Computer simulations have become a popular tool of assessing complex skills such as problem-solving skills. Log files of computer-based items record the entire human-computer interactive processes for each respondent. The response processes are very diverse, noisy, and of nonstandard formats. Few generic methods have been developed for exploiting the information contained in process data. In this article, we propose a method to extract latent variables from process data. The method utilizes a sequence-to-sequence autoencoder to compress response processes into standard numerical vectors. It does not require prior knowledge of the specific items and human-computers interaction patterns. The proposed method is applied to both simulated and real process data to demonstrate that the resulting latent variables extract useful information from the response processes.

Multi-agent systems have a wide range of applications in cooperative and competitive tasks. As the number of agents increases, nonstationarity gets more serious in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), which brings great difficulties to the learning process. Besides, current mainstream algorithms configure each agent an independent network,so that the memory usage increases linearly with the number of agents which greatly slows down the interaction with the environment. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), this paper proposes an iterative update method (IU) to stabilize the nonstationary environment. Further, we add first-person perspective and represent all agents by only one network which can change agents' policies from sequential compute to batch compute. Similar to continual lifelong learning, we realize the iterative update method in this unified representative network (IUUR). In this method, iterative update can greatly alleviate the nonstationarity of the environment, unified representation can speed up the interaction with environment and avoid the linear growth of memory usage. Besides, this method does not bother decentralized execution and distributed deployment. Experiments show that compared with MADDPG, our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance and saves wall-clock time by a large margin especially with more agents.

A goal shared by artificial intelligence and information retrieval is to create an oracle, that is, a machine that can answer our questions, no matter how difficult they are. A more limited, but still instrumental, version of this oracle is a question-answering system, in which an open-ended question is given to the machine, and an answer is produced based on the knowledge it has access to. Such systems already exist and are increasingly capable of answering complicated questions. This progress can be partially attributed to the recent success of machine learning and to the efficient methods for storing and retrieving information, most notably through web search engines. One can imagine that this general-purpose question-answering system can be built as a billion-parameters neural network trained end-to-end with a large number of pairs of questions and answers. We argue, however, that although this approach has been very successful for tasks such as machine translation, storing the world's knowledge as parameters of a learning machine can be very hard. A more efficient way is to train an artificial agent on how to use an external retrieval system to collect relevant information. This agent can leverage the effort that has been put into designing and running efficient storage and retrieval systems by learning how to best utilize them to accomplish a task. ...

These four recommendations can help prepare you -- or the novice analyst on your team -- for a career in this burgeoning field. When Aurora Peddycord-Liu started as an analytical education intern at SAS in the summer of 2017, she came with a solid educational background from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and NC State's computer science Ph.D. program. These programs prepared her well for her current position at SAS, where she uses data to derive actionable insights on the design and use of SAS e-learning courses, but she's had to adapt her skill set to face the challenges of a real-world analytics position. To learn how newbie analysts can prepare for their work in this hot new age of machine learning, I spoke with Peddycord-Liu and senior executive, Dan Olley, global CTO at Elsevier. Recommendation #1: Don't be overwhelmed -- just get started Don't be intimidated by the powerful tools at your disposal; find a point to start and dive in.

We live in exponential times, and merely having a digital strategy focused on continuous innovation is no longer enough to thrive in a constantly changing world. To transform an organisation and contribute to building a secure and rewarding networked society, collaboration among employees, customers, business units and even things is increasingly becoming key. Especially with the availability of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, organisations now, more than ever before, need to focus on bringing together the different stakeholders to co-create the future. Big data empowers customers and employees, the Internet of Things will create vast amounts of data and connects all devices, while artificial intelligence creates new human-machine interactions. In today's world, every organisation is a data organisation, and AI is required to make sense of it all.

Chowbotics is packing up Sally the salad making robot and sending it off to college. Well, many colleges actually, as the food robotics startup is set to announce next week a bigger push into the higher education market. Chowbotics told us that this school year, students at multiple colleges and universities in the U.S. will be able to buy salads and breakfast bowls from Sally the robot. Those schools include: Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH; College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA; the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada; Elmira College in Elmira, NY; the University of Memphis in Memphis, TN; and Wichita State University in Wichita, KS. These schools join Marshall University in Huntington, WV, which installed Sally in 2018.

Employers can now practice laying off an ultra-realistic, AI-powered virtual employee in order to develop their soft skills before they have to fire someone in real life. Capable of realistically engaging trainees in conversation and displaying appropriate emotions, poor virtual employee Barry Thompson gets the sack over and over again. However, his reaction -- which can range from calm acceptance to angry and defensive shouting -- varies depending on the user's handing of the scenario. The firm who created Barry have also developed a number of other virtual training scenarios, from negotiation and making sales to giving feedback to subordinates. Barry is a virtual employee created by Talespin Studios.

Machine Learning Yearning is about structuring the development of machine learning projects. The book contains practical insights that are difficult to find somewhere else, in a format that is easy to share with teammates and collaborators. Most technical AI courses will explain to you how the different ML algorithms work under the hood, but this book teaches you how to actually use them. If you aspire to be a technical leader in AI, this book will help you on your way. Historically, the only way to learn how to make strategic decisions about AI projects was to participate in a graduate program or to gain experience working at a company.

In this paper, we propose a new method to build fair Neural-Network classifiers by using a constraint based on the Wasserstein distance. More specifically, we detail how to efficiently compute the gradients of Wasserstein-2 regularizers for Neural-Networks. The proposed strategy is then used to train Neural-Networks decision rules which favor fair predictions. Our method fully takes into account two specificities of Neural-Networks training: (1) The network parameters are indirectly learned based on automatic differentiation and on the loss gradients, and (2) batch training is the gold standard to approximate the parameter gradients, as it requires a reasonable amount of computations and it can efficiently explore the parameters space. Results are shown on synthetic data, as well as on the UCI Adult Income Dataset. Our method is shown to perform well compared with 'ZafarICWWW17' and linear-regression with Wasserstein-1 regularization, as in 'JiangUAI19', in particular when non-linear decision rules are required for accurate predictions.

We are increasingly turning to machine learning systems to support human decisions. While decision makers may be subject to many forms of prejudice and bias, the promise and hope is that machines would be able to make more equitable decisions. Unfortunately, whether because they are fitted on already biased data or otherwise, there are concerns that some of these data driven recommendation systems treat members of different classes differently, perpetrating biases, providing different degrees of utilities, and inducing disparities. The examples that have emerged are quite varied: 1. Criminal justice: courts in the United States use COMP AS--a commercially available algorithm to assess a criminal defendant's likelihood of becoming a recidivist--to help them decide who should receive parole, based on records collected through the criminal justice system. In 2016 ProPublica analyzed COMP AS and "found that black defendants were far more likely than white defendants to be incorrectly judged to be at a higher risk of recidivism, while white defendants were more likely than black defendants to be incorrectly flagged as low risk" [1].