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What Are The Differences Between Econometrics, Statistics, And Machine Learning?

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What are the differences between econometrics, statistics, and machine learning? I discovered this myself a couple years ago, through an analysis of the economics literature that required the research team to classify articles into economics fields (like labor and macro) and research styles (like theory and econometrics). The project was motivated by frustration with complaints lodged against academic economics in the wake of the Great Recession (perhaps you've seen the movie version: Inside Job). I thought: "What's with all the whining? "Economics has never been better!"


Using artificial intelligence to detect discrimination

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Preventing unfair treatment of individuals on the basis of race, gender or ethnicity, for example, been a long-standing concern of civilized societies. However, detecting such discrimination resulting from decisions, whether by human decision makers or automated AI systems, can be extremely challenging. This challenge is further exacerbated by the wide adoption of AI systems to automate decisions in many domains -- including policing, consumer finance, higher education and business. "Artificial intelligence systems -- such as those involved in selecting candidates for a job or for admission to a university -- are trained on large amounts of data," said Vasant Honavar, Professor and Edward Frymoyer Chair of Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State. "But if these data are biased, they can affect the recommendations of AI systems."


The 10 Deep Learning Methods AI Practitioners Need to Apply 7wData

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Interest in machine learning has exploded over the past decade. You see machine learning in computer science programs, industry conferences, and the Wall Street Journal almost daily. For all the talk about machine learning, many conflate what it can do with what they wish it could do. Fundamentally, machine learning is using algorithms to extract information from raw data and represent it in some type of model. We use this model to infer things about other data we have not yet modeled.


How Product Managers Learn About AI Meeting Peak Effectiveness

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"What do I need to know about AI and what's the best way to learn it?" I've invested a considerable amount of time taking numerous courses, so I dug into my emails to collect some of the suggestions I've doled out. First, it's worth addressing the extent to which a product manager even needs to understand how AI works in order to be effective. There is an endless stream of business articles about what AI is, what it does and how it is going to disrupt this and that, all of which is great, but I am talking about understanding how it works (e.g. As Marty Cagan pointed out in Inspired (a must-read), product managers can come from a variety of different vertical disciplines, including those that are not necessarily technical, such as marketing or sales.


AAAC Issues First State of Artificial Intelligence in Advancement Report

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The AI in Advancement Advisory Council (AAAC), a first-of-its-kind organization committed to open discussion about where artificial intelligence (AI) technology can and should have an impact on advancement, today released the first State of AI in Advancement Report. The study is the first benchmark on the adoption rate, uses, opinions, of AI in the advancement industry, and more, and comes at a time when artificial intelligence is beginning to revolutionize philanthropy. "We've entered an amazing chapter of innovation and progress with artificial intelligence," said AAAC member Reed Sheard, Vice President for College Advancement and Chief Information Officer, Westmont College. "In order to truly harness this technology in a way that helps us build successful organizations, it will be critical to utilize AI in a manner that always seeks to benefit society. It is important to ask both'What can we do?' as well as'What should we do?'. The early results we've seen represent new opportunity and I am excited about what the future holds."


AI Applications In Education

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In addition to education-oriented duties, teachers are also faced with having to manage the classroom environment and handle various organizational tasks. Educators are often required to handle many non-teaching responsibilities such as essay evaluation, grading of exams, filing necessary paperwork, HR and personnel related issues, ordering and managing classroom materials, booking and managing field trips, responding to parents, assisting with conversation and second-language related issues, dealing with sick or otherwise absent students, and otherwise facilitating the learning environment. Educators often spend up to 50% of their time on non-teaching tasks. AI systems are particularly helpful at managing these back office and task related activities. These AI systems can assist with grading activities and provide personalized responses to students.



Machine Learning Coursera

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Machine learning is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. In the past decade, machine learning has given us self-driving cars, practical speech recognition, effective web search, and a vastly improved understanding of the human genome. Machine learning is so pervasive today that you probably use it dozens of times a day without knowing it. Many researchers also think it is the best way to make progress towards human-level AI. In this class, you will learn about the most effective machine learning techniques, and gain practice implementing them and getting them to work for yourself.


Bringing Giant Neural Networks Down to Earth with Unlabeled Data

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Compressing giant neural networks has gained much attention for their extensive applications on edge devices such as cellphones. During the compressing process, one of the most important procedures is to retrain the pre-trained models using the original training dataset. However, due to the consideration of security, privacy or commercial profits, in practice, only a fraction of sample training data are made available, which makes the retraining infeasible. To solve this issue, this paper proposes to resort to unlabeled data in hand that can be cheaper to acquire. Specifically, we exploit the unlabeled data to mimic the classification characteristics of giant networks, so that the original capacity can be preserved nicely. Nevertheless, there exists a dataset bias between the labeled and unlabeled data, disturbing the mimicking to some extent. We thus fix this bias by an adversarial loss to make an alignment on the distributions of their low-level feature representations. We further provide theoretical discussions about how the unlabeled data help compressed networks to generalize better. Experimental results demonstrate that the unlabeled data can significantly improve the performance of the compressed networks.


Motion Planning Networks: Bridging the Gap Between Learning-based and Classical Motion Planners

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper describes Motion Planning Networks (MPNet), a computationally efficient, learning-based neural planner for solving motion planning problems. MPNet uses neural networks to learn general near-optimal heuristics for path planning in seen and unseen environments. It receives environment information as point-clouds, as well as a robot's initial and desired goal configurations and recursively calls itself to bidirectionally generate connectable paths. In addition to finding directly connectable and near-optimal paths in a single pass, we show that worst-case theoretical guarantees can be proven if we merge this neural network strategy with classical sample-based planners in a hybrid approach while still retaining significant computational and optimality improvements. To learn the MPNet models, we present an active continual learning approach that enables MPNet to learn from streaming data and actively ask for expert demonstrations when needed, drastically reducing data for training. We validate MPNet against gold-standard and state-of-the-art planning methods in a variety of problems from 2D to 7D robot configuration spaces in challenging and cluttered environments, with results showing significant and consistently stronger performance metrics, and motivating neural planning in general as a modern strategy for solving motion planning problems efficiently.