Noemi Derzsy is a Senior Inventive Scientist at AT&T Labs Research within the Data Science and AI Research organization, doing lots of science with lots of data. Previously, she was a Data Science Fellow at Insight Data Science NYC and a postdoctoral research associate at Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Holding a PhD in Physics and research background in Network Science and Computer Science, her interests revolve around the study of complex systems and complex networks through real-world data. She is also a NASA Datanaut and the co-organizer of Women in Machine Learning and Data Science NYC meetup group. In her free time she develops online technical courses as course instructor for Pearson and DataCamp.

Machine-learned diagnosis models have shown promise as medical aides but are trained under a closed-set assumption, i.e. that models will only encounter conditions on which they have been trained. However, it is practically infeasible to obtain sufficient training data for every human condition, and once deployed such models will invariably face previously unseen conditions. We frame machine-learned diagnosis as an open-set learning problem, and study how state-of-the-art approaches compare. Further, we extend our study to a setting where training data is distributed across several healthcare sites that do not allow data pooling, and experiment with different strategies of building open-set diagnostic ensembles. Across both settings, we observe consistent gains from explicitly modeling unseen conditions, but find the optimal training strategy to vary across settings.

Novel applications of artificial intelligence can endanger people in new ways. As AI is integrated into new parts of our lives, we must keep safety and security in the development and maintenance of AI systems top of mind. Last year at Data & Society, we convened experts from a number of fields, including cybersecurity, machine learning, computer science, political science, national security, activism, and advocacy, to conceptualize the greatest opportunities and challenges to building safe and secure socio-technical systems. Among our most significant findings was a rift between what it means to make something "safe" and make something "secure." Safety and security have different valences for different communities.

What are the competencies of a good leader? Great leaders can achieve unprecedented results and pave a company's path to the highest achievements. However, leadership alone cannot do much. Leadership has to be translated and broadcasted to stakeholders via efficient and thoroughly defined communication. Therefore effective leadership is all about communicating effectively.

A registered model is a logical container for one or more files that make up your model. For example, if you have a model that is stored in multiple files, you can register them as a single model in your Azure Machine Learning workspace. After registration, you can then download or deploy the registered model and receive all the files that were registered.

In this paper, we introduce a distributed version of the classical stochastic Multi-Arm Bandit (MAB) problem. Our setting consists of a large number of agents $n$ that collaboratively and simultaneously solve the same instance of $K$ armed MAB to minimize the average cumulative regret over all agents. The agents can communicate and collaborate among each other \emph{only} through a pairwise asynchronous gossip based protocol that exchange a limited number of bits. In our model, agents at each point decide on (i) which arm to play, (ii) whether to, and if so (iii) what and whom to communicate with. Agents in our model are decentralized, namely their actions only depend on their observed history in the past. We develop a novel algorithm in which agents, whenever they choose, communicate only arm-ids and not samples, with another agent chosen uniformly and independently at random. The per-agent regret scaling achieved by our algorithm is $O \left( \frac{\lceil\frac{K}{n}\rceil+\log(n)}{\Delta} \log(T) + \frac{\log^3(n) \log \log(n)}{\Delta^2} \right)$. Furthermore, any agent in our algorithm communicates only a total of $\Theta(\log(T))$ times over a time interval of $T$. We compare our results to two benchmarks - one where there is no communication among agents and one corresponding to complete interaction. We show both theoretically and empirically, that our algorithm experiences a significant reduction both in per-agent regret when compared to the case when agents do not collaborate and in communication complexity when compared to the full interaction setting which requires $T$ communication attempts by an agent over $T$ arm pulls.

In this paper, we study the problem of computing $U$-statistics of degree $2$, i.e., quantities that come in the form of averages over pairs of data points, in the local model of differential privacy (LDP). The class of $U$-statistics covers many statistical estimates of interest, including Gini mean difference, Kendall's tau coefficient and Area under the ROC Curve (AUC), as well as empirical risk measures for machine learning problems such as ranking, clustering and metric learning. We first introduce an LDP protocol based on quantizing the data into bins and applying randomized response, which guarantees an $\epsilon$-LDP estimate with a Mean Squared Error (MSE) of $O(1/\sqrt{n}\epsilon)$ under regularity assumptions on the $U$-statistic or the data distribution. We then propose a specialized protocol for AUC based on a novel use of hierarchical histograms that achieves MSE of $O(\alpha^3/n\epsilon^2)$ for arbitrary data distribution. We also show that 2-party secure computation allows to design a protocol with MSE of $O(1/n\epsilon^2)$, without any assumption on the kernel function or data distribution and with total communication linear in the number of users $n$. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our protocols through experiments on synthetic and real datasets.

Federated learning (FL) provides a communication-efficient approach to solve machine learning problems concerning distributed data, without sending raw data to a central server. However, existing works on FL only utilize first-order gradient descent (GD) and do not consider the preceding iterations to gradient update which can potentially accelerate convergence. In this paper, we consider momentum term which relates to the last iteration. The proposed momentum federated learning (MFL) uses momentum gradient descent (MGD) in the local update step of FL system. We establish global convergence properties of MFL and derive an upper bound on MFL convergence rate. Comparing the upper bounds on MFL and FL convergence rate, we provide conditions in which MFL accelerates the convergence. For different machine learning models, the convergence performance of MFL is evaluated based on experiments with MNIST dataset. Simulation results comfirm that MFL is globally convergent and further reveal significant convergence improvement over FL.

A BSTRACT Biological evolution has distilled the experiences of many learners into the general learning algorithms of humans. Our novel meta-reinforcement learning algorithm MetaGenRL is inspired by this process. MetaGenRL distills the experiences of many complex agents to meta-learn a low-complexity neural objective function that affects how future individuals will learn. Unlike recent meta-RL algorithms, MetaGenRL can generalize to new environments that are entirely different from those used for meta-training. In some cases, it even outperforms human-engineered RL algorithms. MetaGenRL uses off-policy second-order gradients during meta-training that greatly increase its sample efficiency. 1 I NTRODUCTION The process of evolution has equipped humans with incredibly general learning algorithms. They allow us to flexibly solve a wide range of problems, even in the absence of many related prior experiences. The inductive biases that give rise to these capabilities are the result of distilling the collective experiences of many learners throughout the course of natural evolution. By essentially learning from learning experiences in this way, this knowledge can be compactly encoded in the genetic code of an individual to give rise to the general learning capabilities that we observe today. In contrast, Reinforcement Learning (RL) in artificial agents rarely proceeds in this way. The learning rules that are used to train agents are the result of years of human engineering and design, (e.g. Correspondingly, artificial agents are inherently limited by the ability of the designer to incorporate the right inductive biases in order to learn from previous experiences.

Over its lifetime, a reinforcement learning agent is often tasked with different tasks. How to efficiently adapt a previously learned control policy from one task to another, remains an open research question. In this paper, we investigate how instructions formulated in natural language can enable faster and more effective task adaptation. This can serve as the basis for developing language instructed skills, which can be used in a lifelong learning setting. Our method is capable of assessing, given a set of developed base control policies, which policy will adapt best to a new unseen task.