Imagine where you could take your business if you knew the next product a customer is going to buy or if a transaction is fraudulent. This is what Machine Learning (ML) promises. Machine Learning allows businesses to challenge the status quo, creating tremendous disruption. Already, many companies are using Machine Learning to create new business opportunities. Are you determined to bring Machine Learning into your organization?

Artificial intelligence is here to stay. It's having a profound impact on education, and that impact will almost certainly expand over time. Is this a positive direction for students and teachers, or is it a slippery slope away from engaged, thoughtful learning? Different stakeholders have very different points of view on this subject, and for good reason. Like any tool, AI has its limits--but it can also provide an impressive array of tools for teaching and learning.

While HR is not known for pioneering nascent technologies, Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents a terrific opportunity. The consumerization of HR technologies has brought AI to the forefront of innovation in HR. From recruitment to employee experience, and talent management, AI has the potential to transform HR. The future of HR is both digital and human as HR leaders focus on optimizing the combination of human and automated work. This is driving a new priority for HR: one which requires leaders and teams to develop fluency in artificial intelligence while they reimagine HR to be more personal and engaging especially for the candidates; strategic and forward-looking to the business.

We present here the Temporal Clustering Algorithm (TCA), an incremental learning algorithm applicable to problems of anticipatory computing in the context of the Internet of Things. This algorithm was tested in a specific prediction scenario of consumption of an electric water dispenser typically used in tropical countries, in which the ambient temperature is around 30-degree Celsius. In this context, the user typically wants to drinking iced water therefore uses the cooler function of the dispenser. Real and synthetic water consumption data was used to test a forecasting capacity on how much energy can be saved by predicting the pattern of use of the equipment. In addition to using a small constant amount of memory, which allows the algorithm to be implemented at the lowest cost, while using microcontrollers with a small amount of memory (less than 1Kbyte) available on the market. The algorithm can also be configured according to user preference, prioritizing comfort, keeping the water at the desired temperature longer, or prioritizing energy savings. The main result is that the TCA achieved energy savings of up to 40% compared to the conventional mode of operation of the dispenser with an average success rate higher than 90% in its times of use.

Dialogue systems are increasingly using knowledge bases (KBs) storing real-world facts to help generate quality responses. However, as the KBs are inherently incomplete and remain fixed during conversation, it limits dialogue systems' ability to answer questions and to handle questions involving entities or relations that are not in the KB. In this paper, we make an attempt to propose an engine for Continuous and Interactive Learning of Knowledge (CILK) for dialogue systems to give them the ability to continuously and interactively learn and infer new knowledge during conversations. With more knowledge accumulated over time, they will be able to learn better and answer more questions. Our empirical evaluation shows that CILK is promising.

Outside of their ability to understand a company's fundamentals, one of the skills Raj Lala appreciates most about his portfolio managers is their ability to interpret body language. Sitting across from management teams before making a decision to either invest or divest from their companies, Lala, the CEO of Evolve ETFs, said his portfolio managers can learn a lot from simply reading the room. Maybe they spot a nervous twitch after a question on guidance or a CEO unable to make eye contact when responding to a question about declining revenues. That very human capability was at the forefront of Lala's mind when he was recently pitched on two types of artificial intelligence that he could incorporate into his portfolio management processes. And it's one of the reasons he said no. "I can't see AI getting to that point where it replaces human interaction and, quite honestly, I would say god bless our world if that's the case," Lala said.

We propose a framework for interactive and explainable machine learning that enables users to (1) understand machine learning models; (2) diagnose model limitations using different explainable AI methods; as well as (3) refine and optimize the models. Our framework combines an iterative XAI pipeline with eight global monitoring and steering mechanisms, including quality monitoring, provenance tracking, model comparison, and trust building. To operationalize the framework, we present explAIner, a visual analytics system for interactive and explainable machine learning that instantiates all phases of the suggested pipeline within the commonly used TensorBoard environment. We performed a user-study with nine participants across different expertise levels to examine their perception of our workflow and to collect suggestions to fill the gap between our system and framework. The evaluation confirms that our tightly integrated system leads to an informed machine learning process while disclosing opportunities for further extensions.

Current AI approaches have frequently been used to help personalize many aspects of medical experiences and tailor them to a specific individuals' needs. However, while such systems consider medically-relevant information, they ignore socially-relevant information about how this diagnosis should be communicated and discussed with the patient. The lack of this capability may lead to mis-communication, resulting in serious implications, such as patients opting out of the best treatment. Consider a case in which the same treatment is proposed to two different individuals. The manner in which this treatment is mediated to each should be different, depending on the individual patient's history, knowledge, and mental state. While it is clear that this communication should be conveyed via a human medical expert and not a software-based system, humans are not always capable of considering all of the relevant aspects and traversing all available information. We pose the challenge of creating Intelligent Agents (IAs) to assist medical service providers (MSPs) and consumers in establishing a more personalized human-to-human dialogue. Personalizing conversations will enable patients and MSPs to reach a solution that is best for their particular situation, such that a relation of trust can be built and commitment to the outcome of the interaction is assured. We propose a four-part conceptual framework for personalized social interactions, expand on which techniques are available within current AI research and discuss what has yet to be achieved.

This paper investigates a new task named Conversational Question Generation (CQG) which is to generate a question based on a passage and a conversation history (i.e., previous turns of question-answer pairs). CQG is a crucial task for developing intelligent agents that can drive question-answering style conversations or test user understanding of a given passage. Towards that end, we propose a new approach named Reinforced Dynamic Reasoning (ReDR) network, which is based on the general encoder-decoder framework but incorporates a reasoning procedure in a dynamic manner to better understand what has been asked and what to ask next about the passage. To encourage producing meaningful questions, we leverage a popular question answering (QA) model to provide feedback and fine-tune the question generator using a reinforcement learning mechanism. Empirical results on the recently released CoQA dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in comparison with various baselines and model variants. Moreover, to show the applicability of our method, we also apply it to create multi-turn question-answering conversations for passages in SQuAD.

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning algorithms have successfully been applied to temporal credit assignment problems with sparse reward signals. However, state-of- the-art algorithms require manual specification of sub-task structures, a sample inefficient exploration phase and lack semantic interpretability. Human infants, on the other hand, efficiently detect hierarchical substructures induced by their surroundings. In this work we propose a cognitive-inspired Reinforcement Learning architecture which uses grammar induction to identify sub-goal policies. More specifically, by treating an on-policy trajectory as a sentence sampled from the policy-conditioned language of the environment, we identify hierarchical constituents with the help of unsupervised grammatical inference. The resulting set of temporal abstractions is called action grammars (Pastra & Aloimonos, 2012) and can be used to enable efficient imitation, transfer and online learning.