and learning, sometimes referred to as machine learning--is changing classrooms in both K12 and higher ed. But robotics has some questioning whether AI is just a fad that will eventually fade into obscurity or alter teaching and learning processes as we know it. Experts discussed the topic at a recent conference for future K12 educators held by the Teachers College at Columbia University, "Where Does Artificial Intelligence Fit in the Classroom?" Borhene Chakroun, director of the division for policies and lifelong learning systems at UNESCO, kicked off the event extolling the future of AI technology and its potential to "profoundly alter every aspect of the teaching and learning process." He also acknowledged the implications of AI and how it is altering how machines and humans work together.
Why artificial intelligence is different from previous technology waves
This post originally published on Medium. It is republished here with permission. I've been around computing since my older brother got a Commodore 64 for Christmas in 1983. I took my first "business machines" class in high school in 1991, attended my first computer science class in 1994 (learning Pascal), and moved to Silicon Valley in 1997 after Cisco converted my internship into a permanent position. I worked in Cisco's IT department for several years before moving to their engineering group, where I designed networking protocols. I went to grad school at MIT in 2004, where I met the founders of several companies in Y Combinator's first couple of batches and worked on Hubspot before it was Hubspot. After writing several books for O'Reilly and attending the first O'Reilly Web 2.0 and MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conferences, I started a "Web 2.0 for Sports" company called StatSheet.com in 2007, which, in 2010, pivoted into the first Natural Language Generation (NLG) company called Automated Insights. I recently stepped back at Automated Insights to become a Ph.D. student at UNC studying artificial intelligence.
Distilling Transformers into Simple Neural Networks with Unlabeled Transfer Data
Mukherjee, Subhabrata, Awadallah, Ahmed Hassan
Recent advances in pre-training huge models on large amounts of text through self supervision have obtained state-of-the-art results in various natural language processing tasks. However, these huge and expensive models are difficult to use in practise for downstream tasks. Some recent efforts use knowledge distillation to compress these models. However, we see a gap between the performance of the smaller student models as compared to that of the large teacher. In this work, we leverage large amounts of in-domain unlabeled transfer data in addition to a limited amount of labeled training instances to bridge this gap. We show that simple RNN based student models even with hard distillation can perform at par with the huge teachers given the transfer set. The student performance can be further improved with soft distillation and leveraging teacher intermediate representations. We show that our student models can compress the huge teacher by up to 26x while still matching or even marginally exceeding the teacher performance in low-resource settings with small amount of labeled data.
Partial differential equation regularization for supervised machine learning
This article is an overview of supervised machine learning problems for regression and classification. Topics include: kernel methods, training by stochastic gradient descent, deep learning architecture, losses for classification, statistical learning theory, and dimension independent generalization bounds. Implicit regularization in deep learning examples are presented, including data augmentation, adversarial training, and additive noise. These methods are re-framed as explicit gradient regularization.
Using Logical Specifications of Objectives in Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning
Nottingham, Kolby, Balakrishnan, Anand, Deshmukh, Jyotirmoy, Christopherson, Connor, Wingate, David
A BSTRACT In the multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) paradigm, the relative importance of each environment objective is often unknown prior to training, so agents must learn to specialize their behavior to optimize different combinations of environment objectives that are specified post-training. These are typically linear combinations, so the agent is effectively parameterized by a weight vector that describes how to balance competing environment objectives. However, many real world behaviors require nonlinear combinations of objectives. Additionally, the conversion between desired behavior and weightings is often unclear. In this work, we explore the use of a language based on propositional logic with quantitative semantics-in place of weight vectors-for specifying nonlinear behaviors in an interpretable way. We use a recurrent encoder to encode logical combinations of objectives, and train a MORL agent to generalize over these encodings. We test our agent in several grid worlds with various objectives and show that our agent can generalize to many never-before-seen specifications with performance comparable to single policy baseline agents. We also demonstrate our agent's ability to generate meaningful policies when presented with novel specifications and quickly specialize to novel specifications. 1 I NTRODUCTION Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a method for learning behavior policies by maximizing expected reward through interactions with an environment. RL has grown in popularity as RL agents have excelled at increasingly complex tasks, including board games (Silver et al., 2016), video games (Mnih et al., 2015), robotic control (Haarnoja et al., 2018), and other high dimensional, complex tasks.
On Education AWS Certified Machine Learning Specialty: Full Practice Exam - CouponED
It's arguably the toughest certification exam AWS offers, as it not only tests AWS-specific knowledge, but your practical experience in machine learning and deep learning in general. It's tough to know what to expect on the exam before going in. This practice exam offers a realistic, full-length simulation of what you can expect in the AWS MLS-C01 exam. It's a great test of your readiness before you decide to invest in the real exam, and a great way to see what sorts of topics the exam will touch on. We also include a 10-question warmup test that will give you a rough idea of your readiness in just a half an hour.
Commentary: A.I. Bias Isn't the Problem. Our Society Is
On Wednesday, Sens. Ron Wyden and Cory Booker and Rep. Yvette Clarke introduced the Algorithmic Accountability Act, indicating policymakers' increasing concern that artificial intelligence is magnifying human bias in tools such as facial recognition, self-driving cars, customer service, marketing, and content moderation. While A.I. has incredible potential to improve our lives, the truth is that it is only capable of reflecting our societal problems right back at us. And because of that, we can't trust it to make important decisions that are susceptible to human prejudice. Even the most enlightened of humans have deep-seated biases. Difficult to identify, they are even harder to correct.
These self-employed jobs face highest risk of A.I. takeover - Futurity
You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Self-employed people who work in some of the most popular--but lowest paid--occupations have the greatest risk of losing their job to artificial intelligence, experts say. With both self-employment and AI investment on the rise, independent sales people, drivers, and agriculture and construction workers face the greatest danger of having their jobs computerized, because the work is routine and low in technical expertise. "Those who are self-employed just don't have the same access to AI resources that corporate employees do, which makes it difficult for them to keep up with these technological advancements," says Kate Bezrukova, associate professor of organization and human resources in the School of Management at the University at Buffalo. The researchers conducted a systematic review of every study to date on artificial intelligence and the self-employed, and compared those findings to their own research on groups and teams from more than 20 published studies across several work settings.
Spotlight Podcast: Security Automation is (and isn't) the Future of Infosec
In this Spotlight Podcast, we speak with David Brumley, the Chief Executive Officer at the security firm ForAllSecure* and a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Brumley is a noted expert on the use of machine learning and automation to cyber security problems. In this podcast, we talk about the growing demand for security automation tools and how the chronic cyber security talent shortage in North America and elsewhere is driving investment in automation. Every so often, a technology comes along that seems to perfectly capture the zeitgeist: representing all that is both promising and troubling about the future. In the 1960s, you think of plastic, which was a pillar of a massively expanding consumer culture in the United States that put "convenience" above all else.